Show & Tell

This is the second in a series about the rules of good writing.

The Second Basic Principle: Show, don't tell.

What does “show, don’t just tell” really mean? To answer that question, I'll ask another one by way of an example. Can you remember being in elementary school on show-n-tell day? Imagine the kid who gets up in front of you and your classmates, empty-handed, and then claims to have a baseball signed by Hank Aaron that’s in perfect condition, only she can’t bring it to school. You can see the eye rolls, can't you?

Even though you’re only eight years old, you know that the story has a few problems. Not only can you not see the ball to know exactly what “perfect condition” looks like, but you can't eyeball the signature, sniff the leather or count the stitches. In other words, you have no reason to believe this kid even if she describes the ball perfectly.

If you tell without showing, your readers might not believe you. In other words, you have to show what you mean. Good writing tends to draw an image in the readers’ mind.

Here's an example of a sentence that tells:

Mr. Schlopenferker is a gangly, ungrateful, and untidy old codger.

There’s a better way to create a stronger image of Mr. Schlopenferker in the reader's mind's eye -- by showing, rather than telling:

Mr. Schlopenferker heaved himself out of the filthy, dilapidated armchair. He struggled to get to his feet and to support his ample length with his cane. The chair groaned in protest. Mr. Schlopenferker's swollen, misshapen knees popped and cracked in objection. The old man pounded the floor with his cane, cursing because the coffee in his cup was cold again.

In the second example, I didn’t just tell you that Mr. Schlopenferker is tall. I showed it by writing that he struggled to get to his feet, and by describing his ample height. I also didn’t just tell you that Mr. Schlopenferker is old. I showed it by mentioning his swollen, misshapen knees popping and cracking, and his cane. I also didn’t tell you that he's ungrateful, but the impatience of a pounding cane has you thinking that he may not be a very appreciative man.

Showing, not telling, gives the reader a clearer picture of what's happening. Whenever possible, offer vivid and specific descriptions to offset mind-numbing statistics about the ingratitude of the old, and endless bar charts and graphs proving this improbable statistic. Showing, and not telling, gives the reader close-up details. The lens of the camera comes in nice and tight on your subject. 

Remember: whenever possible, show don't just tell.

Juggling Multiple Deadlines: Spreading the Love vs. Dividing and Conquering

Three papers. Five finals. So much to do, so little time.

It’s how we all feel during the last few weeks of the semester, yet we still have to manage to get it all done in the allotted amount of time.

We juggle multiple deadlines, trying to finish all of our projects and papers, hoping we don’t drop any balls.

So, how are we supposed to do that, you ask?

There are two approaches we can take. In reality, there are probably more than two, but for time’s sake I will only go through these two.

Approach #1 – Spread the Love

This approach involves working on them all a little at a time. We start by allotting ourselves a specific amount of time, say three hours (in the event there are three papers to write), and work for an hour on each paper. We can set it up like this:

                  Day 1 – Research

                  Day 2 – Reading through research and taking notes

                  Day 3 – Writing a rough draft of the papers

                  Day 4 – Revising and Turning in the papers

Do this over the span of a few days, and before we know it they will all be done!

The major problem with this approach is that not all of us are strict one to two drafters, but sometimes that is all that our schedules will allow. Also, this is not a strict schedule; there is no one way to approach this approach. In other words, make a schedule that works for you, individually, but that allows you to work on multiple projects in a day.

Approach #2: Divide and Conquer

Attack them one at a time. Work one until it is done, and then begin the next.

The problem with this strategy is that deadlines are often too close together to realistically accomplish them one at a time. But if our schedules allow for it, it can make us feel accomplished, productive, and like we’re really going somewhere instead of being stuck at the beginning of three papers with only research to show for.

These are both intense and time-consuming, but so is trying to finish all the work and studying involved in the end of the semester. It can be done. We will finish our papers. We will take our final exams. We will live through it all, and then we will celebrate the end of the semester and a job well done and enjoy the break.

Grammarly: “Another Set of Eyes to Help Perfect Your Writing”?

Grammarly is an online service created to help anyone with grammar usage, word choices, and possible plagiarism risks. The website grammarly.com advertises that over 3 million users trust the site to find over 150 types of grammatical errors. The site also claims to compare all submissions to more than 2 billion online sources to check for plagiarism. In short, Grammarly is supposed to be “another set of eyes to help perfect your writing” (Grammarly.com).

It sounds fantastic, right! 

But how effective is the program? 

Here’s how it works: Once a user of Grammarly creates a document, all he or she has to do is copy and paste the text into Grammarly’s text box via the webite. In a few seconds the site will compute a score ranging anywhere from 1-100. The program will also inform the user if plagiarism is a risk factor. 

The details of these critiques are not available to the user until the user creates a free account. Once that occurs, Grammarly will take the user step by step through the document highlighting problem areas while offering a description of the error highlighted. In the event of plagiarism, the website will provide a link to the likely source of the material.  

It actually works well for what it is. 

It is not, however, another set of eyes to help perfect your writing. 

Take these scenarios for example:
 
To test the site, I grabbed my Oxford Book of Essays sitting on my shelf. I found E.B. White’s essay “About Myself,” and I copied the first paragraph from the essay exactly as it had been published. I then plugged it into Grammarly’s program. 

I purposely chose an essay example to avoid any creative writing problems that may become problematic in my experiment. I didn't want poetry, or dialect to factor into the results, just nice clean prose. I chose E.B. White for his efforts in discussing grammar usage in the popular The Elements of Style handbook. 

Out of the 1-100 scale, E.B. White received a 67!

The program critiqued the essay in this way:
Review this sentence for adjective and adverb use
Review this sentence for comma use.
Review this sentence for use of the passive voice
Spelling
Spelling
Commonly confused words

Grammarly did highlight most of the document as at risk for plagiarism citing a New Yorker article from 1945 as the source.
For my second experiment, I chose Oscar Wilde’s “The Truth of Masks” essay. 

Again, I picked an essay form to use as an example for the same reasons as above, and I picked a seemingly more obscure essay to test the plagiarism program.   

Only 25 points for Wilde.

The most common problem with Wilde was “wordiness." Again, the plagiarism tool caught the text. This time the site provided a link accrediting the work to Wilde.

I did my third experiment for fun, mostly. I chose Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham. This text includes sentences like “Would you? Could you? In a car? Eat them! Eat them! Here they are.”

Dr. Seuss received the highest score of the three: 75 out of 100. I did not check for plagiarism.

So what does this mean for writers using Grammarly?

It means that Grammarly may be a useful tool to some degree, but it is not another set of eyes, at least not human eyes. If it were another set of human eyes, the grades E.B. White, Oscar Wilde, and Dr. Seuss received would have been outrageous results. These guys are masters! They are pros at what they do. But Grammarly cannot recognize the human nature in language.

Why? Because it is not a human. It cannot considers a piece of writing according to its rhetorical context: purpose, audience, subject, genre, and rhetorical aim. 

Therefore, the site does not provide a replacement for the human reader. As a tool to objectively place value and merit on a piece of writing, Grammarly leaves much to be desired. The fact that the program even offers a grade is dumbfounding.

Here's my advice with using Grammarly. 

First, ignore the grade. The grade Grammarly provides is clearly nonsensical and is in no way useful. 

Second, the grammar tool does well to point out possible problem areas. Use the tips as suggestions only but do not compromise the integrity of the document to please the Grammarly program. Remember, it is not human.

Third, Grammarly should never be used as a tool to predict a grade from a teacher and should never be used by a teacher to grade the work of a student. Doing so will only lead to the degradation of both. 

My final suggestion is to take the plagiarism tool seriously. The program seems to be thorough and can even be useful in finding sources to reference in the document. One can never take the risk of plagiarism too seriously. 

However, in the E.B. White example, the first sentence, “I am a man of medium height” (which received a plagiarism flag) is simple language and a common description of many people. Flagging this sentence as plagiarism is iffy at best.  

Just because I was curious how Grammarly would evaluate my own writing, I ran this blog post through Grammarly to see how it stacked up against the heavyweights mentioned above. 

I received a 73. 

According to Grammarly, I’m not quite to the level of essayist that Dr. Seuss is, but I have E.B. White and Oscar Wilde beat by a mile!

Trying to Sound Smart Might Make You Sound Stupid

Have you ever had to write a paper and felt that neither the way you usually speak nor your most academic or "smartest" language would work for the assignment?

I think everyone has felt this way, at least once his or her life. I know I have!

Now, have you ever read through your own paper or perhaps even when you were writing it got confused about what you were saying? If you answered yes, what was the cause of your confusion?

Was it because you were trying so hard to sound smart that your writing became so convoluted that your meaning was lost? Or was it because you hit that right click and went to the Thesaurus option a little too often?

If either of these rang true, revise, rewrite, or rework that paper. If you get lost writing or reading your own paper, imagine what your intended reader will feel!

Sounding smart at the expense of losing your reader(s) is not a risk worth taking. Meaning and comprehension hold much more weight than using a bunch of those 50-cent words (read: big, long words that may or may not fit the meaning you are trying to convey) does.

Otherwise, you run the risk of sounding like Joey's speech from the Friends episode for Monica and Chandler's upcoming wedding.

If you clicked on the link, the message that Joey was trying to get across to his audience was so confusing and aimless that it became meaningless. Essentially, what he meant to say was that he loved his friends and hoped that they would live a life full of happiness and love. Well, why not just say that!

Often times, we spend so much time trying to sound smart that we end up sounding, well, stupid to our readers (especially if they are more educated and/or more familiar with the material we are writing about). This is the exact result we were attempting to avoid by using big words. In other words, it is counter-productive.

If using the simplest word that means exactly what you want and need to say works, then why would you use a bigger word that does or could lose some of your meaning?

The smartest thing you could do is use that simple word with the exact meaning you intended to convey to the readers.

Regis, I'd Like to Use a Lifeline: Writing with Writer's Block

“I'm burnt out,” the thought of every writer who has ever experienced writer’s block.

I've been hovering around the topic of writer's block for a couple of weeks now like a helicopter unable to land safely. There is a reason for this. 

I've been experiencing it myself. And if I have to suffer, well, you know what they say. 

Misery loves company. 

And it does. It is true.

So what do I do when I sit there staring at the blank page in front of me waiting for inspiration or some divine intervention to come down and zap the words into my head? 

I sit there staring at the blank page for a while. I bounce ideas - however idiotic or irrelevant - around my head and hope that a word or a phrase will stick out of the lot of them.

And when that doesn't work?

I take a break. I walk away. I eat something since most likely I have forgotten to adhere to normal mealtimes – or to eat at all. I go for a run. Whatever I do, I step away from the blank paper or the empty Word document.

And when that doesn’t work?

I have a minor meltdown. Just kidding, but really I do. Sometimes I panic. What if I never have anything to say about this topic? What if I don’t get it done by my deadline? What if I don’t get it done at all? What if, what if, what if?

It happens, and then I mentally slap myself and tell myself, “Get it together! Just do it!” Meltdown over.

That sounds easy and clean enough. It is not. Believe me, it is not.

In fact, I just experienced it while thinking about writing this blog post and about a midterm paper I have due Thursday. So, what do I write about when the world is my oyster and I have a blog to write and cannot for the life of me think of what to write about? I write about not being able to write.

I am sure somebody who is or was somebody down the road did this as well and is crazy famous for it; in which case, I thank them for the subliminal idea I wrenched from somewhere in the depths of my long-term memory.

And when the world is not your oyster and you are limited to a topic or a prompt given by a teacher or a boss?

Brainstorm. Freewrite. Doodle. Watch TV. Brood. Phone a friend. Ask the audience (in most cases, a boss, a teacher, or a customer). Flip a coin to choose a side.

Do whatever is going to get your mind off of what you have to do enough to let it sit in the back of your mind and stew there for a while. Later, you can come back to it refreshed and rejuvenated.

Writing something witty or persuasive or argumentative enough to capture your audience is not that easy. Just ask anyone who has ever had to write a speech or a proposal, they’ll tell you.

Some people do not realize how hard it can be, especially if writing has always come easy to them. That is the case until they get blocked, and then they search for that “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” lifeline in the hopes that something will come to them.

However, using these strategies or lifelines, if you will, can help get out all the extra fluff (read, “crap”) out of your head and onto the page so you can get the things you really want and need to say to fulfill your duties.

So when you get blocked, remember, you can always say, “Regis, I’d like to use a lifeline.” The best part of this deal is: there is no limit on the number of lifelines you can use. The worst part is, of course, most likely you aren’t going to win excessive amounts of money for doing your homework.

JSTOR and More

It's still the week before finals, so I figure every little bit helps. The assignment that many of us have due within the next couple weeks is no doubt a research paper. Sure, it's a pain to seek sources (who has time for that?), but I figure I'll try to make it slightly less painless by helping you to find sources with relative ease.


EIU students (and I imagine students at most universities) have access to the wonderful database, JSTOR. For someone like me, JSTOR is a dream come true. Type in what you're looking for and JSTOR will come up with related results much like your average search engine. However, unlike your average search engine, your results are not webpages but scanned and digitized versions of articles from various academic journals. Does your instructor demand peer-reviewed scholarly articles? Look no further. Actually, scratch that. Do look further but further into JSTOR.


Let's say I want to find something about Walt Whitman. In the search field, I'll type "walt whitman" (capitalization be damned in the search bar!). JSTOR promptly brings up results 1-25 of 16012 for "walt whitman." Now let's say my paper's on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. There are two ways I can search for articles about the both of them. One way involves simply typing "walt whitman and lincoln." The other way is typing "walt whitman" into the first search bar, and then "lincoln" into the one right below it. There's a drop-down menu right next to it that'll say "AND." It's other options are "OR," "NOT," "NEAR 5," "NEAR 10," and "NEAR 25." This drop-down menu can be useful in that if I wanted to, I could leave out results with "lincoln" by putting it into the second search bar and selecting "NOT." This can be helpful in omitting unwanted information in your later search.


Now enough about searching. Let's look at an article we found. We'll take a look at "Walt Whitman and Lincoln" by Clarence A. Brown, the fifth result of searching for "walt whitman and lincoln." There's a small box just above the first page of the article that has a few different options. One is, "View PDF" which you can use to download the PDF version of the scanned article for later viewing at your leisure. The rest of them, however, all involve citations. The most useful option may be "View Citation." It should be noted that the citation that they give you isn't in a format that I recognize so it may not be a commonly-used citation system:

Walt Whitman and Lincoln
Clarence A. Brown
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984) , Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 1954), pp. 176-184

Nevertheless, it gives you all the information you'll need.


Also, if you're in a pinch, some articles have a summary or abstract that you can read. "Walt Whitman and Lincoln" does not, but if you want to find it on an article that you've found on JSTOR, select "Summary" next to "Page Scan" just above the article's image. Aside from an abstract, it will also list all of the footnotes and bibliographic information you'll need.


EBSCO is another invaluable resource with a bit more variety. Often, people will use the Academic Search Complete, which touts itself as "the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database." Regardless of which part of the EBSCO database you use, they'll all have the same interface. Using the MLA International Bibliography, we'll do a similar search as earlier about "walt whitman." Similarly to JSTOR, we have a drop-down menu with options like "AND," "OR," and "NOT." But for now, we'll just stick with a "walt whitman" search.


There is some overlap with articles, but there are also some new results here. We'll look at Jim Garrison's "Walt Whitman, John Dewey, and Primordial Artistic Communication." You'll notice we don't get a scanned copy of the essay right away; instead we get a bunch of information. From here, you can formulate a citation. That being said, there's also an option on the side called "Cite" that will give you citation examples for that particular work in some of the more common citation formats. It is a convenience that JSTOR doesn't provide. 


Not all articles have a PDF copy on EBSCO, but they will almost always have some way for you to find it. Sometimes it might link to another database like Project Muse, or will send you back to your library's website to search for the location of the article on your shelves. Nevertheless, it's an important tool to legitimate research. 


Aside from all of that, all that's left is to curl up next to the fire with a good scholarly journal article.

Strengthening Sentences: Good Repetition, Bad Repetition

All the fancy folks who get paid to play elaborate hoaxes on folks in the name of neurological science have told us time and time again that repetition is key to learning.  Neural pathways are dug deeper and deeper, allowing the brain to access them more quickly.  Et cetera, et cetera.

So why do composition teachers rail on repetition within writing?  If it's something that is truly helpful to a reader, why are points being deducted?  There's a very good reason for that, dear reader (sheesh, now I sound like a Victorian novel).  You ready for this?

It's not.  Repetition is good.  Redundancy, however, isn't.  So what's the flipping difference?

Repetition is repeating an element or elements within your writing to emphasize their meaning within the text. The information (or word) is repeated to cast information in a new light, add rhetorical emphasis, or draw connections within the larger scope of the work.  Redundancy occurs when these repetitions have no meaning, when you're simply "spinning your wheels" rather than expanding, emphasizing, or connecting pieces of an argument.

Culprit numero uno?  Word counts.  When you start purposefully stretching out your argument to fill pages, you're almost certain to repeat yourself ... and not in a good way, either.  Let's take a look at some examples, shall we?

Winston Churchill was known for being one sharp public speaker (as well as a complete drunkard), and one of his most famous speeches includes a little bit that goes something like this:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ...

The repetition of the phrase "we shall fight" is purposeful.  It reinforces the idea behind the speech -- no quarter, no surrender.  The rallying cry reinforces the strength of the message, giving it a poignancy that would have been lost had he gone synonym happy.  Can you imagine how a "thesaurused" version of that speech would sound?

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, there shall be an altercation on the seas and oceans, we shall rumble with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall scrap on the beaches, we shall make a ruckus on the landing grounds, we shall quarrel in the fields and in the streets, we shall scuffle in the hills; we shall never surrender ...

Not exactly the kind of thing that goes down in history.  But hey, JFK got away with calling himself a jelly doughnut.  Maybe Churchill would have been remembered for his scrappy beaches and hilly scuffles.

Now that we've looked at some powerful rhetorical repetition, let's take a look at some redundancy.  This is a terrible sentence overall, but the redundancy is especially noticeable:

Corporations in today's society drain American families dry by forcing them to spend all their money through inflation of prices and unfair costs that most people can't afford.


First off, this sentence could probably be cut down into just a few words: "Corporate inflation drains many Americans dry."  If you can make such a drastic cut to a sentence without altering its meaning, then you're likely dealing with redundancy.  Contrarily, Churchill's speech technically been cut down to fewer words, but it would not have had the same impact.  Just saying, "We'll fight them no matter where they show up," is effective, but forgettable.  And the fact that such a cut negatively impacts the writing is an indication of effective repetition.

So what's an aspiring student to do?

First off, put your thesaurus away.  It can be a useful tool, but don't feel like every single iteration of your main point needs to use a different synonym.  Sometimes synonyms carry different connotations, which will subtly change the meaning of what you're saying.  Thin, slender, and skinny are not the same thing.  All of them will be clustered together in a thesaurus, but the subtext behind them is vastly different.

Instead, ask yourself why you're repeating these elements.  Sometimes you'll find that there really is no better word to accurately depict what you're saying.  Using the word "corporation" a dozen times in your paper may not be a bad thing -- a corporation is a corporation.  If you're repeating crap because you need to fill another page and a half, then you've got a completely different set of problems to worry about.

Down to the Wire

All right, folks. Eight days left of classes and a week of finals.

For some of us, finals means cramming for examinations and avoiding sleep like you're in A Nightmare on Elm Street. For the lucky rest of us, that means just papers, big ol' eight-to-ten page monsters with two pages of sources listed adhering to the strict rules of MLA or APA citation. We crawl to the ends of the paper, unsure if our professors want eight full pages or seven pages with two lines on that eighth page.

Sound familiar?

Because it's getting to be that DOWN TO THE WIRE time, the smell of procrastination will be thick in the air. Thankfully, most people (including myself) will be procrastinating as well, so we'll get used to the smell.

Aromas aside, because time will be a scant resource, certain aspects of the writing process may be neglected, namely revision and proofreading. I'm guilty of it myself, but when I luck out (i.e. when I work on things early) and have time to revise, I feel better for it. Not only that, but so also feel my grades.

But "revision" can be seen as this nebulous term that isn't quite clear to students. Does it mean checking for grammar? Does it mean rewriting the sucker? Here at EIU, we've got a handy handout that might assist in clearing up just what we talk about when we talk about that final stretch of the writing process.

Basically, we're talking about two things: "deep revision" and "editing/proofreading." The latter is where we go through and clean up those grammatical issues like tense shifts and spelling errors.

The former, on the other hand, is where we dig deeply into what larger concerns might lie beneath the surface of your paper. I like to think of it like we're trying search for problems under the surface, so something like this doesn't happen:

As perfect as your paper might feel by the end of it, it's important to make sure you don't have any structural problems beneath. Let's focus on that for a bit with a few questions to ask yourself:

1. What's your big picture? What's your point?
2. Do you yourself pose any questions that you maybe didn't consider as you wrote it?
3. If someone else reads this, can they tell you your main points back to you?
4. What does each paragraph do in your paper?

You'll want to read your paper slowly and likely more than once if you want to fully grasp what these questions will help you figure out. If you don't do any of this, there is that possibility that you might've been okay.

But sometimes it's a crapshoot--you just might've built your paper on a structure that'll give you this later:

Cracking the Code

The person standing in front of you hands you a document, black words on white paper. It looks familiar like you should know it intimately, yet a strange language appears in the margins. They are handwritten in a hand that is not your own. They appear deliberate as if they are right where they're supposed to be. But you don't know what they mean. The characters look like they could be letters in English but the words seem like they're only partial words. Things like "awk" or "trans" in a bold red hang on the borders of the familiar text.

We all know this scenario. The professor issues back papers with comments but they all seem to use a codified method of commentary that students aren't usually familiar with. Worse yet, though the problem is addressed by the professor, the method of redress remains a mystery. "Develop more"--develop what more?

Here I hope to dispel the mysteries of these strange writings and turn them from red-inked hieroglyphs to constructive comments.

• awk - "awkward." This is almost always a wording issue. The easy solution for this is to read the marked phrase out loud. Does it seem verbose? Do you get tongue-tied reading it? Then you might find a more concise and clear way to write it.
• trans - "transition." Sometimes you'll see this in conjunction with the word needed. All this means is that you're missing a transition from idea to idea which causes your reader to get confused. Want some suggestions for transitions? Purdue OWL's got your back.
• frag - "frag." Despite common beliefs, it does not have anything to do with grenades. This is just pointing to a sentence fragment. Double-check your sentence and make sure to make it complete. As the Purdue OWL mentions, a sentence fragment occurs when a complete sentence gets a period jammed in the middle of it or dropping a dependent clause on its own. These are easy fixes--get rid of the period or give the dependent clause a direct object or complete verb, depending on the context of the sentence.
• ref - "referent." Likely, it's a case of using words like "this" or "that" but it's unclear as to what you're referring to with them. Make it more clear what the "this" or "that" is by being more specific.
• ? - "what." That's a rough translation of the teacher's comment. It simply means that the point you're trying to make isn't getting across to the reader.
• sp - "spelling error." Check your spelling. It probably didn't get caught by spellcheck or maybe you spelled the word correctly but used the wrong one.

Teacher's comments will often be unique to their courses, so it's possible that your instructor will be the first person you want to ask when it comes to his or her comments. There are some instructors who are so nice as to give out sheets that explain the comments they usually use on a paper.

OWL-ternative Online Sources, Part 3

I'm going to hop onto Stephen's bandwagon and ride shotgun if he doesn't mind (do you?) to offer up an OWL-ternative (darn fine pun) website myself. After perusing a few online writing labs from various universities, I stumbled across University of Wisconsin at Madison's "Writer's Handbook." It doesn't match the thoroughness of Purdue University's OWL, unsurprising considering Purdue launched theirs in 1994 when the Internet was but a wee tyke. Nevertheless, it's a solid alternative that is easy to navigate and less overwhelming than its Purdue counterpart.

The main index is simple yet elegant; on the left side of the page is a purple (or green for all I know since I'm colorblind) area with links for such topics as "Improving Your Writing Style," "Stages of the Writing Process," "Common Writing Assignments," and "Grammar and Punctuation." All of these proceed onto further pages of links offering advice in sentence concision and comma usage, most of which offer solid examples.

What I found unique about UW-M's OWL is that one of the pages offers a "self-test and answers" link that allow you to "test your knowledge" of a given subject. Want to see how up to snuff you are at commas? Scroll to the bottom of the "Using Commas" page and you'll find a link that will initiate a pop-up with a few example sentences to see if you can correctly identify the issues in the sentences. Though most of the other pages lack this feature, it could be a feature that's "in the works" that I would love to see in a more complete form some day.

The Writer's Handbook also features a section on reference citation that, though it lacks the thoroughness of the OWL, still recognizes the other systems outside of MLA and APA. At first, I thought that the page on Chicago style is a bare-bone description noting that "Chicago or Turabian style places bibliographic citations at the bottom of a page or at the end of a paper." On the far right side, however, they offered links to learn more about the documentation style. Aesthetically, it was a little confusing as their MLA page has a clear "Table of Contents" in the center of the page while on the Chicago/Turabian page there is no "Table of Contents," just a side menu. For the unobservant, this menu will elude the reader and cause the reader to go to a different, easier to navigate OWL.

Though not perfect, The Writer's Handbook at The University of Wisconsin - Madison has the potential to grow into a pOWLerhouse (worse pun), offering up great ideas yet not as thoroughly executing them. Some pages are a bit roughly designed, but for the most part it's an impressive alternative to the Purdue OWL.

Citation Smackdown: MLA versus APA

There seems to be some disagreement among the disciplines as to what citation style is superior: MLA versus APA. Some of the spineless "pacifists" who wish to remain outside of the argument simply state that they serve their own purposes, like MLA for literary analysis and APA for scientific research. I say "nay" to that. An emphatic "nay!" While it's true that they do serve certain disciplines more easily than others, ultimately there has to be one that reigns supreme over the other. MLA and APA can't share kingship (or queenship).

You might be saying, "They both do in-text citations and bibliographies, so why does it matter?" Just because they both do it, doesn't mean they do it clearly or concisely. Others of you might be saying, "Well, I use Chicago style." Well, get out. This isn't meant for you.

First, let's look at MLA. It's sleek, it's simple. You don't get bogged down by the information. Check it:

According to Whitmore, the book "took liberties with the life of Bruce Campbell" (93).

The citation is non-intrusive. Here all we have is a page number in parentheses after the author is already mentioned. Any further information can be found on that back page called "Work Cited." But how does APA do it?

According to Whitmore (1997), the book "took liberties with the life of Bruce Campbell" (p. 93).

Ugly. Grotesque. More numbers than there ought to be. And the "p." before the page number? Is that necessary? I think not. While in some cases it might be convenient for the reader to find the cited work's year of publication in the sentence their reading, the parenthetical year can kill the rhythm of a work. Yeah, the reader's not necessarily supposed to read the year, but they still do it in their heads. I do it in my head. I'm still doing it in my head. 1997. Argh.

Parenthetical citation-wise, I think MLA has the upperhand. But then again, I'm just talking about a fake article written about a fake book about Bruce Campbell. What if I had online sources dealing with the same issue?

If it's MLA, I sure hope it's a Tweet.

I kid. According to the Purdue OWL, there are a few online sources that you can clearly cite utilizing MLA format. Its scope, however, is a bit limited. APA, on the other hand, blows MLA out of the water by having specific citation styles for wikis, audio and video podcasts, computer software, online interviews, etc. Sure, APA doesn't outright tell you the proper way to cite a Tweet on Twitter, but by golly it'll tell you how to do so for an "interactive map," whatever that might be.

While I do have particular affection for MLA, compared to APA it does seem a bit behind in the times as far as the intarwebz goes. Maybe in the 8th edition of the MLA manual it'll step it up and tell me how to cite my Facebook statuses.

They deserve it.

OWL-ternative Online Sources: HyperGrammar (University of Ottawa)

Yes, that's an abomination of a pun.  But it was the best I could come up with in the absence of a portable Doug.  He rocks those titles.

Anyway, all fowl puns aside (sorry, couldn't help myself), I thought it might be interesting to explore some quality online resources outside of the comfortable realms of Purdue's OWL.  Sure, the OWL is a fantastic resource, but variety is the spice of life.  It's time to broaden our online horizons.

In all seriousness, it can't hurt to have a few more resources under your belt.  Different people are going to react differently to the various layouts and approaches.  In some instances, these alternative sources might even be better for you.  Blasphemy, right?  I know, I know.  Set down your jagged rocks.  Put out ye flaming torches.  Toss aside your sharpened pitchforks.

The first newcomer hails from the University of Ottawa.  Their Writing Centre (yes, they use the fancy spelling) has a segment called HyperGrammar, which is actually pretty neat.  Now, before you go traipsing off to that website and return in a huff, let me preface this introduction by admitting it focuses more on the basics of writing than much of what you'll find on the OWL.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

HyperGrammer is actually presented in a way that resembles an online classroom.  There's a nice navigation bar on the left-hand side that allows you to either progress through the numerous subject they offer or hunt down the one that's giving you the most trouble.  Honestly, I think it can be incredibly helpful even for advanced writers to occasionally return to the basics.  I know when I'm in the Writing Center, struggling to explain something that I learned half a dozen years ago, having a place of reference makes the task a whole lot easier.

Additionally, nearly all the explanations include hyper-links embedded into the actual explanatory text.  Forget the difference between a correlative and coordinating conjunction while reading up on strategies for combining sentences?  No problem -- click on the phrase and it'll take you straight to the matching page.

Whether you're a veteran writer looking for a refresher or a frustrated freshman trying to sift through gerunds and appositives, HyperGrammar is at least worth a looksie.

For those of you who want to check it out, the link is below:

http://www.writingcentre.uottawa.ca/hypergrammar/grammar.html

(Well, you could also click on the linked "HyperGrammar" up where it's first mentioned, but I felt like pasting a URL.  It was cathartic.  Don't ask me why.)

Citation Spotlight: KnAPSAck

Forgive the title. It was the closest I could come to a pun working with "APSA."

You might be wondering what I mean by "APSA." I too am wondering that same thing. Let's explore, shall we?

APSA is the American Political Science Association, presumably not unlike MLA for the language peeps and APA for the psychology folk. Like every discipline, APSA seems to have their own Style Manual, which according to the University of Wisconsin hasn't been updated since 1993. And perhaps for good reason?

APSA citation style might sound a little familiar to some of you fans of APA citation style, whoever you may be. For example, APSA doesn't use a "Works Cited" like MLA but rather a "Reference List." You'll notice that APSA begins to stray away from the APA method in this example of a referenced journal article:

Aldrich, John H. 1980. "A Dynamic Model of Presidential Nomination Campaigns." American Political Science Review 74:651-69.

Wait a second. There are first names listed! You can't do that in APA! How are we supposed to remain gender-neutral if we know what the writers' first names are? How dare the APSA have the audacity to do something like that! Why, you'd think they were doing MLA style or something like that...

Ahem. Sorry about that. I lost my cool there for a second. Anyhoo, in the actual list, it might appear that it takes after MLA rather than APA, at least in terms of punctuation and formatting. Aside from the audacious use of full first names, APSA still capitalizes titles properly and puts quotation marks around the titles of those short works that require it.

But the year is a bit off, making it not quite MLA still. Let's see the same article cited in MLA style:

Aldrich, John H. "A Dynamic Model of Presidential Nomination Campaigns." American Political Science Review 74.1 (1980): 651-69. Print.

Looks slightly different, no? Now truthfully, I don't know if it actually was Issue 1 of the 74th volume of the American Political Science Review, but I added the one just for the sake of showing what MLA does slightly differently. You'll notice also that the year jumped towards the end as well as shielding itself with parentheses. It is said that those who use MLA tend to privilege the timelessness of a text over the modernity that same text might have. You'll also notice that MLA takes care to list that it's a "print" source. I'm not sure how sold I am on that idea, but it's clear that APSA treats it just as APA does by keeping it towards the front unlike MLA. Aside from that, however, the APSA style is remarkably similar to MLA's.

I question the popularity of this system. According to this handy manual, the APSA revised the their style manual in August 2006. As far as I can tell, they've adopted the Chicago Manual of Style (8). Does that mean the APSA found their style to be out of date? Perhaps. But not everyone seems to think so.

By a Jury of Your Peers

We talk a lot about valuable aspects of writing, the most important (aside from actual writing, of course) being revision, polishing up that rough stone so it glimmers like a diamond. Or something. Bad simile aside, you have to know where to polish the stone. Speaking literally, that's pretty easy--anywhere there's a blemish on the stone it's clear where you need to polish.

Writing is not quite that easy, however. When we first write, we go through the process of proofreading. We go through it once, maybe twice, maybe three times if you're hardcore, but we're sometimes not sure if we've caught everything. The truth is that we likely haven't caught everything. At that point we could use another set of eyes.

Peer review is a way instructors will implement this idea of bringing a fresh pair of eyes to an essay. Another person's going to be coming in with a "clean palette" in a way. They haven't tasted your essay yet, so they'll be able to tell you where your flavor wins and where it loses. Best of all, this is usually before your instructor gets to see it, which means you don't have to worry about him or her going Gordon Ramsay on you about it.

Say we're in class and you hand over your paper to me. You see that glint in my eye--you think that maybe, just maybe, I'm going to tear your paper apart, both figuratively and literally. I might look at it, say it's the worst thing ever written and tell you to quit college and just start working a menial job for the rest of your natural life. Then I might start chomping away at your paper because I didn't have breakfast or lunch yet and it's about two o'clock in the afternoon.

But I won't. Instead this is what I--and what others should do when peer reviewing--will do:

1. Offer constructive feedback - Doing what I could've done earlier (curse the reader's name then eat his/her paper) does not fall under this category. What you want to do is give them feedback that is going to help them. This does not necessarily mean be solely critical; you should also point out strengths of their paper. Every paper has a strength.
2. Be respectful - There's that old adage, "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say it at all." Obviously, you can't give every paper you read a glowing review, unless of course every paper you read deserves it. It's important to remember that, yes, people have feelings and, no, you shouldn't hurt them.
3. Be receptive - When being reviewed, it's not only polite but important to listen to all of your peer's critiques, even if most of them might seem undue or the product of poor reading. Your peer will no doubt at least have some comment that will help you out, especially if it's noticing a pattern of error or a poorly worded phrase. You never know, a comment of theirs might end up being a diamond in the rough (ugh, enough with the diamond imagery).

There are many other rules that one should consider when peer reviewing, but these, I feel, are perhaps the most important and helpful. If nothing else, they'll keep a peer review sessions from turning into a cage match.

Let's Talk ... To Ourselves!

There's something intrinsically intriguing and reflective about speech. It kept a bunch of old Greek guys in togas busy for the better part of their lives, but that doesn't make it irrelevant to us fancy modern folk. When it comes to formalizing ideas and figuring out exactly what the heck is bouncing around that great big brain cavern of yours, conversation can be one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal. Today we're going too look at just how powerful one particular audience can be.

You.

Yes, that's right. We're going to talk about talking to ourselves, specifically regarding how this will help your writing. Don't give me that look (or your screen, I guess). Hear me out before you dial 1-800-BONKERS. There is a lot of good that can come from listening to yourself. Vocalizing ideas always forces you to refine the abstract into something workable. Ever been in the middle of asking a question and came up with the answer halfway through?

Thought so.

Admittedly, sometimes this involves stumbling around blindly while you grapple in the darkness, totally unaware of what the heck you're really trying to say. Will the first thing you manage to spit out be the best possible way to represent that thought? Probably not. (Ever used this one? “Well, that's not exactly it, but you get what I mean")

Here's the great part, though -- once you find that first little hook, you can follow it. Explore it. Refine it. The further you take that initial little blob, the nicer and prettier it will become. Realizing you've come up with the wrong words can sometimes be just as helpful as coming up with the right ones (even though it's infinitely more frustrating). If you come up with a complete blank, you probably didn't really have a workable thought in the first place. Sometimes we feel things that are truly inexplicable, feelings or flashes of abstract thought that evoke emotion, but not word or form. Thinking this through out loud is one of the best ways to test that.

Besides, talking to yourself really isn't all that crazy. I totally have proof.

The stamp of approval from Leslie Nielson should be all you need.

Goofy as it sounds, I am absolutely serious about this. It's remarkable just how reflective thinking aloud can be, especially in brainstorming phases. There have been countless times in the Writing Center where I saw students scrambling for their pen because they said something that turned out to be pretty darn cool while we were chatting about their topics. Heck, it's happened to me in my own writing. Sure, the exact phrase may not end up in the final piece of writing, but when you manage to capture those little thoughts, you want to get them down on the page before they fade. Personally, I forget more ideas than I ever have in any given day.

That brings me to the second place where listening to yourself can be really beneficial – proofreading. When you're thinking about writing a term paper you don't use the exact same thought process as you do when you're engaged in a simple conversation. It's easy to throw words and phrases into a paper to make it sound more “academic,” but many times those can muddle up your flow. When you take the time to read your work to yourself, there's a good chance you'll be able to find these kinds of errors.

Your brain likes to lie to you. If you skim over your own writing, that lazy ol' blob of gray matter can fill in blanks as you go. Ever gotten a term paper back only to find you left out entire words or made silly typos, even though you would swear on the grave of your loveable family turtle you went over the dumb thing? You've got the stuff between your ears to thank for that.

Reading out loud forces to you pay attention to your work on two levels. Not only are you listening to the way it sounds, which can help with structure and flow, but you are also going to read the actual words on the page much more closely.

Don't let that liar of a brain fool you or confuse you with on-the-fly editing and abstract thoughts. Take control of your paper! Talk to yourself! Look crazy! Write better!