Things to keep in mind when writing your essays

This is from a recent post I made to my blog for English 086 while marking their essays. I thought these tips might be helpful to you as you start to work on (or do the final editing on) your essays for English 182....

I often write out extensive comments about grammar, clarity, and other writing issues, but I thought it might be even more useful to post a few general observations here on the blog.

Clarity: In nearly everyone's essays there were passages that should have been revised more thoroughly. Always read your final draft aloud and have someone else proofread as well. This will often help you to catch any sentences where the meaning is unclear or the structure awkward. When you revise your essay, continually focus on expressing your ideas as precisely and concisely as possible. Always ask yourself “Have I truly said what I mean? Have I said it as effectively and efficiently as I can?” To see how one can improve clarity and style often with only the deletion, addition, or relocation of even just a single word, look at some of the quick changes that I made as I was going through your essay.

Grammar:
a) Sentence fragments: Again, always proofread and read out loud very carefully to avoid problems of this sort. Here are a couple of useful links that explain how to fix sentence fragments: http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/fragments.htm and http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_frag.html

b) Passive/active voice: Avoid using the passive voice as much as possible. Try instead to use the active voice; it is nearly always more effective than the passive form. Here is a link to a great webpage for information on the difference between the passive and active voice: http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/passive.htm

Punctuation: Carefully review the errors that I pointed out on your paper so that you can correct those in the future. Pay particular attention to the proper use of commas, semicolons, and apostrophes. At this point in your career you should have mastered all of these forms of punctuation. Websites like OWL at Purdue or this Guide to Grammar and Writing are great sources of exercises that will help you to eliminate these types of errors from your work.

Usage: Make certain when using a word or phrase that you are absolutely certain of what it means. I often see papers where it's clear someone has used the thesaurus extensively and has chosen words from there without doublechecking their definitions. If you see a word circled and the word "usage" in the margin, I'm pointing out a word that doesn't quite fit, that means something other than what you are trying to use it to mean.

A few more comments to follow as I go....

The National "North of 60" this week

As I mentioned in class today, this week CBC's nightly news show, The National, is broadcasting from Nunavut. Last night's broadcast had some great stories about the difficulties of finding a balance between tradition and modernity, but also offered a great insight into how many of today's younger generations are connecting with the past in profound ways. You can watch tonight's news on channel 19 from 10-11. The stories about Nunavut will come in the second half of the hour. Or, go to the National's website at www.cbc.ca/national and watch the news with RealPlayer.

With RealPlayer you can skip ahead to that part of the broadcast (last night's feature stories began at 24:02 of the news) or watch the entire news if you're interested. As I mentioned in class today, it's well worth watching another country's perspective on what's happening in the USA. That's an opportunity you rarely get to do from within this country and it's one of the perks of living so close to the border.

If you do get a chance to watch any of this coverage, please post your reactions here.