Consider this story:
As her daughter’s birthday neared, a birthday that meant the daughter was eligible for her driver’s license, the mother decided she would send her daughter to driving school in order for the daughter to be prepared for the driving test, and even more importantly, for driving on the road. Once enrolled in Warriner’s School of Driving, the daughter spent six weeks in classes. In those classes, students were instructed in disassembling a car engine and naming all the parts. The job was difficult, but the daughter worked hard and ultimately passed the course with top grades.
On her birthday, the daughter went to the DMV and applied for her license. As the mother watched her daughter leave the parking lot for the driving test, she was proud and confident she had helped her child be well prepared for this important day. But the daughter returned in just a few minutes, walking back toward the mother and crying.
“What is wrong?” the mother exclaimed.
“Ma’am,” the man giving the test explained, “your daughter can’t drive at all! It’s like she has never even driven a car before. . .”
The experience of writers and teachers of writing always point to one fact about learning to write: You have to write often to grow as a writer. Research also shows that other strategies, such as isolated grammar or vocabulary lessons, do not help writers grow; in fact, some traditional activities we do in English classes actually impact the writing abilities of students negatively.
Lou LaBrant, born in 1888 and having taught from 1906 until 1971, once argued: “Knowing about writing and its parts does not bring it about, just as owning a blueprint does not give you a house” (256). If our goal is writing, then we should not spend too much time taking the language apart and naming all of those parts—or we will be as disappointed as the mother and daughter above.
As a student or scholar, a writer must develop both a sense of the blueprint and the completed house, to be metaphorical for a moment. The system that drives meaning in language use is both unconscious and conscious in any user of the language. The more aware we are of the system, the more likely we are to use that language with empowerment. If we remain inexpert and unconscious of language, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to be restricted, to be controlled by the language and by others who have a greater expertise and awareness of the language than we have.
When we as students and scholars create original compositions, we are entering either into a situation whereby we will be evaluated or a situation whereby our writing will be published—or rejected. In either case, writing as a student or scholar involves exposing our work to the judgment of others. The responsibility of both the student and the scholar is to be aware of the guidelines, the conventions, upon which those judgments will be based. Teachers, instructors, and professors often provide prompts guiding student essays along with rubrics that outline for students the basis for specific grades being assigned. Scholars submitting work for publication must navigate guidelines for writers of the publication being considered. Within those guidelines, scholars are often required to conform to specific style sheets (MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, and others, for example) and even to unique requirements of that publication.
Consider some examples of on-line writer’s guidelines for scholarly journals:
• English Journal—Primary journal for English teachers from middle school through college. Visit the following link, and then select the link “EJ Information for Authors” (also visit “Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language”):
http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/ej/write
• Educational Leadership—Major journal for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Visit the following link:
http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/
menuitem.2a4fb56d79bd30a98d7ea23161a001ca/
template.article?articleMgmtId=be6f0f05c1520010
VgnVCM1000003d01a8c0RCRD
• Phi Delta Kappan—Major journal for Phi Delta Kappa International. Visit the following link:
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/khpsubmi/kedguide.htm
While students and scholars are ultimately concerned with building houses, they must also be aware of the blueprints that provide the concepts upon which the real thing is built.
THE BLUEPRINT OF LANGUAGE—GRAMMAR
“Grammar” as a term creates many problems—and probably makes many people flinch, ducking the hypothetical hand of the abusive English teacher poised always to swat us when we make an “error.” Yet, grammar is simply the term for the system that language follows when humans communicate. Before writers can evolve fully as writers, they must spend some time and energy growing in their awareness of language and the system that drives it.
First, to become a healthy and effective writer, you must back up and reset your hard-drive, erase the many misconceptions you have about language and reformat your disk space. To do that, let’s consider a common misconception about language and writing before turning to rethinking both language and writing.
Misconception: Grammar is a set of rules that govern the right and wrong uses of language. (This is called a “prescriptive” view of grammar.)
Reality: Grammar is the description of the most recent set of conventions that guide language use. Language is always in a state of flux; language changes, and that change is both natural and healthy. Language use is guided by conventional guidelines that contribute to more effective communication. For example, users of the language agree about spelling (although spelling changes: “through” is becoming “thru,” for example, and “today” once was “to-day”) so that we all think about the same basic animal when someone writes “dog.” Writers and speakers who wish to be read and heard with some level of respect must be aware of the conventions of the situation and audience, and then must decide how fully to conform to those conventions (realizing that not conforming increases the risk of harsh judgment).
Now, how should students and scholars rethink language and writing? The most important change concerns how we view language. If we persist in believing language is governed by “rules,” then we are abdicating our power over our most human quality, language, to some Other who then dictates how we use an intimate performance that is us.
Language is conventional, not bound to rules. Language is in a constant state of flux, not a fixed thing. And these facts of language contribute to a new view of writing and being a writer.
In school, we have often relinquished the power over our language to someone else, usually the teacher who also holds the power of some grammar book. Also in school, we have relinquished the power of writing to the teacher—someone who decides what we write, how we write it, and even what we say in that writing. One fact of being a student is that the control over writing may not be something a student can demand. Nonetheless, students and scholars should practice attitudes toward language and writing that support their own empowerment as writers.
One such practice is becoming aware and then expert in the conventions of language.
Why Conventional Language?
Academic and scholarly writing is conventional language because students and scholars, by choice to some degree, enter into situations that involve evaluation based on some conventions guiding the situation. For students, the evaluation is a grade leading to course credit and a diploma or degree of some kind; for scholars, the evaluation is publication—or rejection.
Conventions, then, are the specified and implied guidelines governing any unique situation. A common term for the broad conventions of language use in English is Standard English. Standard English, as noted above, should not be viewed as fixed rules, but as the current state of agreements among users of the language in relatively formal situations. (We rarely feel compelled to worry about Standard English among friends and intimates, but we are often held accountable for Standard English in academic settings, work settings, and publication settings.)
Conventions also exist in more narrow situations, such as the conventions we associate with prose and poetry. Prose is primarily composed using sentences and paragraphs while poetry is primarily driven by the formation of lines and stanzas (although poetry still maintains a primary focus on language driven by sentence formation within the line/stanza convention). Other conventions exist for genre as well; “genre” as a term refers to the kind of writing a text generally conforms to. Again, poetry is a type of language and a genre, but prose is an umbrella term for a wide number of genres. Drama, as a genre, can be composed in both verse (poetry) and in prose. Types of genre common in prose writing include many forms of writing; some that most readers have encountered include:
• Journalism (including news stories, sports stories, editorials (Op-Eds), features)
• Literary criticism
• Short stories
• Novels
• Memoirs
• Textbooks
• Screenplays
Of course this list is brief, but most of us could identify easily any of these genres, some even by glancing at the printed page (consider a screenplay). The guidelines that we use (often unconsciously) to identify and distinguish among genres are the conventions guiding that form. Students and scholars must become aware of those conventions so that their writing either works within or against those conventions with purpose.
Courses and other settings that allow students and scholars to practice and grow as writers, then, are ideal circumstances for learning the conventions and practicing both conforming to and working against those conventions in purposeful ways in order to evolve as the writers all students and scholars can be.
While conventions seem to be restrictions on what writers can and should do, a better view of conventions is to see them as something concrete against which a writer can experiment in order to create something powerful and unique to each writer. Conventions provide a framework for writers to discover and refine both their writing and themselves as writers.
Students and scholars should be aware, however, that some conventions are not debatable—such as the guidelines for documentations that govern fair use of sources in a writer’s original text.
Discovering and Refining Yourself as a Writer
Students and scholars, whether in a class setting or on their own, can follow some strategies to discover themselves as writers, and then to refine themselves as writers. Some of the strategies include the following:
• Read widely and often. When you read, develop “reading like a writer” techniques. A writer reads differently than non-writers because writers are always considering more than what the text expresses. Writers consider the following elements of text as models for their own writing:
—What the text conveys.
—How the writer makes meaning for the reader, noting the craft in the text.
Craft includes techniques and rhetorical strategies such as diction, syntax, figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification), rhythm, rhetorical questions, parallelism, allusion, narration, sound devices (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme), dialogue, and a list too long to include here.
• Write often and for a wide variety of purposes, using your reading experiences as a guide for experimentation. Writers should take risks, and then share their writing with audiences that can give the writer feedback. A self-conscious and fearful writer has less chance of evolving than a risk-taker who shares text with others.
• Begin to describe your writing process. What steps do you take to produce text? Then begin to consider how you can refine your writing process to improve as a writer. Also, do not restrict yourself in terms of what counts in the writing process. Some writers read as part of the process, some talk with others, some have to take walks, and some conduct research as a way to prime their writing motor. See some resources for the writing process starting here (and see the menu to the right for additional help):
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/587/01/
• Create a network of people to share your writing with; you need to have input if you want to grow as a writer. Writers need to learn how to respond to other writers in ways that help each other grow—not correcting and criticizing, but giving specific input about what works, what doesn’t work, and why in both cases.
Works Cited
LaBrant, Lou. “Writing Is More Than Structure.” English Journal 46.5 (1957): 252–56, 293.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Resources
One excellent, but traditional, on-line resource for you as a student and writer is The OWL at Purdue; that stands for “on-line writing lab.” The resource is linked often throughout this text. Be sure to visit as a reference, but be cautioned that a reference is simply a place for advice. Ultimately as a student, writer, and scholar, you must make your own decisions. Find The OWL at Purdue here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Also, you should visit the writing center link available at Temple University. Be sure to search for the excellent PDFs available to help with APA, MLA, and Chicago citation formats.
Additional Resources:
• “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices” from The Council of Writing Program Administrators (http://www.wpacouncil.org/node/9)
• The Stanford University Libraries, “Copyright & Fair Use” (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/)
• Robert J. Rutland Institute for Ethics (http://www.clemson.edu/ethics/)
• How to Recognize Plagiarism Test, Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eistd/test.html)
• Resources for Scholarly Writing, Walden University (http://inside.waldenu.edu/c/Student_Faculty/StudentFaculty_1458.htm)
• Critically Analyzing Information Sources, Cornell University (http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm)
• Evaluating Internet Resources: An Annotated Guide to Selected Resources, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/selectbib.html)
• Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask, UC Berkeley—Teaching Library Internet Workshops (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html)
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Also, you should visit the writing center link available at Temple University. Be sure to search for the excellent PDFs available to help with APA, MLA, and Chicago citation formats.
Additional Resources:
• “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices” from The Council of Writing Program Administrators (http://www.wpacouncil.org/node/9)
• The Stanford University Libraries, “Copyright & Fair Use” (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/)
• Robert J. Rutland Institute for Ethics (http://www.clemson.edu/ethics/)
• How to Recognize Plagiarism Test, Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eistd/test.html)
• Resources for Scholarly Writing, Walden University (http://inside.waldenu.edu/c/Student_Faculty/StudentFaculty_1458.htm)
• Critically Analyzing Information Sources, Cornell University (http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm)
• Evaluating Internet Resources: An Annotated Guide to Selected Resources, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/selectbib.html)
• Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask, UC Berkeley—Teaching Library Internet Workshops (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html)
A Guide to Revision, Drafting, and Conventional Writing
Writers of English make thousands and thousands of decisions about language and grammar while composing. The most accurate guiding principle for a writer in academic or scholarly situations is that writing should be purposeful with all choices working either within the appropriate conventions or against those conventions as elements of the writer’s craft.
The following guide lists most situations a writer will face. Each aspect of language use is numbered (with no real rhyme or reason for that numbering except to facilitate identifying elements in a draft for the writer) and followed by some tentative explanations and occasional examples.
Each aspect addressed is intended to raise the writer’s awareness of elements of language use, but the final decisions for completing a draft of an original work of writing is the responsibility of the writer—not to be dictated by those who offer advice and input during the drafting stages.
When possible, additional resources are offered. Writers must learn that a wide range of expectations and attitudes about language exist. Language use is not guided by “rules,” but written discourse is bound by an ever-evolving set of conventions that are organic and that tend to support the power of language to communicate.
When revising, a writer should focus proportionately on the aspects of the writing that matter most first, leaving the less important aspects of writing for later in the writing process; for a consideration of higher order and lower order concerns while revising see the following:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/690/01/
The following guide lists most situations a writer will face. Each aspect of language use is numbered (with no real rhyme or reason for that numbering except to facilitate identifying elements in a draft for the writer) and followed by some tentative explanations and occasional examples.
Each aspect addressed is intended to raise the writer’s awareness of elements of language use, but the final decisions for completing a draft of an original work of writing is the responsibility of the writer—not to be dictated by those who offer advice and input during the drafting stages.
When possible, additional resources are offered. Writers must learn that a wide range of expectations and attitudes about language exist. Language use is not guided by “rules,” but written discourse is bound by an ever-evolving set of conventions that are organic and that tend to support the power of language to communicate.
When revising, a writer should focus proportionately on the aspects of the writing that matter most first, leaving the less important aspects of writing for later in the writing process; for a consideration of higher order and lower order concerns while revising see the following:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/690/01/
(1) Commas
The comma (,) is placed in conventional writing as a marker for grammatical breaks within a sentence; a sentence is traditionally a grammatically complete thought, but many writers create sentences that are grammatically fragments and occasionally writers blend complete thoughts with a comma, resulting in a run-on sentence/comma splice. See (12) and (13) for a more complete discussion of sentence conventions. [EDIT]
Many students and writers are baffled by the seemingly endless list of “rules” for the use of commas. A few points will help if you have trouble with commas:
• When deciding to insert a comma or not, you should not use pausing as a guide. Many associate a reading rule with commas since we are taught early in school to pause slightly when we come to a comma while reading aloud. Converting that reading rule into a guide for inserting commas will often fail you as a writer in academic and scholarly situations.
• Comma use and the length of a sentence do not have any relationship either. In other words, a very long sentence may be drafted without any commas.
• A better “lazy person” guideline than the misleading “pause” rule is to prefer not placing a comma when in doubt. Comma use has decreased over the past century (read a few pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from the mid-nineteenth century and you’ll see) so for comma choices, when in doubt, do without.
Comma use, however, is manageable if you look at a relatively few broad concepts that guide how most writers of English incorporate commas in their writing.
Conventional uses of commas:
(1.L) Use commas to separate elements of a list including three or more within that list. Here, we have a choice that is preferred differently by different conventional guidelines. Place a comma after the first element in the list and continue to use commas to separate elements; however, some guidelines require a comma before the conjunction in the list while other guidelines do not require that comma. Consult the appropriate guidelines when submitting an assignment or work for publication. Nonetheless, be consistent about applying the comma or not throughout your writing.
Examples:
(List with a series of words)
The American flag incorporates the colors red, white, and blue. Or
The American flag incorporates the colors red, white and blue.
(List with a series of phrases)
People who live in poverty have been shown to consume less healthy diets than people in relative affluence, to conduct less healthy lifestyles (tobacco use, alcohol abuse, sedentary lives), and to visit doctors less often.
The political language, the public discourse, and the mandates of federal and state legislation all speak about and to the “achievement gap” and the need for schools to “close” that “gap.”
(List with a series of clauses)
You should read the explanation carefully, you should brainstorm about how you want to respond, and you should compose an answer that addresses the situation clearly.
(1.UI) Use a comma or pair of commas to set off words, phrases, or clauses that include unneeded information. Information that interrupts the flow of the sentence without actually enhancing the central content of that sentence or information that creates a grammatical shift (such as the use of “but” or “yet”) in the sentence are also both treated the same as information that interrupts, requiring the use of a comma or pair of commas.
Examples:
Fran’s oldest sister, Emily, works at the high school.*
* [Since “oldest” cannot be made more specific or clearer by adding the name, you use commas, but in this sentence—“Fran’s sister Robbie works at a different high school that her sister Emily”—you do not set off the names with commas since the names are needed to specify between the sisters.]
Ellison, celebrated author of Invisible Man, spoke with a clarity then that must be heard now.
I have been struck, however, by a much more pressing issue than the claimed rise in student dishonesty in their writing.
This lecture came to us from a writer, a man not expert in the field of education.
Schools filled with children in poverty who are failing, disproportionately also children of color, mirror a reality of our society—the socioeconomic stratification of the lives of Americans.
Students complete both formative and summative assessments that are holistic and authentic, but primarily based on texts not discussed in class to avoid students simply repeating what the teacher has stated in class.
(1.CT) When you join complete thoughts (clauses that can stand alone as a grammatical sentence) with conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “yet,” for example), place a comma before that conjunction. If conjunctions join pairs of words, phrases, or clauses, do not precede the conjunction with a comma.
Examples:
This is politically difficult and challenging, but such a shift must happen first—before schools have any hope of helping students.
All students deserve and need some differentiated instruction based on their demonstrated strengths and needs, and all students deserve daily generative experiences at school that honor their humanity and their potential.
(1.I) Set off introductory words, phrases, and clauses with a comma.
Examples:
Finally, the paper will offer needed shifts for addressing all students, including children from poverty.
If we judged hospitals and mortuaries as we judge schools, we’d constantly condemn hospitals for making people sick and condemn mortuaries for killing people simply because both institutions happen to house the sick and the deceased.
Yet, when one school coincidentally serves an area of high poverty, we blame that school for low test scores—while celebrating schools in affluent districts for their high test scores.
(1.Qt) Several circumstances with quoting involve the use of commas. Often commas help separate the original text form the quoted text.
Examples:
[APA documentation]
“I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference,” began Ralph Ellison (2003), speaking to educators at Bank Street College of Education in September of 1963.
“Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548).
“We do not believe that the inequalities that exist today are the result of intentional actions to hurt children,” Peske and Haycock (2006) explain, but, “The simple truth is that public education cannot fulfill its mission if students growing up in poverty, students of color and low-performing students continue to be disproportionately taught by inexperienced, under-qualified teachers” (p. 15).
[MLA documentation]
“Teaching English is probably the most intimate of all teaching,” proclaimed Lou LaBrant (34), a progressive educator who pursued literacy instruction with a staggering passion for over 65 years.
Atwood adds, “[W]riters tend to adopt their terms of discourse early in their reading and writing lives” (xxvi).
Finally, a few situational uses of commas do exist:
Dates:
Her birth date is March 11, 1989, exactly three years after her cousin’s birth date.
City, States:
He flew to Iowa City, Iowa, to help work on a reading test.
Numbers:
She paid $256,000 for the painting.
An on-line resource for commas can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/607/01/
Many students and writers are baffled by the seemingly endless list of “rules” for the use of commas. A few points will help if you have trouble with commas:
• When deciding to insert a comma or not, you should not use pausing as a guide. Many associate a reading rule with commas since we are taught early in school to pause slightly when we come to a comma while reading aloud. Converting that reading rule into a guide for inserting commas will often fail you as a writer in academic and scholarly situations.
• Comma use and the length of a sentence do not have any relationship either. In other words, a very long sentence may be drafted without any commas.
• A better “lazy person” guideline than the misleading “pause” rule is to prefer not placing a comma when in doubt. Comma use has decreased over the past century (read a few pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from the mid-nineteenth century and you’ll see) so for comma choices, when in doubt, do without.
Comma use, however, is manageable if you look at a relatively few broad concepts that guide how most writers of English incorporate commas in their writing.
Conventional uses of commas:
(1.L) Use commas to separate elements of a list including three or more within that list. Here, we have a choice that is preferred differently by different conventional guidelines. Place a comma after the first element in the list and continue to use commas to separate elements; however, some guidelines require a comma before the conjunction in the list while other guidelines do not require that comma. Consult the appropriate guidelines when submitting an assignment or work for publication. Nonetheless, be consistent about applying the comma or not throughout your writing.
Examples:
(List with a series of words)
The American flag incorporates the colors red, white, and blue. Or
The American flag incorporates the colors red, white and blue.
(List with a series of phrases)
People who live in poverty have been shown to consume less healthy diets than people in relative affluence, to conduct less healthy lifestyles (tobacco use, alcohol abuse, sedentary lives), and to visit doctors less often.
The political language, the public discourse, and the mandates of federal and state legislation all speak about and to the “achievement gap” and the need for schools to “close” that “gap.”
(List with a series of clauses)
You should read the explanation carefully, you should brainstorm about how you want to respond, and you should compose an answer that addresses the situation clearly.
(1.UI) Use a comma or pair of commas to set off words, phrases, or clauses that include unneeded information. Information that interrupts the flow of the sentence without actually enhancing the central content of that sentence or information that creates a grammatical shift (such as the use of “but” or “yet”) in the sentence are also both treated the same as information that interrupts, requiring the use of a comma or pair of commas.
Examples:
Fran’s oldest sister, Emily, works at the high school.*
* [Since “oldest” cannot be made more specific or clearer by adding the name, you use commas, but in this sentence—“Fran’s sister Robbie works at a different high school that her sister Emily”—you do not set off the names with commas since the names are needed to specify between the sisters.]
Ellison, celebrated author of Invisible Man, spoke with a clarity then that must be heard now.
I have been struck, however, by a much more pressing issue than the claimed rise in student dishonesty in their writing.
This lecture came to us from a writer, a man not expert in the field of education.
Schools filled with children in poverty who are failing, disproportionately also children of color, mirror a reality of our society—the socioeconomic stratification of the lives of Americans.
Students complete both formative and summative assessments that are holistic and authentic, but primarily based on texts not discussed in class to avoid students simply repeating what the teacher has stated in class.
(1.CT) When you join complete thoughts (clauses that can stand alone as a grammatical sentence) with conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “yet,” for example), place a comma before that conjunction. If conjunctions join pairs of words, phrases, or clauses, do not precede the conjunction with a comma.
Examples:
This is politically difficult and challenging, but such a shift must happen first—before schools have any hope of helping students.
All students deserve and need some differentiated instruction based on their demonstrated strengths and needs, and all students deserve daily generative experiences at school that honor their humanity and their potential.
(1.I) Set off introductory words, phrases, and clauses with a comma.
Examples:
Finally, the paper will offer needed shifts for addressing all students, including children from poverty.
If we judged hospitals and mortuaries as we judge schools, we’d constantly condemn hospitals for making people sick and condemn mortuaries for killing people simply because both institutions happen to house the sick and the deceased.
Yet, when one school coincidentally serves an area of high poverty, we blame that school for low test scores—while celebrating schools in affluent districts for their high test scores.
(1.Qt) Several circumstances with quoting involve the use of commas. Often commas help separate the original text form the quoted text.
Examples:
[APA documentation]
“I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference,” began Ralph Ellison (2003), speaking to educators at Bank Street College of Education in September of 1963.
“Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548).
“We do not believe that the inequalities that exist today are the result of intentional actions to hurt children,” Peske and Haycock (2006) explain, but, “The simple truth is that public education cannot fulfill its mission if students growing up in poverty, students of color and low-performing students continue to be disproportionately taught by inexperienced, under-qualified teachers” (p. 15).
[MLA documentation]
“Teaching English is probably the most intimate of all teaching,” proclaimed Lou LaBrant (34), a progressive educator who pursued literacy instruction with a staggering passion for over 65 years.
Atwood adds, “[W]riters tend to adopt their terms of discourse early in their reading and writing lives” (xxvi).
Finally, a few situational uses of commas do exist:
Dates:
Her birth date is March 11, 1989, exactly three years after her cousin’s birth date.
City, States:
He flew to Iowa City, Iowa, to help work on a reading test.
Numbers:
She paid $256,000 for the painting.
An on-line resource for commas can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/607/01/
(2) Quote Marks
Quote marks (“”) are used to designate direct quotes from sources, to identify a comment about a word, and to identify dialogue. [EDIT]
Placing double quote marks around material designates those words as original to some source, either another text or some comment spoken by someone. In the examples above in the discussion of commas, you have several examples of quotes with documentation in both APA and MLA.
Integrating quotes into your original writing involves the use of quote marks along with understanding the conventions of commas, periods, documentation, and capitalization. Note that if you need to make any changes or additions within a quoted passage, place the changes in brackets ([ ]); if you omit anything from the quote, identify the omitted material with an ellipsis (. . .). However, any changes made to quoted passages must honor the integrity of the meaning of those passages, and you must maintain grammatical integrity of both the quoted material and the entire text of your writing integrating that source. Here are passages using quoted material. Look closely at how the quotes are integrated; the first two examples use APA documentation, and the third and forth examples use MLA documentation:
Examples:
“There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid,” argued Ellison (2003, p. 547). Here, a man of letters recognized something that contrasts with our assumptions today: Too often we attempt to address the educational problems of children from poverty with workshops, programs, and classroom practices that maintain a deficit view of those children and their lives. “Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548). For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548). And why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?—we might imagine him asking those who see children from poverty as incomplete, passively waiting for schools and teachers to fill in those gaps.
Ayers, in To Teach, argues, “Education will unfit anyone to be a slave. . . .Education tears down walls; training is all barbed wire” (p. 132).
My ideas for this article were first spurred several years ago by reading Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context. In that book, Weaver spends a few pages on the developmental stages of children’s ability to draw people. As most brain researchers believe, people do not reach levels of cognitive development at easily prescribed rates, but people often do follow the same sequence of development, though their performances of those levels may manifest themselves in erratic and conflicting ways. Weaver shows (see her Fig. 4.2, 61) the stages of a child’s drawing of people—which reveals conceptual leaps of understanding that the child exhibits through drawing. Children’s drawings of people reveal two important aspects of a child’s development of expression, as noted by Weaver: “[l]earners do not typically master something correctly all at once,” and “[s]omething learned may be temporarily not applied as the person is trying something else new” (60). One does not have to make too much of a leap to see the parallel with composing and the ability to write by hand: “These generalizations hold for emergent writers as well as for emergent artists, and for adults as well as children,” Weaver explains (62).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formatting is lost; this last section of text must be left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.SQM) Single Quote Marks (‘’) are used to identify quoted material already enclosed within quote marks.
Example:
As an adult, Loyd is a train engineer, and in Chapter 23, he is telling Codi about a recent and difficult maneuver he has conducted with a particularly long and heavy train. “’Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?’” Codi asks Loyd—who replies, “’No, because every train’s different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it’” (295).
“‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
(2.P) In academic and scholarly writing, writers often quote words and lines from poetry. Quoting and documenting poetry have a few conventions unique to poetry. When you quote from a poem and the quote includes words from more than one line, but not more than two, show the break in the line with a slash (/); if you quote more than two lines, set the lines off and maintain the line formation and all other aspects of formatting in the original. Document the line numbers, not the page number, when quoting poetry.
Examples:
In her poem, Atwood’s wordplay with “spell,” “spelling,” and “spells” is paralleled later in the poem with her wordplay with “name first” and “first naming” (ll. 4, 5, 6, 39, 40).
The speaker in Atwood’s poem emphasizes her focus near the middle of the poem: “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (ll. 24-25).
One of Atwood’s most effective poems, most shocking poems, is only four lines long:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye. (ll. 1-4)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.F) Quoted passages from fiction are formatted and documented in the same ways as quoting from any prose.
(2.D) Quoting from drama requires that you follow the conventions of quoting from prose if the drama is in prose, but to follow the conventions of quoting poetry is in verse (such as Shakespeare). Documentation usually requires that you identify the page number in prose drama, but the act, scene, and line(s) in verse plays (see the example for documenting a verse play).
Example:
Macbeth proclaims, “I have lived long enough. My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3.22-3).
• Quotes of passages considered too long to keep within the flow of your normal sentences should be set off, following the conventions of the style sheet you are using, but with no quote marks used around the set-off sentences; the first example is in APA format and the second, MLA.
Example:
Identifying the social impact of poverty on students is potentially perpetuating deficit assumptions also, as noted by Bomer, Dworin, May and Semingson (2008):
There are two basic varieties of deficit thinking. One is genetic, where poor performance of students from low-income households is held to be transmitted through biology. The other perspective, and the one that Payne advocates, is the culture of poverty view, where the self-sustaining cultural models of the poor are thought to be carriers of deficits like school failure and intergenerational poverty. In this variety of deficit thinking, the family and home environmental contexts are singled out as the transmitters of pathology (Valencia, 1997).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
• Place quote marks around words you are referring to, not using, in the flow of your sentence. (Some prefer italics to quote marks for referring to a word.)
Example:
Students often asked if they could use “I,” “it,” and “you.”
An on-line reference for using quote marks can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
Placing double quote marks around material designates those words as original to some source, either another text or some comment spoken by someone. In the examples above in the discussion of commas, you have several examples of quotes with documentation in both APA and MLA.
Integrating quotes into your original writing involves the use of quote marks along with understanding the conventions of commas, periods, documentation, and capitalization. Note that if you need to make any changes or additions within a quoted passage, place the changes in brackets ([ ]); if you omit anything from the quote, identify the omitted material with an ellipsis (. . .). However, any changes made to quoted passages must honor the integrity of the meaning of those passages, and you must maintain grammatical integrity of both the quoted material and the entire text of your writing integrating that source. Here are passages using quoted material. Look closely at how the quotes are integrated; the first two examples use APA documentation, and the third and forth examples use MLA documentation:
Examples:
“There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid,” argued Ellison (2003, p. 547). Here, a man of letters recognized something that contrasts with our assumptions today: Too often we attempt to address the educational problems of children from poverty with workshops, programs, and classroom practices that maintain a deficit view of those children and their lives. “Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548). For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548). And why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?—we might imagine him asking those who see children from poverty as incomplete, passively waiting for schools and teachers to fill in those gaps.
Ayers, in To Teach, argues, “Education will unfit anyone to be a slave. . . .Education tears down walls; training is all barbed wire” (p. 132).
My ideas for this article were first spurred several years ago by reading Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context. In that book, Weaver spends a few pages on the developmental stages of children’s ability to draw people. As most brain researchers believe, people do not reach levels of cognitive development at easily prescribed rates, but people often do follow the same sequence of development, though their performances of those levels may manifest themselves in erratic and conflicting ways. Weaver shows (see her Fig. 4.2, 61) the stages of a child’s drawing of people—which reveals conceptual leaps of understanding that the child exhibits through drawing. Children’s drawings of people reveal two important aspects of a child’s development of expression, as noted by Weaver: “[l]earners do not typically master something correctly all at once,” and “[s]omething learned may be temporarily not applied as the person is trying something else new” (60). One does not have to make too much of a leap to see the parallel with composing and the ability to write by hand: “These generalizations hold for emergent writers as well as for emergent artists, and for adults as well as children,” Weaver explains (62).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formatting is lost; this last section of text must be left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.SQM) Single Quote Marks (‘’) are used to identify quoted material already enclosed within quote marks.
Example:
As an adult, Loyd is a train engineer, and in Chapter 23, he is telling Codi about a recent and difficult maneuver he has conducted with a particularly long and heavy train. “’Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?’” Codi asks Loyd—who replies, “’No, because every train’s different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it’” (295).
“‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
(2.P) In academic and scholarly writing, writers often quote words and lines from poetry. Quoting and documenting poetry have a few conventions unique to poetry. When you quote from a poem and the quote includes words from more than one line, but not more than two, show the break in the line with a slash (/); if you quote more than two lines, set the lines off and maintain the line formation and all other aspects of formatting in the original. Document the line numbers, not the page number, when quoting poetry.
Examples:
In her poem, Atwood’s wordplay with “spell,” “spelling,” and “spells” is paralleled later in the poem with her wordplay with “name first” and “first naming” (ll. 4, 5, 6, 39, 40).
The speaker in Atwood’s poem emphasizes her focus near the middle of the poem: “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (ll. 24-25).
One of Atwood’s most effective poems, most shocking poems, is only four lines long:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye. (ll. 1-4)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.F) Quoted passages from fiction are formatted and documented in the same ways as quoting from any prose.
(2.D) Quoting from drama requires that you follow the conventions of quoting from prose if the drama is in prose, but to follow the conventions of quoting poetry is in verse (such as Shakespeare). Documentation usually requires that you identify the page number in prose drama, but the act, scene, and line(s) in verse plays (see the example for documenting a verse play).
Example:
Macbeth proclaims, “I have lived long enough. My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3.22-3).
• Quotes of passages considered too long to keep within the flow of your normal sentences should be set off, following the conventions of the style sheet you are using, but with no quote marks used around the set-off sentences; the first example is in APA format and the second, MLA.
Example:
Identifying the social impact of poverty on students is potentially perpetuating deficit assumptions also, as noted by Bomer, Dworin, May and Semingson (2008):
There are two basic varieties of deficit thinking. One is genetic, where poor performance of students from low-income households is held to be transmitted through biology. The other perspective, and the one that Payne advocates, is the culture of poverty view, where the self-sustaining cultural models of the poor are thought to be carriers of deficits like school failure and intergenerational poverty. In this variety of deficit thinking, the family and home environmental contexts are singled out as the transmitters of pathology (Valencia, 1997).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
• Place quote marks around words you are referring to, not using, in the flow of your sentence. (Some prefer italics to quote marks for referring to a word.)
Example:
Students often asked if they could use “I,” “it,” and “you.”
An on-line reference for using quote marks can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
(3) End Marks
End marks ( . ? !) are used to designate a sentence, including grammatical complete sentences, purposeful fragments, questions, and interjections. [EDIT]
(3.P) The period is used to end sentences that are statements (not questions) and to designate abbreviations. A few important conventions are related to the placement of periods, noted in the examples. The final period comes after documentation in parentheses (see the first example), and the final period remains inside a closing quote mark (see the second example).
Examples:
In “Public School 65, Down on the Lower East Side,” LaBrant (1998) recalls working with PS 65 from 1942 until 1953. The school, over fifty years ago, struggled: “The school was two years below the norm in reading, according to the latest all-city testing” (p. 7).
A series of extensive research reports on poverty and education in the UK paint an even more vivid picture of the impact of social realities on student achievement along with the probability that schools are unlikely to erase the impact poverty has on student achievement (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007): “Just 14 percent of variation in individuals' performance is accounted for by school quality. Most variation is explained by other factors, underlining the need to look at the range of children's experiences, inside and outside school, when seeking to raise achievement.”
(3.QM) A question mark ends a question. Note the placement of question marks with the content of quoted material.
Examples:
“Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548).
Why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?
Ellison asked his audience to consider the positive qualities of failing students. (No question mark is the sentence is a statement about asking a question.)
(3.EP) An exclamation point denotes excitement, shouting, or an interjection. Writers are cautioned to avoid excessive use of exclamation points, except in dialogue that reflects excitement or shouting.
(3.P) The period is used to end sentences that are statements (not questions) and to designate abbreviations. A few important conventions are related to the placement of periods, noted in the examples. The final period comes after documentation in parentheses (see the first example), and the final period remains inside a closing quote mark (see the second example).
Examples:
In “Public School 65, Down on the Lower East Side,” LaBrant (1998) recalls working with PS 65 from 1942 until 1953. The school, over fifty years ago, struggled: “The school was two years below the norm in reading, according to the latest all-city testing” (p. 7).
A series of extensive research reports on poverty and education in the UK paint an even more vivid picture of the impact of social realities on student achievement along with the probability that schools are unlikely to erase the impact poverty has on student achievement (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007): “Just 14 percent of variation in individuals' performance is accounted for by school quality. Most variation is explained by other factors, underlining the need to look at the range of children's experiences, inside and outside school, when seeking to raise achievement.”
(3.QM) A question mark ends a question. Note the placement of question marks with the content of quoted material.
Examples:
“Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548).
Why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?
Ellison asked his audience to consider the positive qualities of failing students. (No question mark is the sentence is a statement about asking a question.)
(3.EP) An exclamation point denotes excitement, shouting, or an interjection. Writers are cautioned to avoid excessive use of exclamation points, except in dialogue that reflects excitement or shouting.
(4) Semicolon, Colon, Dash, Hyphen, and Ellipsis
The semicolon (;), colon (:), dash (—), hyphen (-), and ellipsis (. . .) are forms of punctuation that serve a variety of functions within the grammatical and stylistic flow of sentences. [EDIT]
(4.S) A semicolon usually combines two closely related complete sentences (approximately equal to a comma and conjunction joining two sentences). The semicolon also precedes and a comma follows adverbial conjunctions such as “however,” “therefore,” “hence,” “furthermore,” “for example,” and “in fact.” A semicolon can also replace a comma when a series of elements includes commas within each element of the series in order to avoid confusion for the reader.
Examples:
As students read their chosen texts, the teacher provides a common text for students as a model of reading and responding to text; that model text is chosen because it is rich literacy and challenges the students.
Nationally, the ratio is about 800 students per administrator; for example, Maine is about 400 to 1, suggesting a waste of funds.
Students and children in general have far more experiences with traditional views being endorsed than with having traditional views questioned; thus, challenging traditional views of gender in a setting where the literature is difficult can cause students more disequilibrium than they can handle.
At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
(4.C) The colon is used to introduce long lists, extended examples or elaborations, or quoted material that can stand alone. (The colon also has functional uses when displaying time in numerals and when identifying books and verses from the Bible, for example.)
Examples:
For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548).
Here I will focus solely on writing instruction and will consider several problems that face us as teachers of writing at the early childhood levels—setting the stage for all writing instruction that follows:
(1) What do we know about teaching writing?
(2) What are the distinctions between writing and composing?
(3) What is the nature of the composing/writing process?
(4) How do pre-K and early childhood teachers address composing with pre-graphic and developing-graphic students—ones just learning to physically write on paper?
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)
(4.D) The dash identifies harsh interruptions, when those interruptions are so abrupt that commas seem inadequate, and connects lists, explanations, quotes, and elaborations to the main flow of a sentence in similar ways as the use of colons. The dash can be typed as two hyphens, but auto-formatting options in modern word processors should allow you to insert actual dashes in your text (the hyphen and dash are not interchangeable forms of punctuation). Many people have strong stylistic opinions about dashes—some preferring the dash and some cautioning writers against overuse.
Examples:
“’Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
Direct instruction—especially implemented in a blanket approach for an entire class—of grammatical and mechanical awareness already intuited by students often interferes with both their known and their expanding range of linguistic dexterity.
At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
(4.H) The hyphen combines words that normally work separately but when combined have a meaning unique to those same words used separately. The evolving nature of spelling in the English language also includes words being separate and then hyphenated and finally one word (“None the less,” “none-the-less,” “nonetheless” and “to morrow,” “to-morrow,” “tomorrow”).
An on-line resource for the hyphen can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/576/01/
Examples:
Most students have suffered through some form of the imposed essay form. At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
Over the course of two decades of high-stakes testing that has evolved into NCLB, students have been coerced more and more to fulfill false templates instead of developing as writers with ideas and linguistic command.
The template approach to teaching students to write essays is analogous to teaching students to paint portraits in art classes by starting with paint-by-numbers.
(4.E) The ellipsis is a single form of punctuation, but it appears to be three periods. The ellipsis represents omitted material within quoted passages. If you omit words, you must be sure to maintain the meaning of the quoted material, and that quote must remain grammatically sensible.
Example:
“I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference,” began Ralph Ellison (2003), speaking to educators at Bank Street College of Education in September of 1963. Despite his perceptive opening, Ellison did continue his lecture, “to discuss. . .the difficult thirty percent” (p. 546).
An on-line resource for several punctuation issues can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/566/01/
An additional resource relating punctuation and sentence patterns can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/604/01/
(4.S) A semicolon usually combines two closely related complete sentences (approximately equal to a comma and conjunction joining two sentences). The semicolon also precedes and a comma follows adverbial conjunctions such as “however,” “therefore,” “hence,” “furthermore,” “for example,” and “in fact.” A semicolon can also replace a comma when a series of elements includes commas within each element of the series in order to avoid confusion for the reader.
Examples:
As students read their chosen texts, the teacher provides a common text for students as a model of reading and responding to text; that model text is chosen because it is rich literacy and challenges the students.
Nationally, the ratio is about 800 students per administrator; for example, Maine is about 400 to 1, suggesting a waste of funds.
Students and children in general have far more experiences with traditional views being endorsed than with having traditional views questioned; thus, challenging traditional views of gender in a setting where the literature is difficult can cause students more disequilibrium than they can handle.
At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
(4.C) The colon is used to introduce long lists, extended examples or elaborations, or quoted material that can stand alone. (The colon also has functional uses when displaying time in numerals and when identifying books and verses from the Bible, for example.)
Examples:
For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548).
Here I will focus solely on writing instruction and will consider several problems that face us as teachers of writing at the early childhood levels—setting the stage for all writing instruction that follows:
(1) What do we know about teaching writing?
(2) What are the distinctions between writing and composing?
(3) What is the nature of the composing/writing process?
(4) How do pre-K and early childhood teachers address composing with pre-graphic and developing-graphic students—ones just learning to physically write on paper?
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)
(4.D) The dash identifies harsh interruptions, when those interruptions are so abrupt that commas seem inadequate, and connects lists, explanations, quotes, and elaborations to the main flow of a sentence in similar ways as the use of colons. The dash can be typed as two hyphens, but auto-formatting options in modern word processors should allow you to insert actual dashes in your text (the hyphen and dash are not interchangeable forms of punctuation). Many people have strong stylistic opinions about dashes—some preferring the dash and some cautioning writers against overuse.
Examples:
“’Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
Direct instruction—especially implemented in a blanket approach for an entire class—of grammatical and mechanical awareness already intuited by students often interferes with both their known and their expanding range of linguistic dexterity.
At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
(4.H) The hyphen combines words that normally work separately but when combined have a meaning unique to those same words used separately. The evolving nature of spelling in the English language also includes words being separate and then hyphenated and finally one word (“None the less,” “none-the-less,” “nonetheless” and “to morrow,” “to-morrow,” “tomorrow”).
An on-line resource for the hyphen can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/576/01/
Examples:
Most students have suffered through some form of the imposed essay form. At one point that always consisted of the five-paragraph essay—introduction with a thesis statement that established three points; three body paragraphs, one for each point; and a conclusion.
Over the course of two decades of high-stakes testing that has evolved into NCLB, students have been coerced more and more to fulfill false templates instead of developing as writers with ideas and linguistic command.
The template approach to teaching students to write essays is analogous to teaching students to paint portraits in art classes by starting with paint-by-numbers.
(4.E) The ellipsis is a single form of punctuation, but it appears to be three periods. The ellipsis represents omitted material within quoted passages. If you omit words, you must be sure to maintain the meaning of the quoted material, and that quote must remain grammatically sensible.
Example:
“I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference,” began Ralph Ellison (2003), speaking to educators at Bank Street College of Education in September of 1963. Despite his perceptive opening, Ellison did continue his lecture, “to discuss. . .the difficult thirty percent” (p. 546).
An on-line resource for several punctuation issues can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/566/01/
An additional resource relating punctuation and sentence patterns can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/604/01/
(5) Apostrophe
The apostrophe (’) joined with an “s” designates possessives—before the “s” in singular form and after the “s” in plural form. The apostrophe also represents omitted letters in contractions. [EDIT]
Writers should take care with possessive forms and with contractions. The use of the apostrophe for possessive forms appears to be disappearing in popular culture (Note the spelling on restrooms: “Mens” and “Womens” signs are becoming common, although the omission of the apostrophe is nonstandard.
Examples:
The student’s book. . . (singular) v. The students’ books. . . (plural)
You all = y’all
Do not = don’t
1979 = ‘79
• Note that the current convention concerning an entire decade does not include an apostrophe: She remembers growing up in the 1960s.
• Some cautions with possessive forms include the following:
Pronouns that do not have an apostrophe but are possessive: his, hers, its (don’t confuse with the contractions “it’s”), ours, yours, theirs.
Distinguish carefully between possessive and plural constructions in sentences such as the following (the distinction is based on your intended meaning in the sentence):
The principal did not approve of the students’ singing in the lunchroom. (The lack of approval concerns the singing, but not the students as people.)
The principal did not approve of the students singing in the lunchroom. (The lack of approval concerns the students, regardless of their singing.)
Be careful with meaning also when you have compound possessives:
Steve and Anne’s house is in our neighborhood.
Mark’s and Ted’s homework assignments were exactly the same, including the incorrect answers.
On-line help can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/
Writers should take care with possessive forms and with contractions. The use of the apostrophe for possessive forms appears to be disappearing in popular culture (Note the spelling on restrooms: “Mens” and “Womens” signs are becoming common, although the omission of the apostrophe is nonstandard.
Examples:
The student’s book. . . (singular) v. The students’ books. . . (plural)
You all = y’all
Do not = don’t
1979 = ‘79
• Note that the current convention concerning an entire decade does not include an apostrophe: She remembers growing up in the 1960s.
• Some cautions with possessive forms include the following:
Pronouns that do not have an apostrophe but are possessive: his, hers, its (don’t confuse with the contractions “it’s”), ours, yours, theirs.
Distinguish carefully between possessive and plural constructions in sentences such as the following (the distinction is based on your intended meaning in the sentence):
The principal did not approve of the students’ singing in the lunchroom. (The lack of approval concerns the singing, but not the students as people.)
The principal did not approve of the students singing in the lunchroom. (The lack of approval concerns the students, regardless of their singing.)
Be careful with meaning also when you have compound possessives:
Steve and Anne’s house is in our neighborhood.
Mark’s and Ted’s homework assignments were exactly the same, including the incorrect answers.
On-line help can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/
(6) Singular/Plural
Adding an “-s” to a singular noun forms the plural, but the singular verb has an “-s.” Nouns also have irregular forms that do not follow the “-s” convention. [EDIT]
• Many unusual forms exist for singular and plural nouns. Writers should take care to check on irregular forms. One example concerns “data”:
“Data” is a plural word, thus: Neither NAEP nor PACT provides educators with any valuable data that enhance our ability to teach.
Since many issues with forming the plural for nouns exist (including differences between the U.S. and the U.K about collective nouns), consult a reference when in doubt. One on-line source is the following:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/plurals.htm
• Many unusual forms exist for singular and plural nouns. Writers should take care to check on irregular forms. One example concerns “data”:
“Data” is a plural word, thus: Neither NAEP nor PACT provides educators with any valuable data that enhance our ability to teach.
Since many issues with forming the plural for nouns exist (including differences between the U.S. and the U.K about collective nouns), consult a reference when in doubt. One on-line source is the following:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/plurals.htm
(7) Spelling
One of the most conventional aspects of language is spelling; consult a recent dictionary for accepted spelling. [EDIT]
Consult a dictionary or use the dictionary in your word processor to help with spelling.
One interesting pattern is people have misspelled words repeatedly for many years. Lists of commonly misspelled words are available, many on-line:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html
Consult a dictionary or use the dictionary in your word processor to help with spelling.
One interesting pattern is people have misspelled words repeatedly for many years. Lists of commonly misspelled words are available, many on-line:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html
(8) Verb Tense
Verbs designate time in most English sentences. Broadly, verbs denote past, present, and future tenses, but many verb forms exist, including perfect tenses. Writers should be careful with consistent verb tense and be familiar with a wide variety of irregular forms. [EDIT]
Verbs are some of the most complex aspects of the English language. The system that guides verb use has some strong patterns that work for most writers without the need to raise our knowledge of the system to the conscious level. But the irregularities cause us the greatest problems, such as irregular verb forms.
Consult a reference if you have basic problems with verb tense; I recommend this on-line source:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/01/
Irregular verb forms (such as “lie” and “lay”) can be difficult, but as we become familiar with these words, most people develop expertise with the irregularities; consult a reference, including:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/605/01/
Research (See Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context from 1996) shows that verb use is one of the most significant markers for readers as they make judgments about the writer. When a writer exhibits careless verb use, readers assume the writing and the content of the writing are questionable.
As noted above, writers must be careful to use the conventional verb form at all times, including distinctions between perennial problem verbs “lie” and “lay” (see the link above for help).
Two key issues of concern are using the appropriate verb tense for the context of the writing and maintaining consistent verb tense (avoiding verb tense shift).
(8.CT) Conventions govern what verb tense a writer chooses in different writing contexts. Consider the following guidelines:
Prefer present and present perfect verb tenses when referring to passages or actions from published text in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry:
The speaker in Atwood’s poem emphasizes her focus near the middle of the poem: “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (ll. 24-25).
“’Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
Darl and Jewel struggle with their relationships, both between them as brothers and with their affection for their mother, Addie.
Billy Pilgrims swings back and forth between the past and the present throughout the novel.
Prefer past tense forms when writing about historical events. As well, conventions for writing about drama require past tense verb forms when writing about the action of a play:
Jefferson spoke and wrote in support of a separation between church and state.
(8.TS) A key marker for sophisticated writing is purposeful control of the verb tense throughout a composition. Careless and purposeless shifts in the verb tense suggest a lack of writer expertise and control.
Example*:
“There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid,” argued Ellison (2003, p. 547). Here, a man of letters recognized something that contrasts with our assumptions today: Too often we attempt to address the educational problems of children from poverty with workshops, programs, and classroom practices that maintain a deficit view of those children and their lives. “Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548). For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548). And why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?—we might imagine him asking those who see children from poverty as incomplete, passively waiting for schools and teachers to fill in those gaps.
* Here, since Ellison made an actual speech, but the text is published as an essay, I chose to use past tense verbs in the discussion of Ellison’s speech, but maintain present tense in the original text. This shows purposeful shifts in verb tense.
Verbs are some of the most complex aspects of the English language. The system that guides verb use has some strong patterns that work for most writers without the need to raise our knowledge of the system to the conscious level. But the irregularities cause us the greatest problems, such as irregular verb forms.
Consult a reference if you have basic problems with verb tense; I recommend this on-line source:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/01/
Irregular verb forms (such as “lie” and “lay”) can be difficult, but as we become familiar with these words, most people develop expertise with the irregularities; consult a reference, including:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/605/01/
Research (See Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context from 1996) shows that verb use is one of the most significant markers for readers as they make judgments about the writer. When a writer exhibits careless verb use, readers assume the writing and the content of the writing are questionable.
As noted above, writers must be careful to use the conventional verb form at all times, including distinctions between perennial problem verbs “lie” and “lay” (see the link above for help).
Two key issues of concern are using the appropriate verb tense for the context of the writing and maintaining consistent verb tense (avoiding verb tense shift).
(8.CT) Conventions govern what verb tense a writer chooses in different writing contexts. Consider the following guidelines:
Prefer present and present perfect verb tenses when referring to passages or actions from published text in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry:
The speaker in Atwood’s poem emphasizes her focus near the middle of the poem: “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (ll. 24-25).
“’Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
Darl and Jewel struggle with their relationships, both between them as brothers and with their affection for their mother, Addie.
Billy Pilgrims swings back and forth between the past and the present throughout the novel.
Prefer past tense forms when writing about historical events. As well, conventions for writing about drama require past tense verb forms when writing about the action of a play:
Jefferson spoke and wrote in support of a separation between church and state.
(8.TS) A key marker for sophisticated writing is purposeful control of the verb tense throughout a composition. Careless and purposeless shifts in the verb tense suggest a lack of writer expertise and control.
Example*:
“There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid,” argued Ellison (2003, p. 547). Here, a man of letters recognized something that contrasts with our assumptions today: Too often we attempt to address the educational problems of children from poverty with workshops, programs, and classroom practices that maintain a deficit view of those children and their lives. “Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548). For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548). And why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?—we might imagine him asking those who see children from poverty as incomplete, passively waiting for schools and teachers to fill in those gaps.
* Here, since Ellison made an actual speech, but the text is published as an essay, I chose to use past tense verbs in the discussion of Ellison’s speech, but maintain present tense in the original text. This shows purposeful shifts in verb tense.
(9) Subject/Verb Agreement
One key convention of the English language is the agreement in number between the subject and verb in a sentence. Both the subject and verb should be singular, or both, plural. [EDIT]
Subject/verb agreement, as with verb tense use, is another primary marker for readers when they react to the work of writers. Several issues cause writers problems. If you have trouble with subject/verb agreement, please consult a resource; I recommend this on-line help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/599/01/
Note that singular and plural forms for nouns and verbs appear to be opposite. Nouns add an “-s” to form the plural (in regular forms), but verbs are singular with the “-s” and plural without the “-s.”
Another common problem for writers is when the subject and verb are separated by phrases and clauses.
Also be cautious when using collective nouns, when using compound subjects joined by “or,” and when using “there [to be]” constructions. All of these problem areas are addressed in the on-line source noted above.
Finally, be cautious with indefinite pronouns:
Always singular: each, either, neither, one, everyone, no one, nobody, anyone, anybody, someone, somebody, everybody, much
Always plural: several, few, both, many, others.
Either singular or plural, depending on reference: some, any, none, all, most.
Subject/verb agreement, as with verb tense use, is another primary marker for readers when they react to the work of writers. Several issues cause writers problems. If you have trouble with subject/verb agreement, please consult a resource; I recommend this on-line help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/599/01/
Note that singular and plural forms for nouns and verbs appear to be opposite. Nouns add an “-s” to form the plural (in regular forms), but verbs are singular with the “-s” and plural without the “-s.”
Another common problem for writers is when the subject and verb are separated by phrases and clauses.
Also be cautious when using collective nouns, when using compound subjects joined by “or,” and when using “there [to be]” constructions. All of these problem areas are addressed in the on-line source noted above.
Finally, be cautious with indefinite pronouns:
Always singular: each, either, neither, one, everyone, no one, nobody, anyone, anybody, someone, somebody, everybody, much
Always plural: several, few, both, many, others.
Either singular or plural, depending on reference: some, any, none, all, most.
(10) Pronoun Reference
A pronoun is a part of speech including those words that refer specifically to some noun. Writers should strive to be clear in their use of pronouns. [EDIT]
Pronoun use can create problems with clarity and specificity for writers. On-line help can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/01/
A careful writer should pay close attention to the following cautions when using pronouns:
Avoid the use of pronouns when you are including multiple people of the same gender in the same sentence.
Use “it” cautiously. Prefer the use of “it” only in sentences that include the noun referred to by “it.”
Use “they” cautiously. Avoid referring to some hypothetical “they”; instead, prefer the use of the actual people or group to which you are referring.
Use “this” and “which” cautiously as well. Both can contribute to sentences that are unclear.
Restrict the use of “you” to actual references to the second person, usually a reference directly to the actual reader. Do not shift carelessly between third person and second person.
Pronoun use can create problems with clarity and specificity for writers. On-line help can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/01/
A careful writer should pay close attention to the following cautions when using pronouns:
Avoid the use of pronouns when you are including multiple people of the same gender in the same sentence.
Use “it” cautiously. Prefer the use of “it” only in sentences that include the noun referred to by “it.”
Use “they” cautiously. Avoid referring to some hypothetical “they”; instead, prefer the use of the actual people or group to which you are referring.
Use “this” and “which” cautiously as well. Both can contribute to sentences that are unclear.
Restrict the use of “you” to actual references to the second person, usually a reference directly to the actual reader. Do not shift carelessly between third person and second person.
(11) Pronoun/Antecedent Agreement
A parallel grammatical convention to subject/verb agreement is pronoun/antecedent agreement—requiring the writer to use pronouns that agree in number with the antecedent (the noun to which the pronoun refers) of that pronoun. [EDIT]
Writers must be careful with keeping pronouns and their antecedents parallel in number. Singular nouns require a singular pronoun, and both must be plural, of course.
A common problem in usage for many is the fear of assigning a gender to a nonspecific noun that is singular. See the example below:
Nonstandard: A student left their book in the gym. (Non-specific gender of “student” leads to “their,” which is nonstandard since it is plural, but it seems to agree with “student” since it doesn’t specify gender.)
Conventions require that writer agree pronouns and antecedents by number. If a writer is being hypothetical, prefer plural nouns and pronouns to avoid number errors and to avoid gender issues in language usage.
Pronoun/antecedent agreement is the focus of a debate about language conventions and sexist language use. The standard convention for using a pronoun to refer to a singular noun has been the third person singular pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his,” resulting in sexist language. Many have advocated awkward constructions such as “he/she,” “him/her,” and “his/hers.” But many balk at the awkward forms. Each writer must make a decision about these usage questions, paying close attention to the guidelines concerning the use of sexist language in course or when submitting work for publication.
Again, be cautious with indefinite pronouns:
Always singular: each, either, neither, one, everyone, no one, nobody, anyone, anybody, someone, somebody, everybody, much
Always plural: several, few, both, many, others.
Either singular or plural, depending on reference: some, any, none, all, most.
On-line help with pronoun/antecedent agreement is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/01/
Writers must be careful with keeping pronouns and their antecedents parallel in number. Singular nouns require a singular pronoun, and both must be plural, of course.
A common problem in usage for many is the fear of assigning a gender to a nonspecific noun that is singular. See the example below:
Nonstandard: A student left their book in the gym. (Non-specific gender of “student” leads to “their,” which is nonstandard since it is plural, but it seems to agree with “student” since it doesn’t specify gender.)
Conventions require that writer agree pronouns and antecedents by number. If a writer is being hypothetical, prefer plural nouns and pronouns to avoid number errors and to avoid gender issues in language usage.
Pronoun/antecedent agreement is the focus of a debate about language conventions and sexist language use. The standard convention for using a pronoun to refer to a singular noun has been the third person singular pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his,” resulting in sexist language. Many have advocated awkward constructions such as “he/she,” “him/her,” and “his/hers.” But many balk at the awkward forms. Each writer must make a decision about these usage questions, paying close attention to the guidelines concerning the use of sexist language in course or when submitting work for publication.
Again, be cautious with indefinite pronouns:
Always singular: each, either, neither, one, everyone, no one, nobody, anyone, anybody, someone, somebody, everybody, much
Always plural: several, few, both, many, others.
Either singular or plural, depending on reference: some, any, none, all, most.
On-line help with pronoun/antecedent agreement is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/01/
(12) Run-on Sentence/ Comma Splice
Conventional sentences are separated or joined by the appropriate punctuation and words. When a writer joins complete thoughts with no punctuation or with only a comma (omitting a conjunction such as “but” or “and” after that comma) and without doing so for stylistic purposes, the form is nonstandard and referred to as a “run-on sentence” or a “comma splice.” [EDIT]
Conventional guidelines for sentence formation require that complete thoughts that could stand alone as a single, grammatical sentence must be joined by a limited number of strategies:
Conjunction preceded by a comma: He went to the store, and the owner offered him a job.
Semicolon: He went to the store; the owner offered him a job.
Adverbial conjunction preceded by a semicolon and followed by a comma: He went to the store; however, the store was closed.
However, occasionally writers will cast run-on sentences—complete thoughts joined by only a comma—for effect. As with all language usage, purpose is the central issue, not whether or not a usage is “correct” or “wrong.” Fused sentences (complete sentences run together with only a space between) are nearly never used for effect.
Purposeful run-on:
We also do not condemn hospitals for not curing the incurable, we do not condemn mortuaries for not raising the deceased.
On-line help with run-ons and comma splices is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/01/
Conventional guidelines for sentence formation require that complete thoughts that could stand alone as a single, grammatical sentence must be joined by a limited number of strategies:
Conjunction preceded by a comma: He went to the store, and the owner offered him a job.
Semicolon: He went to the store; the owner offered him a job.
Adverbial conjunction preceded by a semicolon and followed by a comma: He went to the store; however, the store was closed.
However, occasionally writers will cast run-on sentences—complete thoughts joined by only a comma—for effect. As with all language usage, purpose is the central issue, not whether or not a usage is “correct” or “wrong.” Fused sentences (complete sentences run together with only a space between) are nearly never used for effect.
Purposeful run-on:
We also do not condemn hospitals for not curing the incurable, we do not condemn mortuaries for not raising the deceased.
On-line help with run-ons and comma splices is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/01/
(13) Fragment/ Sentence
Conventional sentences are complete thoughts with a subject and verb (although either may be implied). But the formation of a sentence is a purposeful act of the writer. Writers will occasionally construct a fragment for a stylistic purpose. [EDIT]
Particularly in academic and scholarly writing, the conventional expectation for sentence formation is the complete sentence. In published writing of all kinds, however, many writers use occasional fragments for effect in their writing. When a writer incorporates fragments purposefully, they are completely acceptable; most fragments in student writing are assumed to be errors, not the intent of the writer. All writers, students and scholars seeking publication, must be careful that any use of a fragment is clearly a purposeful decision by the writer.
An on-line resource for sentence formation and fragments is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/620/01/
Particularly in academic and scholarly writing, the conventional expectation for sentence formation is the complete sentence. In published writing of all kinds, however, many writers use occasional fragments for effect in their writing. When a writer incorporates fragments purposefully, they are completely acceptable; most fragments in student writing are assumed to be errors, not the intent of the writer. All writers, students and scholars seeking publication, must be careful that any use of a fragment is clearly a purposeful decision by the writer.
An on-line resource for sentence formation and fragments is available here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/620/01/
(14) Incomplete/Senseless Sentence
Some writers construct sentences that appear to be complete, having a subject and a verb, but the sentence doesn’t satisfy grammatical completeness or it simply confuses the reader. [EDIT]
One potential problem as writers grow more sophisticated is that as the sentences become more complex, the opportunities to create senseless or mangled sentences also increase.
Ultimately, writers should seek to be sophisticated but clear. A number of grammatical and stylistic issues can impair sentence completeness and clarity. Consider this on-line help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/711/01/
One potential problem as writers grow more sophisticated is that as the sentences become more complex, the opportunities to create senseless or mangled sentences also increase.
Ultimately, writers should seek to be sophisticated but clear. A number of grammatical and stylistic issues can impair sentence completeness and clarity. Consider this on-line help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/711/01/
(15) Awkward Wording
Even when a sentence is conventional in its grammar and mechanics, writers can construct sentences that are unintentionally awkward, detracting from the meaning. [EDIT]
Once a writer has command of the conventions, issues of style become more important. Many elements can contribute to awkward wording. Most writers will acquire a smooth style from drafting, peer input, editorial/instructional input, and reading extensively. The most common sources of awkward constructions are language habits we bring from speaking into our writing.
Some areas to consider:
Avoid: “what I am trying to say,” “what the author is trying to say,” “this means that”
Avoid: Direct references to your sources as “quotes,” direct references to your essay or your argument—“in the quote above,” “my point is,” “in this essay,” “in conclusion”
Recast: “How,” “when,” “where” and similar clauses into “-ing” constructions; for example:
He does not tolerate how people talk during movies. (avoid)
He does not tolerate people talking during movies. (recast)
Avoid: Repeated back-to-back sentences with the first ending in the same word as the subsequent sentences has as the first word; for example:
Jessica wanted to join a club to play soccer. Soccer is her favorite sport.
Jessica wanted to join a club to play soccer, her favorite sport. (revised)
Once a writer has command of the conventions, issues of style become more important. Many elements can contribute to awkward wording. Most writers will acquire a smooth style from drafting, peer input, editorial/instructional input, and reading extensively. The most common sources of awkward constructions are language habits we bring from speaking into our writing.
Some areas to consider:
Avoid: “what I am trying to say,” “what the author is trying to say,” “this means that”
Avoid: Direct references to your sources as “quotes,” direct references to your essay or your argument—“in the quote above,” “my point is,” “in this essay,” “in conclusion”
Recast: “How,” “when,” “where” and similar clauses into “-ing” constructions; for example:
He does not tolerate how people talk during movies. (avoid)
He does not tolerate people talking during movies. (recast)
Avoid: Repeated back-to-back sentences with the first ending in the same word as the subsequent sentences has as the first word; for example:
Jessica wanted to join a club to play soccer. Soccer is her favorite sport.
Jessica wanted to join a club to play soccer, her favorite sport. (revised)
(16) Wordiness
A stylistic guideline that is nearly universally recognized is the pursuit of conciseness in writing; in other words, writers should strive to use as few words as possible to express an idea. [EDIT]
Writers can never go wrong if they keep as a primary goal concise writing. Being concise means drafting writing that does not waste words, but “concise” does not mean “short.” Instead, concision is a concern for precise language. A well-written novel of 800 pages can be concise, while a four-sentence email can be wordy.
Some guidelines to wordy habits can help you create elegant writing that is concise:
Avoid: “the fact that,” “when it comes to,” “all of a sudden,” “a person who,” “in this day and time,” “off of,” “the type of person that”
William Strunk Jr.—noted for his conservative and brief statement on the use of the English language, The Elements of Style—states: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Consult these on-line resources for more help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_concise.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/572/01/
Writers can never go wrong if they keep as a primary goal concise writing. Being concise means drafting writing that does not waste words, but “concise” does not mean “short.” Instead, concision is a concern for precise language. A well-written novel of 800 pages can be concise, while a four-sentence email can be wordy.
Some guidelines to wordy habits can help you create elegant writing that is concise:
Avoid: “the fact that,” “when it comes to,” “all of a sudden,” “a person who,” “in this day and time,” “off of,” “the type of person that”
William Strunk Jr.—noted for his conservative and brief statement on the use of the English language, The Elements of Style—states: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Consult these on-line resources for more help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_concise.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/572/01/
(17) Empty Words and Phrases
Many words and phrases used by writers are ultimately empty; writers should avoid commonly used words and phrases that do not add to the flow or content of the writing. [DELETE]
Some word use should be deleted entirely, not just revised. Some writers, usually young or inexperienced writers, become more focused on word count than the quality of the language used. Some empty words to avoid:
Debatable (This is a debatable topic.)
Interesting
Good
Points (The writer makes a good point.)
Issues (The article raises an interesting issue.)
Some word use should be deleted entirely, not just revised. Some writers, usually young or inexperienced writers, become more focused on word count than the quality of the language used. Some empty words to avoid:
Debatable (This is a debatable topic.)
Interesting
Good
Points (The writer makes a good point.)
Issues (The article raises an interesting issue.)
(18) Discussion Lacking Support, Evidence
Virtually all writing benefits from support, evidence, examples, and concrete proof. The meat of most writing is the care a writer takes to reinforce the central points through evidence. [ADD]
Academic and scholarly writing requires the writer to offer solid and clear points that give the writing focus. Further, the writer must elaborate on those points by providing the reader with ample and convincing evidence, support, and examples. Ultimately, writers in academic and scholarly settings should see all writing as argument; the most effective aspect of an argument is the weight of evidence.
Example:
Of course, we do not. That brings us to a larger issue about poverty than how we address it in our schools. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (UK) has recently released “Experiences of Poverty and Educational Disadvantage” (2007, September). This series of studies on the effects of poverty in the UK should suggest to everyone in education a much larger shift that must take place in our approaches to poverty and education. The research reveals several key points, some of which reinforce existing understandings about poverty—a strong correlation exists between poverty and low achievement, low school achievement is followed by low achievement beyond school for those in poverty, for example.
More significantly, the study raises some unique results that we simply do not acknowledge in schools. Six of the key points drawn from their eight projects so far are significant for considering what we expect schools to accomplish with children from poverty (quoted below from the on-line report):
When offering support, the writer must be careful: The evidence must be compelling, but the writer must be ethical in the use of that evidence. Avoid corrupting your use of support with logic fallacies; see this on-line resource concerning logic fallacies:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/659/03/
When conducting research or using research to support your writing, you must avoid common errors in using and interpreting research; avoid the following:
Cherry picking: Some select only that research that supports their perspective, ignoring contradictory research. Cherry picking is misleading and unethical.
Causation v. correlation: Research findings should clearly state whether they are offering a causational relationship (one factor causes another) or a correlational relationship (one factor is connected to another factor, but one does not cause the other). Writers using research should never imply causation when only correlation has been shown.
Overstating one study: Similar to cherry picking is the tendency to overstate the “proof” found in one study. Writers should take care to use single studies judiciously, being skeptical themselves that one study can justify broad generalizations.
Overstating exceptions: The flip side to the above is the tendency to find an exception to a generalization, thus suggesting the exception disproves the generalization.
Academic and scholarly writing requires the writer to offer solid and clear points that give the writing focus. Further, the writer must elaborate on those points by providing the reader with ample and convincing evidence, support, and examples. Ultimately, writers in academic and scholarly settings should see all writing as argument; the most effective aspect of an argument is the weight of evidence.
Example:
Of course, we do not. That brings us to a larger issue about poverty than how we address it in our schools. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (UK) has recently released “Experiences of Poverty and Educational Disadvantage” (2007, September). This series of studies on the effects of poverty in the UK should suggest to everyone in education a much larger shift that must take place in our approaches to poverty and education. The research reveals several key points, some of which reinforce existing understandings about poverty—a strong correlation exists between poverty and low achievement, low school achievement is followed by low achievement beyond school for those in poverty, for example.
More significantly, the study raises some unique results that we simply do not acknowledge in schools. Six of the key points drawn from their eight projects so far are significant for considering what we expect schools to accomplish with children from poverty (quoted below from the on-line report):
- Just 14 per cent of variation in individuals' performance is accounted for by school quality. Most variation is explained by other factors, underlining the need to look at the range of children's experiences, inside and outside school, when seeking to raise achievement.
- Children from different backgrounds have contrasting experiences at school. Less advantaged children are more likely to feel a lack of control over their learning, and to become reluctant recipients of the taught curriculum. This influences the development of different attitudes to education at primary school that help shape their future.
- Children from all backgrounds see the advantages of school, but deprived children are more likely to feel anxious and unconfident about school.
- Out-of-school activities can help build self-confidence. Children from advantaged backgrounds experience more structured and supervised out-of-school activities.
- Many children and young people who become disaffected with school develop strong resentments about mistreatment (such as perceived racial discrimination). Work with disaffected young people is most effective where it makes them feel more involved in their own futures. Equality of educational opportunity must address multiple aspects of disadvantaged children's lives.
- These factors are at the heart of the social divide in educational outcomes, but have not been central in solutions so far. Measures to improve the extent to which disadvantaged children engage in education are elusive, but cannot be neglected. (Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage, 2007)
When offering support, the writer must be careful: The evidence must be compelling, but the writer must be ethical in the use of that evidence. Avoid corrupting your use of support with logic fallacies; see this on-line resource concerning logic fallacies:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/659/03/
When conducting research or using research to support your writing, you must avoid common errors in using and interpreting research; avoid the following:
Cherry picking: Some select only that research that supports their perspective, ignoring contradictory research. Cherry picking is misleading and unethical.
Causation v. correlation: Research findings should clearly state whether they are offering a causational relationship (one factor causes another) or a correlational relationship (one factor is connected to another factor, but one does not cause the other). Writers using research should never imply causation when only correlation has been shown.
Overstating one study: Similar to cherry picking is the tendency to overstate the “proof” found in one study. Writers should take care to use single studies judiciously, being skeptical themselves that one study can justify broad generalizations.
Overstating exceptions: The flip side to the above is the tendency to find an exception to a generalization, thus suggesting the exception disproves the generalization.
(19) Vague Word Choice
Specific language is most often the most effective language. Writers should prefer language that is specific and concrete. [ADD/EDIT]
Writers should always strive for specific language. Many words create vague writing, harming the effectiveness of the composition.
Instead of referring to, be sure to specify. Some words and constructions to avoid:
“How”
“What”
“This”
“Which”
“Attitude”
“Idea”
“Point”
“Belief”
“Purpose”
“Opinion”
“Feeling”
“View”
“Thing”
“Way”
An on-line source for avoiding vague language is available here:
http://www.english.uga.edu/writingcenter/writing/expletive.html
A key problem with vague writing, especially in academic and scholarly writing, is the misconception that the opening paragraph, generally seen as an “introduction,” should begin with general statements, followed by more specific paragraphs. This often leads to vague openings by less experienced writers. I note that this is a misconception because even general openings should be avoided. The beginning of any writing must create some interest in the reader. Neither vague nor general openings will be effective.
One effective opening technique is the use of scholarly personal narrative (see Robert J. Nash’s Liberating Scholarly Writing). See the following example:
Being an English teacher for nearly twenty years pales in comparison with being the father of a daughter coming through the public school system and sitting daily in language arts class. I have learned an enormous amount about reading and writing instruction—what works, what is counter-educational, why teachers do the things they do—as my child has grown from kindergarten to her current sixth grade. Two moments in my daughter’s life stand out as I consider the impact the current standards movement has had on reading and writing instruction.
This year, my eleven-year-old daughter, Jessica, made an observation: “All they care about is the PACT test; they don’t care if we learn anything.” She was speaking of the most recent statewide testing (in South Carolina) that will determine grade promotion and eventually graduation.
A few years ago, as a third grader, Jessica failed a text-prepared test on complete sentences. The assistant superintendent at the time ran a reading level check on the test, finding that the sentences on this third-grade test were written on the eighth-grade reading level. My daughter had marked as fragments sentences she did not understand in terms of content; to her, these sentences were incomplete thoughts, thus fragments. At home I gave her what I felt was an authentic measure of her understanding of complete sentences. After being asked to write a series of ten sentences from ten separate verbal prompts such as, “Write a sentence about playing soccer,” she wrote ten grammatically complete sentences with standard capitalization and punctuation. The child understood complete sentences, but the text-supplied test had falsely measured her as a failure.
Yet, when I spoke with her teacher about the test, she expressed a perceived obligation to give the test because that was what she felt the administration wanted and that was what students needed for the standardized tests that year. She sincerely believed that the isolated instruction and assessment that she was implementing were required for preparation to take standardized tests—never questioning whether the testing was legitimate or not. As a professional educator, she had never questioned the authenticity of measuring a child’s editing skills as a reflection of a child’s ability to compose complete sentences—and she had never questioned the quality of the text-supplied test. The reductionistic nature of high-stakes testing as the de facto curriculum had distorted both the students’ authentic understanding of language and the teacher’s professional legitimacy.
In the sample above, I opened my scholarly essay with a personal narrative that creates interest in the reader while also focusing the intent of the essay (accomplishing more authentically the traditional call for writers to open with an introduction that includes an overt thesis sentence). Throughout the opening included above, I also chose as many specific details as possible, including diction that is specific and clear. Look carefully at the passage above. What aspects of it give the writing specificity?
Writers should always strive for specific language. Many words create vague writing, harming the effectiveness of the composition.
Instead of referring to, be sure to specify. Some words and constructions to avoid:
“How”
“What”
“This”
“Which”
“Attitude”
“Idea”
“Point”
“Belief”
“Purpose”
“Opinion”
“Feeling”
“View”
“Thing”
“Way”
An on-line source for avoiding vague language is available here:
http://www.english.uga.edu/writingcenter/writing/expletive.html
A key problem with vague writing, especially in academic and scholarly writing, is the misconception that the opening paragraph, generally seen as an “introduction,” should begin with general statements, followed by more specific paragraphs. This often leads to vague openings by less experienced writers. I note that this is a misconception because even general openings should be avoided. The beginning of any writing must create some interest in the reader. Neither vague nor general openings will be effective.
One effective opening technique is the use of scholarly personal narrative (see Robert J. Nash’s Liberating Scholarly Writing). See the following example:
Being an English teacher for nearly twenty years pales in comparison with being the father of a daughter coming through the public school system and sitting daily in language arts class. I have learned an enormous amount about reading and writing instruction—what works, what is counter-educational, why teachers do the things they do—as my child has grown from kindergarten to her current sixth grade. Two moments in my daughter’s life stand out as I consider the impact the current standards movement has had on reading and writing instruction.
This year, my eleven-year-old daughter, Jessica, made an observation: “All they care about is the PACT test; they don’t care if we learn anything.” She was speaking of the most recent statewide testing (in South Carolina) that will determine grade promotion and eventually graduation.
A few years ago, as a third grader, Jessica failed a text-prepared test on complete sentences. The assistant superintendent at the time ran a reading level check on the test, finding that the sentences on this third-grade test were written on the eighth-grade reading level. My daughter had marked as fragments sentences she did not understand in terms of content; to her, these sentences were incomplete thoughts, thus fragments. At home I gave her what I felt was an authentic measure of her understanding of complete sentences. After being asked to write a series of ten sentences from ten separate verbal prompts such as, “Write a sentence about playing soccer,” she wrote ten grammatically complete sentences with standard capitalization and punctuation. The child understood complete sentences, but the text-supplied test had falsely measured her as a failure.
Yet, when I spoke with her teacher about the test, she expressed a perceived obligation to give the test because that was what she felt the administration wanted and that was what students needed for the standardized tests that year. She sincerely believed that the isolated instruction and assessment that she was implementing were required for preparation to take standardized tests—never questioning whether the testing was legitimate or not. As a professional educator, she had never questioned the authenticity of measuring a child’s editing skills as a reflection of a child’s ability to compose complete sentences—and she had never questioned the quality of the text-supplied test. The reductionistic nature of high-stakes testing as the de facto curriculum had distorted both the students’ authentic understanding of language and the teacher’s professional legitimacy.
In the sample above, I opened my scholarly essay with a personal narrative that creates interest in the reader while also focusing the intent of the essay (accomplishing more authentically the traditional call for writers to open with an introduction that includes an overt thesis sentence). Throughout the opening included above, I also chose as many specific details as possible, including diction that is specific and clear. Look carefully at the passage above. What aspects of it give the writing specificity?
(20) Lacking Development, Elaboration
Most writing requires that the writer fully develop the focus and purpose for the text. [ADD]
The most significant elements of academic and scholarly writing are the elaborations, the development of ideas, arguments, positions, and questions. Many inexperienced writers fall into the trap of stating; they believe that simply stating something makes it so. Academic and scholarly conventions require full elaborations of ideas.
Many techniques can help develop and elaborate a point or points in paragraphs and throughout an essay. Consider some of the following:
Be sure to use transition. Words and phrases that move your writing forward and make relationships among ideas help develop your point. The most basic transition is the use of ranking terms such as “first,” “next,” and “last” (Be sure not to add unneeded adverb endings to words that are already adverbs, such as making “last” into “lastly”).
Consider the number of support elements in your discussion. One piece of evidence is usually insufficient. Try to offer the reader several elements of support, incorporating variety in the types of support you include.
If you include quoted or paraphrased passages from sources, be sure to include sentences that show you unpacking that material for the reader. Part of your job as a writer is offering evidence, but you also should interpret, reflect, and balance the evidence.
Include statements that keep your discussion connected with your primary focus.
The most significant elements of academic and scholarly writing are the elaborations, the development of ideas, arguments, positions, and questions. Many inexperienced writers fall into the trap of stating; they believe that simply stating something makes it so. Academic and scholarly conventions require full elaborations of ideas.
Many techniques can help develop and elaborate a point or points in paragraphs and throughout an essay. Consider some of the following:
Be sure to use transition. Words and phrases that move your writing forward and make relationships among ideas help develop your point. The most basic transition is the use of ranking terms such as “first,” “next,” and “last” (Be sure not to add unneeded adverb endings to words that are already adverbs, such as making “last” into “lastly”).
Consider the number of support elements in your discussion. One piece of evidence is usually insufficient. Try to offer the reader several elements of support, incorporating variety in the types of support you include.
If you include quoted or paraphrased passages from sources, be sure to include sentences that show you unpacking that material for the reader. Part of your job as a writer is offering evidence, but you also should interpret, reflect, and balance the evidence.
Include statements that keep your discussion connected with your primary focus.
(21) Inflated Word Choice
A writer’s primary goal is communicate. Many writers mistakenly believe that complex and inflated language is needed to be a strong writer. Often, clear and simple language is most effective. Writers should avoid masking empty or shallow ideas with language that distorts. [EDIT]
Many inexperienced writers seek to use the most difficult and unusual words they can find, often resorting to the thesaurus and purposefully choosing odd words. The reality about skilled writing is that words must be appropriate and no single guideline exists for what words are best suited for a piece of writing.
Words chosen must fit the content of the writing, must support the appropriate tone for the writing, and must communicate effectively with the intended audience.
One important aspect of language is the level of the formality of the language; another is the connotation of words. Consider the use of these terms: “police officer,” “cop,” and “pig.” While all mean the same thing, each word has a level of formality and a connotation. Most words in the language fit along similar scales. Refer to the following on-line resource as you consider the proper level of your diction:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/02/
Many inexperienced writers seek to use the most difficult and unusual words they can find, often resorting to the thesaurus and purposefully choosing odd words. The reality about skilled writing is that words must be appropriate and no single guideline exists for what words are best suited for a piece of writing.
Words chosen must fit the content of the writing, must support the appropriate tone for the writing, and must communicate effectively with the intended audience.
One important aspect of language is the level of the formality of the language; another is the connotation of words. Consider the use of these terms: “police officer,” “cop,” and “pig.” While all mean the same thing, each word has a level of formality and a connotation. Most words in the language fit along similar scales. Refer to the following on-line resource as you consider the proper level of your diction:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/02/
(22) Establish Focus
Conventional views of writing require that writers directly state a thesis within the first paragraph. A conventional thesis is a sentence that identifies the central purpose for a text. However, all writing establishes focus in a wide variety of ways. Rarely do writers begin with clearly stated thesis sentences, except in traditional academic settings. [ADD/EDIT]
The conventional and traditional view of academic and scholarly writing holds that essays must begin with an introduction that includes a highly mechanical thesis sentence identifying the main focus of the essay. For an on-line resource related to traditional thesis development, see the following links:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/
Crafting an Effective Thesis Sentence
However, this mechanical view is highly limited and misleading. In the academic and scholarly worlds, most writing is far more creative and engaging than the staid introduction with an overt thesis sentence.
Writers establish focus and invite the reader to continue reading with hundreds of different techniques. Consider some of the following techniques to establish focus:
Begin with a powerful question or series of questions that your essay will address.
Begin with a personal narrative that relates to your main focus.
Begin with a quote or paraphrase from a major source related to your focus.
Begin with a literary quote, reference, or allusion related to your focus.
Begin with and develop an ironic course that contradicts your focus, saving your focus until the end.
For a more direct discussion of beginnings, see Reading, Learning, Teaching Barbara Kingsolver, Chapter Two, pages 36-42, 58-59 (Thomas, P. L., Peter Lang USA, 2005). Also consider this excerpt from that book:
Reconsidering Beginnings—Barbara Kingsolver
Considering these beginnings from Kingsolver’s non-fiction:
• “June is the cruelest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts until the end of July” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Creation Stories,” p. 17)—allusion, wit.
• “When I left downtown Tucson to make my home in the desert, I went, like Thoreau, ‘to live deliberately’” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Making Peace,” p. 23)—literary quote.
• “Maybe this has happened to you: You are curled up on the sofa, with an afghan maybe, and the person you love is there too” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Semper Fi,” p. 66)—hypothetical “you” situation.
• “As I walked out of the street entrance to my newly rented apartment, a guy in maroon high-tops and a skateboard haircut approached, making kissing noises and saying, ‘Hi, gorgeous’” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Somebody’s Baby,” p. 99)—narrative technique, purposeful misdirection. [Misdirection is also employed in her “Lily’s Chickens” from Small Wonder.]
• “In the catalog of family values, where do we rank an occasion like this?” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Stone Soup,” p. 135)—question.
• “The drive from Tucson to Phoenix is a trip through merciless desert, where tall saguaros throw up their arms in apparent surrender to the encroaching cotton fields” (Kingsolver, 1995, “The Spaces Between,” p. 146)—figurative language (personification).
• “Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Jabberwocky,” p. 222)—manipulation of genre.
• “I have places where all my stories begin” (Kingsolver, 2002, “Knowing Our Place,” p. 31)—one-sentence beginning paragraph. [Also employed in “Flying,” in the same collection.]
• “’Nobody ever gets killed at our house,’ begins a song by Charlie King. . .” (Kingsolver, 2002, “The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don’t Let Him In,” p. 131)—opening with a song lyric.
• “My daughter came home from kindergarten and announced, ‘Tomorrow we all have to wear red, white, and blue’” [followed by four paragraphs of dialogue between Kingsolver and her daughter] (Kingsolver, 2002, “And Our Flag Was Still There,” p. 235)—dialogue.
The conventional and traditional view of academic and scholarly writing holds that essays must begin with an introduction that includes a highly mechanical thesis sentence identifying the main focus of the essay. For an on-line resource related to traditional thesis development, see the following links:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/
Crafting an Effective Thesis Sentence
However, this mechanical view is highly limited and misleading. In the academic and scholarly worlds, most writing is far more creative and engaging than the staid introduction with an overt thesis sentence.
Writers establish focus and invite the reader to continue reading with hundreds of different techniques. Consider some of the following techniques to establish focus:
Begin with a powerful question or series of questions that your essay will address.
Begin with a personal narrative that relates to your main focus.
Begin with a quote or paraphrase from a major source related to your focus.
Begin with a literary quote, reference, or allusion related to your focus.
Begin with and develop an ironic course that contradicts your focus, saving your focus until the end.
For a more direct discussion of beginnings, see Reading, Learning, Teaching Barbara Kingsolver, Chapter Two, pages 36-42, 58-59 (Thomas, P. L., Peter Lang USA, 2005). Also consider this excerpt from that book:
Reconsidering Beginnings—Barbara Kingsolver
Considering these beginnings from Kingsolver’s non-fiction:
• “June is the cruelest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts until the end of July” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Creation Stories,” p. 17)—allusion, wit.
• “When I left downtown Tucson to make my home in the desert, I went, like Thoreau, ‘to live deliberately’” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Making Peace,” p. 23)—literary quote.
• “Maybe this has happened to you: You are curled up on the sofa, with an afghan maybe, and the person you love is there too” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Semper Fi,” p. 66)—hypothetical “you” situation.
• “As I walked out of the street entrance to my newly rented apartment, a guy in maroon high-tops and a skateboard haircut approached, making kissing noises and saying, ‘Hi, gorgeous’” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Somebody’s Baby,” p. 99)—narrative technique, purposeful misdirection. [Misdirection is also employed in her “Lily’s Chickens” from Small Wonder.]
• “In the catalog of family values, where do we rank an occasion like this?” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Stone Soup,” p. 135)—question.
• “The drive from Tucson to Phoenix is a trip through merciless desert, where tall saguaros throw up their arms in apparent surrender to the encroaching cotton fields” (Kingsolver, 1995, “The Spaces Between,” p. 146)—figurative language (personification).
• “Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile” (Kingsolver, 1995, “Jabberwocky,” p. 222)—manipulation of genre.
• “I have places where all my stories begin” (Kingsolver, 2002, “Knowing Our Place,” p. 31)—one-sentence beginning paragraph. [Also employed in “Flying,” in the same collection.]
• “’Nobody ever gets killed at our house,’ begins a song by Charlie King. . .” (Kingsolver, 2002, “The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don’t Let Him In,” p. 131)—opening with a song lyric.
• “My daughter came home from kindergarten and announced, ‘Tomorrow we all have to wear red, white, and blue’” [followed by four paragraphs of dialogue between Kingsolver and her daughter] (Kingsolver, 2002, “And Our Flag Was Still There,” p. 235)—dialogue.
(23) Essay Form
Many different conventions exist for the form an essay or text should take. Writers should be careful to work within or against those conventions with purpose and expertise. [EDIT]
Whether the writer is a student in a course or a scholar submitting a work for publication, the writer must be aware of the essay conventions guiding their work.
We can generally assume that essays must be multi-paragraph and that they should have a solid beginning, middle, and end. However, even those guidelines look different from one setting to the next. Careful writers should pay close attention to paragraphing and organizational structures when writing essays. Further, writers must be aware of the expectations for any essays they are submitting for a grade or publication.
For a resource addressing a traditional view of the essay form, see the following link:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/724/01/
Students and scholars would be better served reading a wide variety of nonfiction and scholarly essays in order to develop a more sophisticated view of essays.
Whether the writer is a student in a course or a scholar submitting a work for publication, the writer must be aware of the essay conventions guiding their work.
We can generally assume that essays must be multi-paragraph and that they should have a solid beginning, middle, and end. However, even those guidelines look different from one setting to the next. Careful writers should pay close attention to paragraphing and organizational structures when writing essays. Further, writers must be aware of the expectations for any essays they are submitting for a grade or publication.
For a resource addressing a traditional view of the essay form, see the following link:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/724/01/
Students and scholars would be better served reading a wide variety of nonfiction and scholarly essays in order to develop a more sophisticated view of essays.
(24) Diction (Word Choice)
A key skill of any writer is making appropriate and sharp word choices. Writers should be careful to select words that carry the appropriate meaning and tone for the purpose of the text. [EDIT]
Although this story may be more Urban Legend than history, James Joyce spent an entire 24 hours once, walking about his home town asking everyone he saw about one word he was considering for a piece he was writing. While extreme, this story does capture the importance of word choice for the writer.
Writers must choose their words carefully, seeking always the appropriate word for the context of the purpose of the composition. Writers should prefer accessible words—words that the audience knows—and, above all else, specific words.
A few strategies can help writers grow more expert in their diction. Pay attention to the following words and phrases as you draft:
• Avoid “good,” “bad,” “very,” “a lot,” “nice,” “great,” and other common words that have lost their power through overuse in our daily speech.
• Avoid forms of “to say” when choosing a verb while integrating your source material or while discussing speakers in poetry and narrators or characters in fiction. Some alternatives include: “to explain,” “to argue,” “to detail,” “to specify,” “to mention,” “to show,” and “to reveal.”
• Avoid characterizing your own writing or the writing/research of others using the construction “try to”—as in “Bomer tries to convince his readers to reconsider the work of Ruby Payne.” Prefer taking a more solid assessment of what you or other writers do or do not accomplish.
• Avoid “use” and “utilize” when possible (avoid “utilize” always). A technique you can apply when drafting is to attack “to use” sentences in the following way:
Recast “Dickinson uses personification in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’” as “Dickinson personifies death in ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’”
• Avoid all forms of “to get.”
• Avoid slang, except within dialogue or in first-person narration when the language of the character or narrator would include slang. Consult the on-line resource listed below for further discussions of slang:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/01/
• Avoid verb forms that include tag-on prepositions, such as “up” and “out.” Some to avoid include: “stands up,” “breaks off,” “throws out,” “talks about,” “thinks about,” “finds out.” Most of these verb forms have more specific and effective synonyms or the preposition is redundant; consider:
“stands up” >>>>> “stands”
“throws out” >>>>> “discards”
“talks about” >>>>> “discusses”
“finds out” >>>>> “discovers”
• Avoid “help but” and “doubt but” constructions. For example, recast “She could not help but cry at the wedding” as “She could not help crying at the wedding.”
• Do not use “irregardless,” but choose “regardless” instead since “irregardless” is a careless word creation that has crept into the language but marks the user as unsophisticated.
• Be careful not to choose “literally” when you mean “figuratively.” Many writers construct sentences such as “The audience literally laughed their heads off.” Of course, the writer means to be figurative so a better recasting would be, “The audience laughed their heads off,” allowing the reader to appreciate the hyperbole.
• Avoid word forms including “-like,” “-wise,” and “-ize.” Some constructions, however, will be necessary, such as “childlike,” but many readers find these word forms harsh and awkward.
• Do not create a part of speech when the word already fulfills your need. Consider “first,” “second,” “last,” and other transitional words. They are already adverbs; thus, we have no need to create “secondly” or “lastly.”
• When you choose “unique,” be careful not to qualify. “Unique” cannot be “more” or “most” as something is either unique, or not. “Unique” has a quality similar to “dead” in that respect.
• Select between “filled with” and “full of” carefully. “Filled with” should be preferred when you need a positive connotation: “The room was filled with the aroma of newly cut flowers.” “Full of” has a negative connotation: “His speech was full of hateful condemnations of his opponent.”
• Choose “because” carefully and only when you intend a causational relationship.
• Avoid “there [to be]” sentence formations. Usually, recasting the sentence is more effective. “There are students loitering in the hallways” is not as direct as “Students are loitering in the hallway.”
• Choose carefully between “and” and “and then” since the choice distinguishes between a parallel and a sequence.
• Know the language of the field within which you are writing, and know the language of your intended audience. Writers should avoid jargon (again, see the link early in this section for a discussion of jargon) and exclusive language, but the precise language of a field is crucial for the writer to be accepted as credible. For example, “point of view” and “character” have different meanings in common language and in the field of literature. “I see your point of view” is distinct from “Ann Tyler’s narration is in second person point of view, creating a story that challenges the reader’s expectations for narration.”
• Be aware of and sensitive to your audience’s concern for sexist language use. Here, the writer is in difficult waters. Many are now vigilant in keeping language gender neutral since English has a history of sexist patterns (see (11) concerning pronoun use), but others are encouraging a backlash against recognizing sexist language, labeling such concerns as “politically correct”—a pejorative term intended to demean the issue. A writer making an effort to choose “humanity” over “mankind,” it seems, is seeking to use language that is precise and sophisticated.
• Avoid euphemisms since they mask instead of convey accurately (see the link earlier for a fuller discussion of euphemisms). One example is the use of “near miss” in the airline industry; the deceit of the term is that when two planes come very close to each other, they have experienced nearly hitting. When you miss something, it is entirely regardless of how close the objects are when they pass. But the airline industry has no interest, in terms of public relations, for discussing planes hitting.
• Choose powerful and vivid verbs when integrating source material; for a list of such verbs go here:
Effective Verbs for Referring to Source Material
Although this story may be more Urban Legend than history, James Joyce spent an entire 24 hours once, walking about his home town asking everyone he saw about one word he was considering for a piece he was writing. While extreme, this story does capture the importance of word choice for the writer.
Writers must choose their words carefully, seeking always the appropriate word for the context of the purpose of the composition. Writers should prefer accessible words—words that the audience knows—and, above all else, specific words.
A few strategies can help writers grow more expert in their diction. Pay attention to the following words and phrases as you draft:
• Avoid “good,” “bad,” “very,” “a lot,” “nice,” “great,” and other common words that have lost their power through overuse in our daily speech.
• Avoid forms of “to say” when choosing a verb while integrating your source material or while discussing speakers in poetry and narrators or characters in fiction. Some alternatives include: “to explain,” “to argue,” “to detail,” “to specify,” “to mention,” “to show,” and “to reveal.”
• Avoid characterizing your own writing or the writing/research of others using the construction “try to”—as in “Bomer tries to convince his readers to reconsider the work of Ruby Payne.” Prefer taking a more solid assessment of what you or other writers do or do not accomplish.
• Avoid “use” and “utilize” when possible (avoid “utilize” always). A technique you can apply when drafting is to attack “to use” sentences in the following way:
Recast “Dickinson uses personification in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’” as “Dickinson personifies death in ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’”
• Avoid all forms of “to get.”
• Avoid slang, except within dialogue or in first-person narration when the language of the character or narrator would include slang. Consult the on-line resource listed below for further discussions of slang:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/01/
• Avoid verb forms that include tag-on prepositions, such as “up” and “out.” Some to avoid include: “stands up,” “breaks off,” “throws out,” “talks about,” “thinks about,” “finds out.” Most of these verb forms have more specific and effective synonyms or the preposition is redundant; consider:
“stands up” >>>>> “stands”
“throws out” >>>>> “discards”
“talks about” >>>>> “discusses”
“finds out” >>>>> “discovers”
• Avoid “help but” and “doubt but” constructions. For example, recast “She could not help but cry at the wedding” as “She could not help crying at the wedding.”
• Do not use “irregardless,” but choose “regardless” instead since “irregardless” is a careless word creation that has crept into the language but marks the user as unsophisticated.
• Be careful not to choose “literally” when you mean “figuratively.” Many writers construct sentences such as “The audience literally laughed their heads off.” Of course, the writer means to be figurative so a better recasting would be, “The audience laughed their heads off,” allowing the reader to appreciate the hyperbole.
• Avoid word forms including “-like,” “-wise,” and “-ize.” Some constructions, however, will be necessary, such as “childlike,” but many readers find these word forms harsh and awkward.
• Do not create a part of speech when the word already fulfills your need. Consider “first,” “second,” “last,” and other transitional words. They are already adverbs; thus, we have no need to create “secondly” or “lastly.”
• When you choose “unique,” be careful not to qualify. “Unique” cannot be “more” or “most” as something is either unique, or not. “Unique” has a quality similar to “dead” in that respect.
• Select between “filled with” and “full of” carefully. “Filled with” should be preferred when you need a positive connotation: “The room was filled with the aroma of newly cut flowers.” “Full of” has a negative connotation: “His speech was full of hateful condemnations of his opponent.”
• Choose “because” carefully and only when you intend a causational relationship.
• Avoid “there [to be]” sentence formations. Usually, recasting the sentence is more effective. “There are students loitering in the hallways” is not as direct as “Students are loitering in the hallway.”
• Choose carefully between “and” and “and then” since the choice distinguishes between a parallel and a sequence.
• Know the language of the field within which you are writing, and know the language of your intended audience. Writers should avoid jargon (again, see the link early in this section for a discussion of jargon) and exclusive language, but the precise language of a field is crucial for the writer to be accepted as credible. For example, “point of view” and “character” have different meanings in common language and in the field of literature. “I see your point of view” is distinct from “Ann Tyler’s narration is in second person point of view, creating a story that challenges the reader’s expectations for narration.”
• Be aware of and sensitive to your audience’s concern for sexist language use. Here, the writer is in difficult waters. Many are now vigilant in keeping language gender neutral since English has a history of sexist patterns (see (11) concerning pronoun use), but others are encouraging a backlash against recognizing sexist language, labeling such concerns as “politically correct”—a pejorative term intended to demean the issue. A writer making an effort to choose “humanity” over “mankind,” it seems, is seeking to use language that is precise and sophisticated.
• Avoid euphemisms since they mask instead of convey accurately (see the link earlier for a fuller discussion of euphemisms). One example is the use of “near miss” in the airline industry; the deceit of the term is that when two planes come very close to each other, they have experienced nearly hitting. When you miss something, it is entirely regardless of how close the objects are when they pass. But the airline industry has no interest, in terms of public relations, for discussing planes hitting.
• Choose powerful and vivid verbs when integrating source material; for a list of such verbs go here:
Effective Verbs for Referring to Source Material
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