Posts Tagged ‘proofreading’

Reverse Psychology

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I occasionally teach creative writing; last week’s class involved an exercise where we took the “World’s Worst Poem” (according to Google) and fixed it.  One of the people noted that she was able to see many faux pas in the author’s style of which she, herself, was guilty.  We all had a look at the poem and, regretfully, each one of us could find at least one problem which was evident in our own writing.

This made me think: have you ever checked out some really bad academic writing?  If you do a quick search for “world’s worst essay”, you’ll get some prime examples.  (Caveat: the first link Google comes up with is an essay which has an extraordinary amount of inappropriate language, so don’t click on it if that sort of thing bothers you… no, I’m not giving you the link to it. )

This essay comes up in several places on the internet.  It looks like it was written by a 7-year-old who drank too much Red Bull.  It’s a good essay to read if you’re at all inclined to rambling, though; you’ll never want to ramble again.

Here is a college admission essay which is the epitome of pretentiousness and inappropriate vocabulary.  You’ll have to scroll down and click on “read more of this essay”.

It would be a good exercise to print out these two paragraphs and mark them up with a big red pen, as they break just about every rule of academic writing.

Have a look at some of these.  You may find some things which strike you as disturbingly familiar.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in style | No Comments »

Doin’ It Wrong; U R Doin’ It Right

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Artists - just like athletes - have to do exercises.  I’m not talking about stretching out the muscles in your hands; I’m talking about stretching out your brain.

No, it’s not that gross.

Visual artists have to draw things from different perspectives.  Musicians have to play scales.  Actors have to assume characters they would never really want to play.  And writers have to write things they don’t mean to write.

There are the traditional exercises: describe something, write down directions, find words that rhyme with orange (just kidding).  These are good things to do if you’re working on creativity or clarity.

My students never come to me because they’re having problems with creativity.  They come to me because they have problems with the basics of writing something for school or work.  I spend several hours assessing them, identifying the actual problem.  Then I spend several hours making them practice that problem.

No, not fix the problem.  Practice it.  Again and again.  If you have problems with leaving out capitals, then i want you to write an entire essay with no capitals.  (make it a long essay, not an effortless paragraph or two.)  If you like capitals too much, THEN WRITE AN ENTIRE ESSAY IN CAPITALS.  Comma happy?  Then, put, a, comma, between, every, word.  Go ahead and split all your infinitives, end every sentence with a preposition, run your sentences on for pages, and use every contraction available.  Just make sure your writing is purely erroneous.  There shouldn’t be one thing done properly.

When you’ve practiced your mistake to the point where it’s perfect (you’ll know), then go through your paper and correct the mistakes.  They’ll stand out clearly.  Use a nice, acid-green pen or something, so it looks pretty.  Tape your masterpiece to the wall above your desk.  You’ll find that the three pages or so will be enough to train your brain to think differently, to see the errors differently.

Then, when your formal writing is perfect, you can take your imperfections and write for lolcats, or become the next e.e. cummings, because formal writing isn’t the only type of writing.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Grammar and Punctuation, Writing Centre | No Comments »

Using Prepositions

Monday, February 15th, 2010

In the last two months, I believe I’ve corrected enough essays to kill a horse.  A lot of the teachers and professors send notes back with my students, listing the particular grammatical sins of the student:

I never want to see a contraction again!

Semi-colons are not commas!

If I were able to do such a thing, I would issue warnings about

PREPOSITIONS.

They’re my pet peeve.

Learn to use them properly, please.

Now, because we are discussing English prepositions, this is not a light-hearted remark.  English prepositions don’t like to follow rules.  The only way to learn to use prepositions properly is to practice them.  Filling out page after page of cloze exercises is not going to help very much.

Read.  Listen to people talk.  Speak.

If you are new to the English language and are having problems with basic prepositions, do, by all means, fill out some cloze exercises.  Here are some decent ones to start with:

Dave’s ESL Preposition Quiz 1

Dave’s ESL Preposition Quiz 2

Dave’s ESL Preposition Quiz 3

Dave’s ESL Preposition Quiz 4

The Hares And The Frogs

When it comes to idioms, you’ll have serious problems making the prepositions follow the rules.  Here’s a short list of examples.  As you can see, it’s beyond the average ability to memorise them all.  There is nothing for it but to throw yourself into the English language and learn to enjoy the quirks and eccentricities of prepositions.  They are funny little things, and can be enjoyable when you learn to make them work for you.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Grammar and Punctuation | No Comments »

Humans or Machines?

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Where I live, it’s the end of the semester; post-secondary schools have just finished and the high-schools are just beginning final exams.  Students are wired on caffeine, and going on little-to-no sleep.  Those in their last year of a programme are moved to livid tears by the thought of not getting at least 95%.

I get phone calls and e-mails: “Miss, I think I need you.”  Sometimes, my required response is obvious; this person cannot write a reasonable paper without supervision so, yes, they need me.  Sometimes, it’s a matter of just talking them over a rough spot.  A student may write a perfectly good paper but just needs to be reminded to check their verb tense or to remove contractions.  Many of my students are of this ilk.  All they need to do is run the paper through a grammar- or spell-checker, then go do something else for an hour so they can proofread the paper with fresh eyes.

The students who just have one or two problems - usually the same problem with each paper they write - are the ones who don’t really need me.  They can do with computer support or, perhaps, a study partner to proofread for them.

The other students… they need a tutor.  A computer programme may be able to help them with the punctuation or spelling, but it cannot help them with the actual writing.  There are problems with unsupported theses, repetition, disorganisation, rambling and irrelevant material; the list can go on and on.

Look at your own writing and decide what you need.  Have teachers and professors been scrawling “PLEASE SEE ME” on your papers all year?  In that case, you need a human tutor who can guide you through the writing process.  If your papers are returned looking very festive with all the red circles around the commas, you could run your paper through a computer programme (I, of course, recommend SentenceWorks) and see if you think that helps you fix the problems.

Your school will have some sort of tutoring or writing centre.  It may just be a couple of volunteers who hang around an office for a couple of hours each week, or perhaps it’s an on-line chat, or it may be a full-time tutoring centre.  Whatever it may be, if you feel you haven’t fulfilled the requirements of your assignment, please find a real, living-and-breathing person to help you do so.  Save the computer for the celebratory post-exam gaming sessions. :)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Writing Centre | No Comments »

Non-Formulaic Linking

Monday, November 9th, 2009

chain_links1

Linking is one of those impossible-to-explain-and-more-impossible-to-understand things.  I see a lot of papers with red scrawls beside the beginning of each paragraph saying “Link!”  My students often have no idea what the teacher or professor means.  Draw chains?

Linking is connecting one thought to another.  In formal writing, linking must be done smoothly, so the reader isn’t jarred by a sudden change in subject or perspective.

In elementary school, I was taught the “hamburger paragraph”, complete with “linking” words.

Intro: “In this essay I will be talking about…”

1st paragraph: “Firstly…”

2nd paragraph: “Secondly…”

3rd paragraph: “Thirdly…”

Conclusion: “In conclusion…”

Hm.  Might be able to pull this off in Grade 4 but I think any of my professors would have had me court martialled and shot if I’d written this in university.

So, how should one link?  There’s no formula but here are some ideas:

This page on Writing For Change has a list of good linking words.  If you start to think along these lines, you should achieve a reasonable voice for formal writing although I would avoid common transitions such as “firstly, secondly, thirdly, etc.”  because they sound a little too formulaic.

Waylink English discusses linking paragraphs and gives some fair examples.  (Just remember not to use the examples which include personal pronouns unless you are writing an opinion piece.)

The OWL at Purdue provides this page of transitional words.  They have an excellent list of words to use should you need to show sequence without using “firstly, secondly, thirdly”.  They also have some examples of good transitions here.

Regardless the subject matter,  it should read smoothly.  Find several examples of whatever you’re writing (literary analysis, history paper, scientific report) and see how the authors link their paragraphs.  It will be easy for you to identify the transitions which are well done, and those which carelessly follow a formula or have no linking at all.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Writing Centre, style | No Comments »

Weird Red Editing Marks

Monday, October 12th, 2009

red_pencil1

When your (utterly brilliant) paper is handed back to you, are you filled will trepidation?  When you peek through your fingers to look at the paper, does it take you another half hour to understand what the professor or proofreader thought of it? Does it look like a bunch of aliens stepped in red ink and ran all over your essay?

The alien prints are called “editing marks”. While it may seem a little ironic that someone will write sp. in order to tell you to spell something out, editors have a reason for using these marks. Not only do the editors generally have hundreds of papers to mark but they also have limited space; full sentences crammed into the 2 ½ inches on either side of your paper would make it difficult to read.

It’s not all that difficult to understand editing marks. Some marks are pretty obvious; awk. means the sentence sounds awkward and should be re-written so it sounds a little more natural. Marks such as ¶ are a little more disconcerting: it’s a pilcrow and it means you need to start a new paragraph.

A simple search for “editing marks” should come up with a range of websites which will guide you, or the writing centre at your institution will have a print-out available. Barring that, this website has most of the marks you’re likely to see:

http://wadsworth.com/english_d/templates/student_resources/1413001890_burnett/UsageHandbook/edit_marks.htm

Code-breaking is a very useful skill….

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Writing Centre | No Comments »

Sentenceworks Blog is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).