Fix Your Grammar

I love puppets. And I love fuzzy animals with large teeth (Look at these capybaras. How can you not love these capybaras?). And I love internet videos. And I love grammar.

So, imagine all the love I felt when I came across this video by Glove and Boots on YouTube. It's everything. A bunch of puppets (including a puppet version of a fuzzy animal with large teeth) give directions on fixing common grammar problems.

Hearts popped out of my eyeballs.

So, without further ado, I'll share the love. Here it is: "Fix Your Grammar" by Glove and Boots.

Repetitio est Mater Studiorum

Repetition is the Mother of Learning. Repetition is the Mother of Learning. Repetition is the...

If you are among the rank and file of those educated in Catholic schools, it is probably safe to assume that you are familiar with the phrase Repetitio est Mater Studiorm, along with a (heavenly?) host of other Latin slogans (Ad Majorem Dei Glorium! Ave Maria! Salve Regina! Carpe Diem!). But whether or not you attended one, it's probably true that when you think of Catholic schools, you thinks of iron-clad rules enforced by iron-clad nuns. Or maybe you think of elderly priests smacking smart-talking boys. (Let the record show that this particular Catholic schoolboy was desperately well-behaved, never once talked back to any priests, and definitely never missed so many 8:00 am classes one semester during his senior year that his poor religion teacher thought he had been thrown out of school.) Basically, you might think about restrictions.

Repetitio est Mater Studiorm beautifully captures that stereotypically rigid Catholic world. As I type the phrase, I can hear hippies spinning in their graves. In a quick Google search, I saw several web sites that claimed repetition is the mother of brainwashing, not learning. That the only way to learn is through  a complete lack of constraints, through total and utter freedom. Whatever that means.

This is essentially the same issue that haunts writing centers and freshman composition classrooms: how much time should a teacher or tutor devote to "skills and drills"-style work on grammar and punctuation? The underlying problem is that many of the rules of English grammar and punctuation more or less need to be memorized, even by native English speakers. (Fun fact courtesy of Dr. Jad Smith: English has more irregular verbs than any other language.)

Let me be clear what I mean by "grammar and punctuation." I'm talking about comma splices, dangling modifiers, misplaced modifiers, as well as the litany of other errors English professors love to circle in red pen. My point is that these types of errors are habits. We all have good and bad habits. And we all know that breaking bad habits takes a lot of time. And, from a pedagogical perspective, the time spent helping writers break bad lexical habits could be spent freeing student writers from all constraints and restrictions. (By the by, isn't freedom always a brainwasher's proclaimed goal? If I planned on brainwashing a group of people, it's not like I would come out and say that I wanted to brainwash them. I would say that I wanted to give them something. Something like the freedom to express themselves more fully.)

But here's another way to look at it.  Lynne Truss, whom I have already cited several times in the blog, equates good grammar with good manners. Both grammar and manners serve to aid human interactions, which are frequently fraught with complications.

Take, for example, a recent experience I had while waiting tables. I have worked as a waiter at a fancy Bosnian restaurant in St. Louis for about six months. In August, a young man who planned on running for public office (maybe alderman?) came into the restaurant for dinner. He met with the restaurant's owner because he needed the Bosnian community's support for his campaign. There are about 75,000 Bosnians in St. Louis, by the way, and the city would be in some seriously dire straights if the Bosnians had not emigrated to St. Louis en masse during and after the horrific war that occurred in the 1990s. The guy running for public office seemed nice enough. Unfortunately, when I watched him eat, he put his left elbow on the table, held his fork like it was a spear, leaned over his plate, and proceeded to shovel delicious Bosnian food into his mouth. It was like he had not eaten in days. I have never seen anything quite like it, and I used to teach at an all-boys middle school.

Shoveling food into your mouth is not a crime. And, function-wise, it totally works. It's not like your gastrointestinal system cares too much about table manners. Bad grammar, also, is not a crime. If the reader is still able to understand what you want to say, everything's gravy. Grammatical and punctuation mistakes often obscure a sentence's meaning, but generally do not make the sentence unintelligible.

However, here's the thing. Grammatical mistakes make the reader work a little harder. In some rare cases, grammatical mistakes will make the reader want to vomit and never ever support your campaign for public office.

This is why teaching the habits of good grammar and punctuation is very important, despite being both time-consuming and reminiscent of rote-learning at the hands of nuns packing wooden rulers. Like good manners, good grammar must be practiced for it to stick. And it is worth it. Perhaps no one told our potential alderman that it is totally rude to cram food into your mouth at the dinner table. Or, maybe, in whatever culture our potential alderman is from, inhaling one's food is a sign of respect. But, in the restaurant's kitchen, the owner did not wonder about our potential alderman's cultural background. Instead, the owner went on at length about how he would never support the campaign of someone who could not follow basic dining etiquette.

On Misplaced Modifiers

On our second day of orientation, the new batch of English graduate assistants working in the writing center[1] this year took the grammar section of the College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST). The test was brief, 40 questions in all, and self-graded. Taking the test served several functions, not least of which was to quickly check any budding egos. The main reasons were to provide the graduate assistants with a heads up on their own grammatical miscues and to prepare them for forthcoming questions from students.

While many of the questions on the test were discussed, one in particular frustrated me to no end, causing me to think about nothing else for the rest of the orientation, and to continue speaking about the subject over the weekend until my girlfriend threatened to brain me with the nearest blunt object if I didn’t shut up.

The test directions were to “Choose the sentence that expresses the thought most clearly and effectively and that has no errors in structure.” The question focused on misplaced modifiers, and went as follows:

A.      John left the classroom immediately after the last speech.

B.      John immediately left the classroom after the last speech.

C.      Immediately, John left the classroom after the last speech.

The author chose answer “B.” To his great consternation, the correct answer is “A.” While both answers are grammatically sound, the people of CLAST apparently believe that A expresses the thought most clearly and effectively.  In an attempt to decipher the logic behind the answer, the author and other assistants came to the conclusion that A comes closest to how people actually speak. This in itself is a satisfactory answer, except that it touches on a long-standing grammar debate between “prescriptivists” and “descriptivists,” the two camps fighting over the very nature of the English language in a winner-take-all battle.[2].

As a rule of thumb, you want to have the modifier as close as possible to whatever is being modified in order to avoid confusion. The prescriptivist Brian Garner provides some great examples of misplaced modifiers, including ‘“Both died in an apartment Dr. Kevorkian was leasing after inhaling carbon dioxide.”’[3] In this example, the writer means that the people died after inhaling carbon dioxide. However, due to misplaced modifiers, the sentence gives the impression that Dr. Kevorkian leased the apartment after inhaling carbon dioxide. A rewrite that erases the confusion would be “Both died after inhaling carbon dioxide in an apartment Dr. Kevorkian was leasing.” Note that the modifier (inhaling carbon dioxide) is much closer to the verb being modified (died) in the rewrite.

Originally, I thought A was not the best choice because it placed the modifier (immediately) further away from what was being modified (left). It turns out, dear reader, that I was hopelessly incorrect! In A, "immediately" is not modifying "left" at all. Instead, "immediately" is acting as a qualifier for the adverbial preposition "after the last speech." 

There are some interesting differences between qualifiers and modifiers, but that will have to be taken up in another post. However, here is another example of a qualifier (with some hip lingo thrown in): "That kid is wicked smart!" In this example, "wicked" is acting as a qualifier for the adjective "smart." How smart is the kid? The kid is wicked smart. 

Alright, I have one last thing to say about modifiers. Another common mistake is what is referred to as a "squinting" modifier. Take for example the sentence, "The tugboat chugged along noisily blowing its whistle." It is unclear whether the adverb "noisily" refers to the tugboat chugging along or to the tugboat blowing its whistle.

All of that is to say, choosing where to place the sentence’s modifiers carefully avoids confusion.[4]

Author's Note: I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. Shonk, who provided much needed guidance with this post. He also came up with the tugboat example. 

---

[1] Please come visit us. If you don’t, we’ll spend all of our time talking about inane subjects like whether Mark Twain was a briefs or boxers sort of guy. (The author posits boxer-briefs).

[2] I’m stealing this from a great essay by David Foster Wallace titled “Authority and American Usage,” but suffice it to say that a “prescriptivist” would be someone like your middle school grammar teacher who circled every sentence ending with a preposition with a red felt pen in a paper you handed in before drawing frowny-faces in the margins. A “descriptivist,” on the other hand, would be someone like your middle school art teacher who told you that the most important thing in the world was to express your own, special and totally unique soul in whatever way your heart desired.Or, as Dr. Shonk explained, a prescriptivist is someone who explains "how" something should be said, while a descriptivist is someone who explains "what" is actually said.

[3] Garner, Brian. Modern American Usage. 3^rd Edition. 540. Oxford UP, 2009.

[4] See my point?

Don't Snooki Around with Grammar

The youtube video above is a clear representation of how celebrities are subject to the same grammar judgments all of us are vulnerable to.

Many of us frequently use one of the many social media sites available to us, and we are subject to criticisms about our grammar, which is typically focused on what people call usage errors. That means that now, more than ever, we should be aware of our writing etiquette.

At any given time, people from all over the world can make instant judgments of our intelligence from merely glancing at a tweet. A poorly written Facebook status can cause massive amounts of critical comments written in all caps. Likewise, a simple grammar mistake on a dating site profile can have horrible consequences.

This public shame should be seen as a huge internal motivator for correcting our grammar.

The first step to avoid these embarrassing types of errors is by valuing language. As Hank says in the video, we have to "care about the quality of discourse in our society." By doing so, we will not only improve our individual reputations, but our social media discourse as well.

These are the important skills we learn in writing classes and classes where strong written communication is highly valued and supported. All we have to do is transfer these grammatical and stylistic lessons from the classroom into everyday use.

For example, proofreading and editing are skills that can be applied to even the smallest post, say even one less than 140 characters, before hitting "Post."

Awareness is crucial to our media reputation.

Using strong proofreading and editing skills in our attempts to communicate on social sites, paired with a consideration of our audience, purpose, and subject will not only improve our reputation and our credibility, but it will also improve our social media discourse.

I'm not suggesting we remove the culture, creativity, or the fun out of social media communication. What I am suggesting is that we value clarity and integrity in our social discourse.

So, let's not Snooki-around with our grammar. Let's consider our language quality!

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!

Forget about The Elements of Style

In doing a little research for this blog, I stumbled upon an NPR audio article marking the 50^th anniversary of William Strunk and E.B. White’s writing handbook TheElements of Style. The article is three years old,which is about the same time the book was strongly suggested to me by one of my professors. I took his advice and bought it.

However, the article I found features Geoffrey Pullum arguing that The Elements of Style gave us a half century of “stupid grammar advice.”

Imagine my confusion had I listened to the broadcast of this radio interview the day my professor strongly suggested I buy the book. What is a student to do? And how can grammar advice be stupid? Grammar is either correct or incorrect… Right?

Evidently not! Pullum says of Strunk and White, “some of the advice is just coo coo.” He notes more specifically the controversy over the avoidance of the split infinitive, which is the placing of an adverb between to and the verb (OED). Take this example from the Oxford English Dictionary: 

She used to secretly admire him. (incorrect, split infinitive)

She used secretly to admire him. (correct)

“Advice to avoid this is just silly bossiness,” says Pullum. Furthering his critique, Pullum also attacks Strunk and White for creating the rule of using none (as in no one) as strictly a singular noun. As in:

None of us is

Opposed to

None of us are

What Strunk and White are doing is “giving untrue claims to students that will make them uneasy about phrases they will use… the advice is just harmful” (Pullum).

So what does Pullum suggest we do? If The Elements of Style is no longer the turn-to handbook as my professor suggested, then what is? Pullum recommends Joseph M. Williams’s Style Toward Clarity and Grace.
 

What Williams offers to the “lively debate” is this: “We don’t have to understand principles of grammar to write well” (1). In fact, “The best evidence suggests that students who spend a lot of time studying grammar improve their writing not one bit” (1) and in many instances they get worse (2).

Williams’ introduction isn’t the best to entice one to want to read further until he offers a new perspective on the problem. Instead of focusing on grammar and memorizing rules and advice that are stupid, “mature writers can change the way they write once they grasp a principled way of thinking about language” (2). 

The principled way is to be clear, sincere, and try to understand how “readers of modern English read”(2).  What this means to me is simply (1) be sincere, (2) read every word you have written precisely as you have written it, and (3) forget about The Elements of Style. 

Grammar is still worth mentioning. It cannot be forgotten altogether. However, for mature writers, grammar anxiety may be a thing of the past. 

Grammar: The Geography of Writing

The science of tectonic plates did not begin until the early 20^th century. Even before this study began young students could see how easily Africa and South America fit together like puzzle pieces. Those who raised a hand to share this observation were quickly dismissed by the teacher.

Now, that same idea is applauded in the classroom. Thus, the student prior-to-discovery is left discouraged while the student post-discovery is encouraged.  This analogy is played throughout our education, and I would not be surprised if every student has their own comparable experience.

Especially with grammar.

Take for instance, ending a sentence with a preposition.  When I left high school, this practice was heresy.  Now it has been adopted as sometimes necessary although still controversial.  My mother, for example, always ends the conversation with, “What are we teaching our kids today?” But with today’s standards changing quite faster than the tectonic plates how can educators keep the trust of their students? How can animosity be avoided in students as one teacher will say one thing, the next another, leaving the student thinking “WTF”? How can educators correct students today when tomorrow there will be no “mistake”?

Spoiler! I do not have an answer. However, it is important to keep this paradox in mind.  The real danger here is that students may begin to think teachers are just making it up as they go, and students will just give up altogether.

Think of the student who comes home from grammar class only to open his mother’s copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I would personally pitch a fit all afternoon! And Poor Mom who would have to hear it! Educators have to walk the tightrope of giving a student a proper education of today while being sensitive to the education of tomorrow.

This topic is sticky! Really sticky!

On one hand are the teachers who strongly condemn the singular “their” as I have used it in this blog post. On the other hand are those who condemn the practice of “he” or “his” as the alternative (as I have also used in this blog post). Both have valid arguments. However, which is right today? Which standard will be correct tomorrow?

In the words of Mom, “What are we teaching kids today?” But, more importantly, how are students to feel about the discrepancies in grammar pedagogy, and how are they to be convinced teachers are not just making it up as they go? 

OWL-ternative Online Sources, Part 2

While exploring the often-frightening depths of the internet for other interesting online writing resources, I stumbled across what might possibly be the most bland, generic name for a writing lab that one could possibly conceive:

Guide to Grammar and Writing

While its name certainly won't be winning any creativity awards, the core of this website is pure gold.  It has three drop-down menus that each deal with a different aspect of the writing process (such as sentence-level, paragraph-level, and essay-level) and three others for miscellaneous resources -- PowerPoints, Grammar Quizzes, and the like.

But the thing that sold me was the index.

Being the giant nerd that I am, I frequently find myself digging through rulebooks for various roleplaying and tabletop games.  Few things make me sadder than a poor index ... or the lack of one at all.  The index is alphabetized, which makes it easy enough to find what you're looking for, but what really makes it shine is the simple fact that it's on a computer.

Which means I can use Control+F.

If that keyboard shortcut was a person, he (or she) would be one of my best friends.  We'd go to picnics in the park, take long walks on the beach, and sing "Kumbaya" into the early hours of the morning.  Seriously, though, the ability to pull up a digital index and immediately locate whatever particular issue that haunts you is pretty awesome.  And yes, I'm aware that many writing labs have a built-in search feature, but rarely are all the resources compiled together in one convenient location.  It's also nice to see the other categories as you snag the particular one that's giving you trouble.

Now, with all that said, it's important to check the quality of the information.  And while you'll need to get past some cutesy fonts and its propensity to bold, italicize, underline, and color-swap constantly, it's definitely worth the effort.  It's a book that you definitely don't want to judge by it's initial cover.  The information is presented concisely and simply, but it's never intelligence insulting.

While the OWL certainly has a lot of good information on grammar, the Super Duper Zany Grammar-Palooza (as I'm renaming it, starting now) goes into an incredible amount of depth with a mind-boggling number of topics.  (NOTE: Apparently, my mind is not that difficult to boggle.  The exact number of entries is 427.  I'd have hoped that my brain-boggle threshold would have at least been in the thousands ... C'est la vie.)  It has entire entries on the difference between "few and a few," when to use slashes (also called a virgule, as I learned today), "which versus that," and many other topics.

The variety of topics covered and the detail given to each of them make The Super Duper Zany Grammar Funhouse of Doom worth a visit, at the very least.  Once again, I'm not claiming that this website should overrun the OWL with flaming pitchforks and bloody axes, but it's definitely a nice alternative if you have specific topics you're looking to explore in depth.

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.)

The Whimsical Whom and Insensible I

Everyone wants to sound smart, right?

"Of course we do, Stephen," you all collectively cry, adjusting your monocles and top-hats.  Well my friends, it's time to address something that frequently arises when people try just a wee bit too hard to sound academic and edumacated.  It's easy to pick up on phrases that float around academia enough, and it's even easier to mess them up and make yourself look like a goober.  Two errors that are frequently over-corrected are the improper use of "whom" and "I".

Me vs. I
(could a sub-title get any more schizophrenic?)
When you were in kindergarten asking your teacher if you and Jim could have a cookie, did you get a finger waggled in your face as the kind teacher explained you always put others first and use I instead of me?  Well, even though sweet old Mrs. Sputzweizer had your best interests at heart, she unfortunately led you astray.  Most of the time you will use "I", but only because we humans are greedy little buggers that like to be the center of attention.

So here's the scoop:  When you and whatever buddy you plan on dragging with you are the subject of a sentence, you follow Mrs. Sputzweizer's advice and use "I".  Here's an example:

Jim and I flew through the air with our new superpowers, looking for villains to vanquish.


However, this isn't always the case.  If you and your buddy end up being the target of someone else's shenanigans (or any other calamity befell you), then you'd no longer hold that illustrious position of subject.  Congratulations.  You're now the object -- the one being acted upon by the verb.  When that happens, ignore Mrs. Sputzweizer and use "me".  Check it:

The radioactive laser-eating dragon beat the ever-living daylights out of Jim and me.


See how that works?  The subject in this sentence isn't me.  Nor is it Jim.  It's the radioactive laser-eating dragon using us as a punching bag.  Since "beat" refers to the action being taken upon Jim and myself, we've become the object of the sentence.  Thus, "me".

Here's a quick and dirty trick to remembering which one to use.  If you eliminate the other party and it still sounds right, you've chosen properly.  For example, you'd never hear anyone talk about "the radioactive dragon that beat the tar out of I."  That's just ... weird.  It's wrong.  Most of us have been around the human language long enough to recognize how odd it sounds when you swap out the subject and object pronoun.  Isolate it and see if it still sounds right.

Who vs. Whom
(which could serve as the headline to a mystery fight)

"Whom owns this book?"

I heard that in the library one day.  I never caught a glimpse of who actually said it, but I imagine they looked very proud for using such a university-friendly word.  Unfortunately, our mystery scholar used this word incorrectly.  Go ahead, read it out loud.  It sounds strange, doesn't it?  While this little sneak is a little harder to identify by ear than "I" and "me", most people can still recognize that such an over-corrected phrase sounds weird.

Fun fact: The who/whom issue is directly related to I/me.  They're both inexorably tied up with subject and object.  Determining whether to use "who" or "whom" in a given sentence comes back to whether you're referring to the subject or object.  Small world, isn't it?

If you're referring to the subject of a sentence, you use "who", like in the example below:

Who wants ice cream?


The subject of this interrogative is the ice-cream-starved men and women in question.  You could just as easily replace "who" with any other subject without ruining the structure of the sentence (though it would no longer be a question):

Bob wants ice cream.
The cat wants ice cream.
The radioactive laser-eating dinosaur wants laser ice cream.


Conversely, when referring to the object of a sentence, you use -- that's right, you guessed it! -- "whom".

Whom does she truly love?

Does that sound a little strange?  It might, but it's technically correct.  Even though "whom" comes first in this sentence, the subject of the question is "she".  If you re-worded it using a different pronoun, it would read "Does she truly love him?"  Our mysterious maiden is the subject here.  The poor man who finds himself subject to her fluctuating feelings is the object of the verb "love".

Here's the quick and dirty trick for that one.  Try and use the pronouns "him" and "he" in the sentence.  If you find "he" fits, then you'll most likely be using "who".  If you find "him" a better match, then "whom" is likely the right choice.

Who knows where the chips went?
He knows where the chips went!


For whom should I vote?
I should vote for him!


So now you know the secret key to avoiding these over-corrections.  Keep your subjects and objects straight, and even Mrs. Sputzweizer and her dusty-smelling perfume won't distract you from your course!

Citation Spotlight: Turabian Nights

Working in the Writing Center, I don't see much variation in citation styles that students bring in. Usually, a student needs help with either APA or MLA. I've had the occasional student that wants to work on Chicago, and I've even seen citation styles that I can't even remember the names of. The one I haven't seen yet, however, is Turabian.

Named after Kate L. Turabian, the late graduate school dissertation secretary of University of Chicago, the style nowadays is "essentially the same as those presented in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, with slight modifications for the needs of student writers" (Turabian). Sounds nice, no?

Upon first inspection, I could see several similarities between Turabian and MLA and APA, and for good reason. Turabian is divided into two sub-styles: notes-bibliography style for the literature and history kids, and parenthetical citations-reference list style for the science folk. Take a look at this example on the official online Turabian Citation Guide:

One author
Note: 1. Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 65.
Bibliographic: Doniger, Wendy. Splitting the Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Parenthetical: (Doniger 1999, 65)
Reference: Doniger, Wendy. 1999. Splitting the difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The parenthetical in particular reminds me of the MLA and APA style both in that it includes a year following the author's name, but it doesn't have a "p." before the page number to denote that it is the page number. APA style is seen in the reference in terms of the method in which the title of the work is capitalized.

Turabian is a curious style in that it covers nearly the entire spectrum of academic research. Your safest bet is to always go with the style your instructor suggests or requires, but should you find yourself in a class with a bit more leniency given to your chosen citation style, I suggest giving Turabian a try. Regardless of where you're coming from academically, you'll find that the transition to Turabian should be relatively painless.

Word Monster

Why is that word wrong? I didn’t write that? The problem is figuring out what happened.

Ahahahahahahahah.

It’s the Word Monster! Or better known as the dreaded spell check trap.

Because of this Word Monster, proofreading your own paper is even more important. Spell check is helpful, but those squiggly lines that appear under your words or citations don’t necessarily mean they are wrong.

Proofreading is an important part of the writing process because if wrong words appear in sentences, then they can alter the entire meaning of those sentences.

Examples of the Word Monster within your paper can be:

Define and definite

Obtain and abstain

Weather and whether

Affect vs. effect

Corpse vs. corps

Text anxiety vs. test anxiety

Immunity vs. impunity

Test vs. testes

They’re vs. there vs. their

Along with word changes, sometimes Microsoft Word has weird squiggly lines underneath citations. An example would be a citation I turned in for a paper recently: 

Baker, Timothy C. “The (Neuro)- Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park.” Poetics Today. Fall 2009. MLA International Biography. Web. 1 September 2011.

Though the citation is right, the Word Monster underlines parts of my citation as if they were wrong, and they are not.

Because of the Word Monster's antics, proofreading is even more important than it was when we had no other option than writing papers by hand and then typing them. 

So watch out for the Word Monster! Proofread your papers before you turn them in and make sure your words are your words, not the Monster’s!

National Novel Writing Month

November means three things to a student: papers, Thanksgiving, and avoiding papers until after Thanksgiving. But to some of us, it means one additional thing: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. If you've ever taken a creative writing class comprised of some of the "hardcore" folks who actually enjoy writing, you've surely heard the phrase. While I personally disdain the phrase in its abbreviated form (it sounds like a technology from a pulpy science fiction series), I've always been attracted to the idea behind it as a creative writer. I must confess I've never actually made an attempt to participate.

The goal is simple. You have thirty days beginning on November 1st at midnight and ending on November 30th at 11:59 PM to write 50,000 words. Say you have about 250 words to the page. Do the math and you'll find that it comes out to be, like, a 1000 pages. Or something. I may carried a number wrong, but math is not my strong point. In any case, assuming you fire off the necessary amount of words by the end of the month, you'll have yourself a beautiful novel.

Then again, it may not be that pretty. Part of the fun/torture of NaNoWriMo (there I go, doing it myself) is taking no time to edit and focusing on pure, nasty generation. According to the website, it's "a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing," which translates into, "you'll probably hate what you wrote when you read it later." They even have the good hear to warn you that "you will be writing a lot of crap." But they insist "that's a good thing." And I'm inclined to agree with them.

As writers, we want to edit as we go, often causing problems for us as we compose. Our internal editor is shouting away at us in our minds, reminding us that "that's crap" we just smeared on the screen/page/napkin. But with NaNoWriMo (ugh) we accept it, nay, we embrace it!

So why do it? The official website offers a few reasons ("To stop being one of those people who say, 'I've always wanted to write a novel,'" or "To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties") and though they may not seem the most productive reasons, I assure you there is something to get out of it aside from a bunch of pages of a mess. By participating in NaNoWriMo, you're pushing yourself to become a more dedicated writer. You set goals for yourself (write 1,600 words a night, 12,500 a week, etc.). The most beneficial thing about National Novel Writing Month (haha!) is that you get to gag that internal editor and stuff him in the trunk until he learns to play nice. Or until you're done with your novel.

Now, off to write 1,600 words of garbage.

BrbAfkLolBbq - A Modest Proposal

For the majority of readers with cell phones and texting plans or voracious instant messaging habits, those letters look familiar to you. All too familiar. They're all shorthand--quick and to the point. Going to be away for a bit? "Be right back"--"brb." Away for longer? "Away from keyboard." Want to eat barbecue? "Bbq."

In the last few years, text messaging has risen from small trend to full-blown epidemic. The language has become such a central part to what we write that it's usurped our formal written language. In some papers, people type "2" instead of "to." The worst part is, even if they proofread carefully, they may not find the error for the simple fact that they don't see it an error. They use it in their everyday language, so what's the problem?

Unfortunately, instructors haven't gotten the memo that textspeak is okay, nor have some of us who were late to the texting game. Though I shudder to think of a world in which textspeak is like a macabre form of newspeak, we can fight the possibility of this. Now here's what I propose:

Stop using textspeak.

I'm not saying don't text any more. Text to your heart's desire! But try it just once--a text message in which you eliminate the numbers for letters and grossly-used shorthand. While it is just a bit more time consuming, newer phones are designed with auto-correct and similar technologies that do not allow you to use shorthand unless it's programmed in. And honestly, it may be difficult to do at first. So try it little by little. Drop your shorthand. Try a full sentence just once! Maybe, just maybe, you'll find you like using full words.

Ttyl.

Be Kind, Rewind

Some of us may be too young to remember the VHS tapes of old. Now with the DVD going the way of the dodo and Blu-ray marching in on high definition chariots, this long-time practice of rewinding a video is fizzling out faster than a copy of The Sixth Sense left out in a hot summer car. You could say that we're just a forward-moving society with no desire to go backwards.

Therein lies a problem.

With as quickly as we move forward in our daily lives, it's easy to miss things. You might miss the lost puppy whimpering as it looks for a companion, the old man sitting patiently for change to fall into his cup, or three commas you arbitrarily stuck in a sentence.

"What's that?" you ask.

"Commas," I tell you. "Three of them."

You say you read through the paper two or three times. I believe you, I do, but I think you're leaving out key details. How fast did you read through your paper? Sure, I could read through this blogpost in about thirty seconds flat. I could could read it three times in just as much time. Would I catch every error? I'll take a resounding NO for an answer.

You could take it slow, sure, but I still don't think you'll catch every error. Our brains work too fast to just slowly read something forward. If you're twenty-two years old and barrel-rolling down a hill, you'll find you can't just slow down--you're going to roll into whatever's waiting at the bottom of the hill like a lake or lake monster.

Think of your paper as a hill or, better yet, a mountain. You roll down the mountain, you're just going to fall and die. Metaphorically. So start from the bottom. Climbing the mountain, however, is a slightly different story. You'll go slowly, inching your way to the top, and, because you're going so slow, you'll be more careful to look for your footing. Such is the case if you read your draft from the bottom up. I don't mean backwards word by word--that would be like climbing the mountain with just your hands. But if you read it sentence by sentence you'll take it slowly; you'll be more aware of your surroundings and catch where you added the superfluous comma(s).

Going backwards sentence-by-sentence is an invaluable resource for sentence-level concerns as it forces your brain to slow the heck down and think more analytically. You're not influenced by the momentum of your piece and you can slowly move upwards to scour your piece for any flaws. The best thing about it is that, unlike mountain climbing, it's impossible to fall and die.

Part 4 of the Interview with President Perry: The Power of Words

"It's through writing, I believe, that you do start to understand yourself."

[Hebeler]

You’ve kind of addressed the next questions I was going to ask you about procrastination, and I really liked the way that you put of all that, so I think I’ll let Dan ask his questions.

[Davis] 

Okay.

[Davis] 

You’ve told us about different applications of writing, and you’ve told us about different steps in your writing process. Is there any one process or any one aspect of your writing that you particularly like, and conversely is there one aspect that you just absolutely dread?

[Perry]

Well, okay so let’s take the different kinds of writing—the part I like for the writing has to do with the job and all that. The part I like there is defining on the front end: Audience, message. Because that clarifies a lot for you right there.

And once I get that clear in my head and that’s not always clear because you’re meaning. Let’s say you’re going to be meeting with the Mattoon Rotary, and you’re going to be talking about something. The audience isn’t the Mattoon Rotary.

You’ve got to look at who’s all in there, the different segments of the community, and then you’ve got to think what are the common threads there, so you may end up knowing you’re going to be addressing, you know, one audience when you’re talking about the Renewable Energy Center, another audience when you’re talking about enrollment, and another audience when you’re talking about community service. And so I that’s the part I like, it’s getting that identified.

In terms of more personal, really personal writing, I like it when I find the right word.

In haiku, you know you’ve got these syllables, and I know of course if you in different languages of course the syllables change and meaning changes and all that, but I just do English okay? So, getting it right, at least what I think is right, is very satisfying because sometimes you’ll write it and you’ll have the write number of syllables and you’ll be getting almost the intent you want. But changing one of the words sometimes can really make things fall into place, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, you know. You do a jigsaw puzzle, and you’re down to just a few spots left, and boy this looks like it goes right there, you know, it almost does, but it doesn’t quite. So it’s the same with words. So that’s very satisfying. I like that. A lot of enjoyment out of that.

[Davis] 

Well splitting it up again into your professional and personal writing, what would you say have been your most successful or favorite writing experiences?

[Perry] 

Well, I’d say maybe a couple of the mathematics papers I wrote. I felt like, you know, when it was all done, I felt very good about the way I had put together. A lot of the stuff that I wrote was in applied mathematics, so I was wanting to strike the right balance, you know, between theory and application, you know.

Proofs but also computational examples that show that the theorem not only is true because you proved it, but you actually can use it to compute solutions to certain kinds of equations. So that’s been very satisfying.

But I think my personal writing, I think students already know. They get to us and they’ve already gone through a lot in their life. And there’s going to be more of that to come, and I think to the extent that they can see writing as a way to deal with issues. It’s not like their writing for anybody else. They’re not going to publish it. Some people keep diaries. Some people just every now and then say I’ve got to write about this. Sometimes they tear it up. Sometimes they keep it in a book.

But, I think words have such power for us. That’s why we have to be careful, you know, in using speech with other people. I mean, yes, we have freedom of speech, but we can sure hurt people with our speech. But the power of words enables us to deal with our own emotions too and deal with the things that are happening to us in our lives. So it’s been satisfying when I’ve been able to face some of those things, deal with some of those things in that way.

[Kory]

Well, to take it back into maybe your professional writing, when you see other people doing the kind of writing you do, so you read a speech, or, you know, you see some of that, when do you think like “Oh, I wish I said that.”

[Perry] 

I wish I’d said that.

[Kory] 

What do you really admire in that you see people doing well in the kind of writing that you also do?

[Perry] 

Well, I see brevity and imagery.

Someone will write something, and it will bring something to mind. I think that’s very valuable. You know, you think about examples: with malice toward none, charity for all, ask not what your country can do for you but what you, I know there are names for that kind of construction.

[Kory]

Right.

[Perry] 

But wording that connects you to the speaker and to the speech.

I think one of the great things about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is its, we all know the part about I have a dream, but you look at the whole speech, and you see imagery in many, many places, very powerful imagery and it’s not with a lot of words.

It’s just, you know, a few words you get this imagery towards you. Franklin Roosevelt, and of course a lot, you’re shaped, I’m shaped by what I studied, what I’ve heard. Those are the kind of things that get me: just short, powerful words with imagery and a call to action. You see this as something more than just some words sitting on the page. It’s something that’s reaching out to you, saying, you know, you need to do something.

[Kory] 

So it’s about when you see writing that works, or sort of that sort of good writing that sort of you know it when you see it. Has anyone ever, to take a sort of more intellectualized version of that, is there, has anyone said anything to you about writing that you said like “Yes!”? Have you gotten good advice about writing?

[Perry] 

Oh well, the best advice I ever had, got was “Know your audience.”