Read-Think-b4-u-Write

July 12 begins the week of the Dork and the Geek. Grammarly is celebrating by offering the Ultimate Language Geek Personality Quiz. I took it and was labeled a Grammar Despot: "The world is a dangerous place for a grammar despot. You cannot read your Facebook news feed or page through the grocery ads without being assaulted with crimes against grammar. When you see 'fewer' in the place of 'less' or 'you’re' in the place of 'your,' you feel your blood pressure rise. Conventions of writing make you feel comfortable and secure. You have a message for anyone who writes anything: Please follow grammar rules." This doesn't seem too surprising for an English Professor, but following the basic rules of good writing is important for more than just passing composition. I have a love/hate relationship with grammar. Getting too hung up on the rules can stifle creativity, but when you make common errors, like using the wrong form of its or it's...

Roberto Bolaño offers "12 Tips on the Art of Writing Short Stories," but good writing is just good writing. Let's take a look at his advice: (1) Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.           This works just as well for college essays. If you write the same essay over and over again, you will get bored and never grow as a thinker (or writer). (2) It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time.           Maybe you won't sit down and write three or five essays at a time, but do write when you feel ENERGIZED, don't write that essay at 3:00 a.m. (4) One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for thes...

Over at Nautilus , Becca Cudmore is puzzled by how the same information can be displayed on charts with two entirely different attitudes, or spin. According to Ruth Rosenholtz, a scientist over at MIT, the way you can tell if a chart is trying to deceive you is by how long it takes you to figure out what that visual is trying to say. "A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen." Since you are often required to use visuals, including graphs and charts, let's take a look at a couple of Nautilus's examples of what you should NOT do. Puzzling Perspective -  The purple chart is about "labor." It is displaying the same information, so why do these charts look so different? The pie chart on the right puts labor up front and closer to you, so it takes up more space. The chart at left puts the labor information farther away from you, so it takes less space (think vanishing point perspective). In other words, mak...

You would think it would be crazy hard for new academic writers to write a college-level academic paper, but NO, what's really hard for new academic writers is to format that paper correctly, especially when it comes to  IN-TEXT CITATIONS (YES! that is ALL CAPS and BOLD ). Why? I don't know...it seems pretty straightforward to me, but then I've been writing and grading academic papers for a long time... would think it would be crazy hard for new academic writers to write a college-level academic paper, but NO! What's really hard for new academic writers is to format that paper correctly, especially when it comes to So here's the basics: If you borrow someone's idea, you have to give him or her credit--it's their idea. They did a lot of work to come up with something original, so give credit where credit is due. A person's ideas can be expressed verbally or in writing. A writer can use those ideas by paraphrasing, summarizing or quoting directly...

http://www.grammarly.com/ At least that's what 3,000 writers said when they were polled by Grammarly, the world's best grammar checker. But why are women better? According to those polled, women are better writers because they spend more time developing characters, women like to write more about people rather than things. Women are even better writers because they like to write purple prose -- "long, descriptive sentences." Or maybe this is just all a bunch of stereotyping? I would really like to know what the internals of this poll are. How many men were polled? How many women? What were the ages of those polled? If you look at the results of this poll (and it doesn't claim to be scientific), what would you guess about the internals? Do you agree with the results? Do you believe women are better writers than men? Who are some of the greatest writers of all time? Ouch, those are men, but is this the result of the male-dominated culture of the pas...

Stress is a necessary evil.  While we don't want to walk around feeling stressed all the time, it does help get successful results. We want to be in the middle of that bell curve when stress leads to increased attention and interest, but right before it causes strong anxiety. As you climb toward optimal performance, you have to stay calm because once you lose your cool, well, that can quickly lead to a "complete meltdown."  So what do successful people do to stay cool? Travis Bradberry over at Forbes.com  offers us some insight about how successful people stay calm. Appreciate what you have. "Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn't merely the 'right' thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%." Remember, 99 percent of the world's population, alive or dead, would love to be a college student in the San Francisco Bay Area. Avoid asking what if? "Calm people kno...

Rewriting is the essence of writing well—where the game is won or lost. —William Zinsser This is very true - instructors don't expect everything in the first draft and, in fact, expect what Anne Lammott would call a "shitty first draft." Here is some basic advice when it comes to revising drafts: 1) Revision is NOT just about fixing grammar and spelling.  2) Revision is NOT just about moving some words around or finding every synonym Word has to offer.  3) REREAD the prompt.  Are you answering the question being proffered, or have you gone off on some tangent? Get back on track and revise towards the prompt. 4) Check in with your thesis.  Is this the paper you just wrote, or did you discover a new approach towards the topic as you wrote your exploratory draft?  Make necessary adjustments.  5)  When revising the next draft "think big"....what kind of evidence (stats, facts, quotes, examples) do you need to support ALL of your points? ...

An essay introduction is just like a personal introduction . . . and yes, it is an art.  They are both a first impression and quickly determine whether you want to read a paper or engage with a person. Let's look at seven standard types of introductions that you can use in ANY essay.  Since I have found examples to be the best teachers, let's look at seven introductory paragraphs for a single thesis statement: Two types of students who attend college are the eighteen-year-old who just graduated from high school and the returning student who seeks a new career. A Personal or Fictional Anecdote As I walked into my first college class, I wondered who would be sitting to my right or left. I remember fearing that everyone would stare at me because I was an "older" student. I soon realized that while many teens were in the class, I was not the only student who had waited a number of years before seeking a college education.  Two types of students who attend college...

We synthesize all the time. When you have a conversation with a friend about something your other friends have said about that certain someone, that's a synthesis. When you are given an assignment that asks you to use "at least one quote" to support your opinion, that's a synthesis. When you go on RateMyProfessor to find reviews of a specific professor in order to decide whether to take his or her class, that's a synthesis. When you read or watch the news, surf the internet, or your favorite video channel, and then form a new opinion, that's a synthesis. Every one of the posts on this blog are a synthesis.  I'm not reinventing the wheel here, I just look for articles that might interest college students, or help them understand a concept better, and then add my own "two cents", as my father would say. But let's take a closer look at the definition of an academic synthesis from Drew University : "Although at its most basi...