Elegant Solutions for Mythical Fussbudgetry

Close to a year ago I wrote at length about three instances of grammatical "rules" I describe as "mythical fussbudgetry":

• Myth 1: Don't Start Sentences with Ands or Buts
• Myth 2: Don't End Sentences with Prepositions
• Myth 3: Don't Use They as a Singular Pronoun

Today in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Anne Curzan addresses Myth 3 with her blog post "Singular 'They': A Footnote."

Curzan offers a solid solution for people who want to use they as a singular pronoun: "I tell students that they are welcome to use singular they  in writing for my class, but they should footnote it the first time they use it and in the footnote explain their rationale for using singular they. And students do, both in my class and in other classes (for other classes, I tell them they’re allowed to end the footnote with an invitation for the instructor to contact me with any questions). This footnote accomplishes at least three things: It shows readers that the author is consciously making a choice to use singular they; it informs readers about legitimate reasons for using singular they, even if they disagree with its use in this context; and most importantly, it asks students to be careful, self-conscious writers, reflecting on and explaining their choices in their writing."

Curzan's proposal reminds me of a recommendation from one of my mentors in graduate school, Dr. Ralph F. Voss. In class one day, he told us that if students want to create intentional fragments in their papers for whatever reason, to indicate they did this consciously, students can just put "fi" in parentheses after the intentional fragment (like in a citation system), which stands for "fragment intended."

If you're someone like me who wants to get rid of the silly "rules" above, you and your students can use footnotes to signal these word choices and constructions were conscious choices.

Elegant solutions from Voss and Curzan (fi). 

Defeating My Arch Nemesis: Using Writing to Learn Math

When I was in first grade, a skinny six-year old sporting long piggy tails and buck teeth, I quickly learned that math was very hard for me.  Longingly I watched my friends go out for recess while I sat inside and attempted to fix the math problems I had done incorrectly earlier. I just couldn't do them right.

And when I couldn't do them right, my teacher would sit me in the corner. Humiliating. I was the girl constantly in tears in the corner, and the cute boy in class (who was a math whiz) thought I was some sort of weirdo (which I am....but still).

The experience created an instant mental math block that I have fought  my entire life. The rest of my grade school career was bleak in the math department, and I have to admit that I never passed a high school Algebra class.

When I started my college career at Parkland College, back in the mid-90s, I had to take basic math. I was not surprised and slowly worked my way up to beginning Algebra. The first day of my college Algebra class sent me into nervous fits. I felt like my six-year old self, only with straighter teeth and shorter hair.

I was determined to do better, and I only wanted to take this class one time. Due to the fact that I came from a large family with not so large of an income, it was up to me to pay for my schooling, and I knew that I did not want to pay to re-take an Algebra class. So, I had resolved to work my butt off and figure this whole math thing out even if it caused my hair to go prematurely gray.

I walked up to my professor before class, wish I could remember her name because she changed my life, and told her of my math woes. She smiled and nodded and asked me what my interests were. At the time my interests circulated around my boyfriend (so stupid!), but I managed to say something like, "Well, I really like English and Theater." She then told me that she had some tricks up her sleeves that could help me with my struggles, and we started class.

Well, I didn't believe her.

I had been told, by many teachers and tutors, that they knew exactly what to do to "fix" me and cure me of my math ignorance. So naturally I just took a deep breath preparing to weather the storm.

After my professor had handed out the syllabus, explained the schedule, and let us introduce ourselves, she dismissed the class for the day--then quickly asked me to stay for a few minutes. She told me that I would need a separate notebook for the class that would become my Algebra Writing log.  I looked at her like she was crazy.

She laughed.

"Kelly, have you ever done journal entry work in your writing or English classes?" she asked. I nodded yes and told her that journaling was one of my favorite things to do.  She then told me that I would be doing this for my homework and in-class activities.  My professor took out a notebook and showed me exactly what I would be writing in my log--it looked something like this:

• Date
• Topic or Chapter/Assignment Name
• Description of pages read in textbook, lecture notes, and in-class activity notes
• Main points from the section being assigned in a bullet point list
• Summary of main points from book/class written in paragraph form

Not only did she have me do this weekly math log, but she also assigned me paragraphs to write.  My professor would write an equation on the board each week, usually on Monday, and by Friday a paragraph was due to her that explained how to solve the problem and why I had decided to solve it in that way. 

I was kind of shocked that I was using writing do help me understand math.  I had never thought that "math" people wrote. In the article "Writing to Learn Mathematics" Bernadette Russek says, "Contrary to popular belief mathematicians must write and must write well...Writing is a valuable assessment tool. It is used to assess attitudes and beliefs, mathematics ability, and ability to express ideas clearly" (36).  Russek also suggests that writing is often used in the math department to "...open doors of communication with students who may have math anxiety or who have 'I hate math' feelings, students who have never really 'spoken' to their mathematics professors before" (36). 

I feel as if Russek might have been directing that last bit directly at me....

Thanks to my professor's willingness to use writing in the math classroom, I passed beginning Algebra with an A. The first A I had ever received in a math class my entire life. I'm still proud of that A.

I moved onward and upward and eventually managed to tackle a college Algebra class. I did not get another A, but I did get a B, and I was able to mark math off of the list of classes I needed to take to finish school.

I really, really, really wanted to take my passing math grades to my former first grade teacher and say, "HA! Take that! See! If you would have just been willing to teach me math in a language I understood, instead of sitting me in a corner, I would have been done with this a LONG TIME AGO."

I wisely did not do that, but man did I ever dream of it.

After I completed my general education requirements, I thought that I would never have to take a math class again. However, my children have proved me wrong (as they usually do), and I find myself helping them with their math homework. Unfortunately, my kids also struggle with math and I sometimes feel as if maybe I should not be the person helping them. 

It's kind of like the blind leading the blind.  So, we write about math. Each day we write out their assignment in paragraph form and then we talk about it and pretty soon those math problems are getting solved correctly. 

If you would like to read the rest of Bernadette Russek's article it can be found here.  As Writing Across the Curriculum becomes more prominent on college campuses and within K-12 curriculum, I'm sure that writing in the math class will be used more often.

EIU President William Perry has used writing in his math classroom, and in an April 2011 interview with the EIU Writes Blog writers (found here) Perry said that: "...mathematics has a language all its own, you all know; you’ve taken math, so you do a math homework; it’s one set of language. But now if you’re going to talk about how that relates to maybe football head injuries or supply and demand, you know these kind of things, you have to interpolate that for your audience. You have to convert mathematical concepts to plain English, and so that’s a valid exercise because I think in all of our lives, we’re always interacting with multiple audiences." 

To me multiple audiences means multiples discourses, which then equals various types of verbal and cultural languages. In a perfect world teachers will be able to teach in a method that answers the needs of all of their students, but that perfect world is more than likely not going to happen in my lifetime.

So, instead of waiting for that perfect world to arrive, try remembering the skinny little six-year old sitting in the corner of her first grade classroom. Don't be afraid to speak to students in languages they understand--even if that means writing in a math classroom.

LSM, Writing Assignments, & You

One of the books I read over winter break was psychologist James W. Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us.

Prior to reading the book, I was familiar with his scholarship about therapeutic writing, which I wrote about last year in "The Power of Therapeutic Writing and Freewriting."

The Secret Life of Pronouns distills research he's done over the years, and it'll make you look at your own and others' language use more closely. I won't go into the big intellectual payoffs of the book because there are so many interesting things to say about his research that I could go on and on and on.

However, there's a specific section of Chapter 8: The Language of Love that directly connects to those of us who create writing assignments (professors) and those of us who write papers/documents in response to those writing assignments (students).

In "The Language of Love" chapter, Pennebaker has a section titled "Verbal Mimicking" where he introduces readers to the phenomenon of Language Style Matching: "The matching of function words is language style matching, or LSM. Analyses of conversations find that LSM occurs within the first fifteen to thirty seconds of any interaction and is generally beyond conscious awareness. Several studies suggest that LSM is apparent in some unlikely places" (200).

When I read about LSM, I thought back to the institution where I taught before EIU. I was in a meeting where someone in power, and I'll just call her Rhoda, had a certain hard-nosed way of talking about problems and solutions. In addition, Rhoda loved using the word "expeditiously." She used that term a lot.

As the meeting went on, some at the meeting picked up on using that word to please Rhoda. And then there were all kinds of people talking about doing all sorts of things expeditiously rather using than a simpler adverb, quickly.

I reckon it's fairly easy to see how LSM happens in your own meetings, your home, and elsewhere. Ponder on that, folks. 

But what I want to really hit on is how LSM happens with writing assignments because Pennebaker and other researchers tested LSM in this domain. 

They gave writing assignments that had "pompous instructions" and instructions that were "written in a chatty 'Valley girl' style" (201). The instructions had different styles, but they asked students to do the same task ~ give an example of cognitive dissonance and how that instance of cognitive dissonance was eventually solved.

So, to be clear here, this was the experiment:

• Same writing task
• Same instructions (essentially)
• Two different styles ~ pompous & Valley girl
• Different sets of students writing in response to the "same" instructions

I'm sure you can guess what happened: LSM in an "unlikely place."

Pennebaker describes the result: "The only difference was that students who received the pompous question answered in pompous ways and those who read the Valley girl instructions wrote in the same freestyle informal lingo. Because everyone responded to four different essay questions, each written in a different style, many students later reported not even noticing the writing styles at all" (201-02). 

Reading that section of the chapter made me reflect on my own writing assignments and the stylistic messages I'm sending because the writing prompts we give frame the responses we get from our students. 

To quote the "Valley girl instructions" in the experiment, "Like, it's [LSM] seriously happening ALL the time, you know??"

When crafting writing assignments, we not only have to clearly communicate what we want, what students need to do, who the audience is, and how we're going to evaluate their responses via rubric or criteria for evaluation, but we also have to pay attention to the style of our prompts.

If we write writing assignments that exemplify convoluted pompous windbaggery, we'll get it back. 

That's, like, you know, really bitchin' info. Totally tubular. OHMYGOD!

Beware, Genre Boundaries

There's a scene in Penny Marshall's 1988 film Big where Robert Loggia's character (the owner of a toy company) is drawing a distinction between the content of a marketing report and the activity that takes place inside a large toy store on the weekend. The aforementioned distinction is addressed to Tom Hanks' character, (a twelve-year old boy who after making a wish at a carnival, undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a thirty year-old man), who with ingenuous befuddlement replies: "What's a marketing report?"

Whatever a marketing report is, a safe assumption to make is that it will both look and read much differently than a Batman comic.

A marketing report belongs to one kind of genre. A Batman comic belongs to a different kind genre.

A marketing report is intended for one kind of discourse community. A Batman comic is intended for a different kind of discourse community.

Presumably, it would be a mistake for an employee of a large toy company or any large company for that matter (except maybe if the employee works for Disney or Time Warner) to produce a marketing report with a series of highly decorated square panels and speech bubbles.

Conceding my ignorance on the matter, I would hazard a guess that, unlike a Batman comic, a marketing report does not contain a plot or bother to develop either a protagonist or an antagonist, unless the antagonists are defined as being the other companies that hold greater market share. Likewise, a Batman comic will rarely delve into issues of market saturation or how the internet is changing the 6-12 age demographic in regard to action figures, which are not tied directly to a TV show or a film.

Of course, other genres exist besides marketing reports and Batman comics. I found this out the hard way when I began working at the writing center. Instead of a market report, I was instructed to compose a memo. Whatever a memo was, I knew it was different than a Socratic Dialogue; I knew it was different than a biography on John Milton. I just didn't know in what specific ways it was different.

Lucky for me, the Directors of the EIU writing center prepared for the unsophisticated consultant. I don't remember if I asked the Assistant Director for a sample of an ideal memo, or if she anticipated that someone would ask, and thus made the asking moot. However it happened, the director informed the class that three sample memos from bygone years were available for our perusal. The first chance I got I seized the folder and began to peruse, but only after whispering a sigh of relief. Ahh.

I supposed I could have guessed. I wasn't completely ignorant. Like I say, I had a pretty good idea of what a memo was not. I have written a lot of papers, for a lot of different classes, at a lot of different institutions, under the guidance of a lot of different professors, and not once had any of them referred to any assignment as a "memo."

Still, guessing is a risky epistemic strategy. Probably a better strategy is to provide an unsophisticated student, who is being introduced to a unfamiliar genre, with an ideal example. In this way, the student can get a sense of the specific differences that delimit the unfamiliar genre with the genres he is already familiar with.

Unlike Batman comics and marketing reports, genre differences can be more subtle. The more subtle the difference, the more likely a student is to transgress a generic boundary. For example, I learned two rules in my first composition course that did not hold in other courses.

First, I learned that when writing an essay, the conclusion should not include the phrase "In conclusion..." A few months later, I took a speech class. My peroration was marked down because I omitted the phrase "In conclusion..." Ouch, that one stung. My  indignant diatribe did nothing except make me thirsty.

Second, I learned that when writing an essay, one should never use the first person singular "I."  One should instead use the term "the reader." Fast-forward a few semesters, and I am sitting across from one of my many philosophy professors, when he asks me: "Why don't you use "I" in your papers? It is so much easier to read and more natural."

Avail yourselves of my foolishness. Do not presume that every paper you write will be in the same genre. Do not presume that every paper you write will be directed to the same discourse community.

Mythical Fussbudgetry

I started reading a new book the other day that had been recommended to me by a friend. It's Mindset (2008) by Carol S. Dweck, a widely respected psychologist and researcher at Stanford University. Although the subtitle of the book, The New Psychology of Success, gave me pause because it sounds a little self-helpy for my taste, Dweck relates interesting scientific research in accessible prose -- a writing skill I highly esteem.

However, a paragraph in Dweck's introduction also made me pause and left me frustrated

Here's the passage:

• "A little note about grammar. I know it and I love it, but I haven't always followed it in this book. I start sentences with ands and buts. I end sentences with prepositions. I use the plural they in contexts that require the singular he or she. I've done this for informality and immediacy, and I hope the sticklers will forgive me" (x). 

Although I'm enjoying the book, I'm still trying to forgive her for writing that passage about "grammar."

Ironically enough, the first sentence of her paragraph begins with an intentional fragment or what could be considered an ellipsis. In her excellent book Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects (5th ed.), Martha Kolln describes the latter, which she calls a "stylistic variation" that "refers to a sentence in which a part is simply left out, or understood" (223). In Dweck's first sentence, we can assume "Here is" or "I have a" is phrase that has been left out of the fragment, "A little note about grammar."

The sticklers she's worrying about would fault her for writing a sentence fragment -- if they noticed it.

Besides that first sentence or intentional fragment or ellipsis or whatever (note the use of polysyndeton), let's take a closer look at the injunctions Dweck worries about because of the "sticklers" out there:

• Myth 1: Don't Start Sentences with Ands or But
• Myth 2: Don't End Sentences with Prepositions
• Myth 3: Don't Use They as a Singular Pronoun

Myth 1: Don't Start Sentences with Ands or Buts
I never understood this misguided "rule" until I volunteered in my daughter's elementary school classroom. Imagine 24 second graders writing stories for their teacher and starting many of those sentences with ands and buts.

This injunction reminds me of the same advice we hear in the writing center when writers tell us they were told never to start sentences with a because. That directive is probably an unintended result of teachers trying to ward off sentence fragments.

I've had this "rule" used against me in various contexts -- when I was writing papers in college and even when I've published research. For me, it doesn't make much sense because writers can use those conjunctions for rhetorical effects. For example, think of a writer who describes many of the positive attributes of a political candidate but then ends the paragraph with this terse statement: "But he's not the right candidate for our district" or "But he's a crook."

Catherine Soanes on the blog of Oxford Dictionaries addresses this grammar myth/diktat in detail.

Likewise, here's further support for beginning sentences with ands and buts:

• "Conjunctions" from Oxford Dictionaries relates, "You might have been taught that it’s not good English to start a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but. It’s not grammatically incorrect to do so, however, and many respected writers use conjunctions at the start of a sentence to create a dramatic or forceful effect," and "It’s best not to overdo it, but there is no reason for completely avoiding the use of conjunctions at the start of sentences." 
• "Starting Sentences with 'And,' 'But,' and 'So': The Definitive Answer" from Plain Text
• "Starting Sentences with And or But" by Dr. Mark Womack
• "Conjunctions to Start Sentences" from Grammarist

Myth 2: Don't End Sentences with Prepositions
Consider these sentences:

• "Ending sentences with prepositions has never been a rule about which I've been concerned."
• "Ending sentences with prepositions has never been a rule I've been concerned about."

The first sounds clunky, doesn't it?

Of course, one could argue the second sentence would sound much better with a front-loaded (subject-verb-object) active voice construction like "I've never been concerned about ending sentences with prepositions," but I'm not going to get into the often stated presumption that active voice is always better.

That might be for another post, one that focuses on how certain disciplinary discourses demand passive voice constructions. In addition, Doug has written about staying active before.
 
For myth-busting purposes, I first went to my faded copy (6th edition) of William Zinsser's On Writing Well for advice. He states, "The growing acceptance of the split infinitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said -- and shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of" (42).

And here are some links to resources that support the practice of placing prepositions at the end of sentences:

• As "Ending Sentences with Prepositions" from Oxford Dictionaries states, "There’s no necessity to ban prepositions from the end of sentences. Ending a sentence with a preposition is a perfectly natural part of the structure of modern English."
• "Prepositions--Ending Sentences With" by Richard Nordquist, who provides a quotation from Garner's Modern American Usage. 
• "Ending a Sentence with a Preposition" from Grammar Girl, who also provides an interesting "Top Ten Grammar Myths" for your perusal.

I also highly recommend this video on the issue from one of the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.


Myth 3: Don't Use They as a Singular Pronoun
This myth is one I'm having a hard time giving up because it's been instilled in me through years upon years of formal schooling. And giving up one's beliefs is difficult.

However, to provide a historical context for this one, I suggest reading "All-Purpose Pronoun" by Patricia T. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman from the New York Times. The authors relate how the use of "he" as the default singular pronoun started with Anne Fisher's A New Grammar in 1745 and has been reinforced ever since.

At the close of their article, they offer this conclusion: "It’s a shame that grammarians ever took umbrage at the singular they. After all, they gave you a slide. It began life as a plural object pronoun and evolved into the whole enchilada: subject and object, singular and plural. But umbrage the grammarians took, and like it or not, the universal they isn’t universally accepted — yet. Its fate is now in the hands of the jury, the people who speak the language."

Likewise, in "Is 'They' Acceptable as a Singular Pronoun?", Mark Nichol works readers through the options writers have with pronouns and opines near the end of the article that "I am flummoxed by the controversy over it [the use of they as a singular pronoun] and by the resistance of many people to accept it. Singular 'they' has long been used in literature and in conversation, and though it still has an informal taint, it seems to me absurd to resist adopting it when it satisfies an aching need."

One of my favorite sites on grammatical matters, Grammar Girl, presents a solid and reasoned approach about how to contend with this myth. Her advice, which I'll quote at length, is this: "everyone who hires writers or assigns writing needs to have a style guide entry on this topic. Writers can waste a lot of time trying to decide what to do (especially in organizations where people collaborate on documents), and it is better to have one single style that some people don't agree with than to have different writers doing different things so that company documents are all willy-nilly."

And she also provides her "bottom line": "Rewrite your sentences to avoid the problem. If that's not possible, check to see if the people you are writing for have a style guide. If not, use "he or she" if you want to play it safe, or use 'they' if you feel bold and are prepared to defend yourself."

Like Grammar Girl, I also think they will eventually become acceptable as a singular pronoun because language can and does change. But I wonder how long it's going to take.

Will I be alive to see it become acceptable?

Will you?

Why not follow Mahatma Gandhi's advice about being "the change you want to see in the world" and make that change now?


The Upshot
Of course, audience awareness is the huge factor here. Grammar Girl addresses this concern in her advice about ending sentences with prepositions, "because of the prevalent myth that it’s wrong to end sentences with prepositions, there are times when you should avoid doing it even though it isn’t wrong. For example, when you’re writing a cover letter to a potential employer, don’t end a sentence with a preposition. The person reading the letter could see it as an error. I always recommend following the most conservative grammar rules in job applications. I’d rather be hired than lose out on an opportunity because my grammar was correct--but perceived as wrong."

The same can be said for using they as a singular pronoun.

If I were to advocate anything here, I would propose we eradicate the so-called rules about conjunctions not being able to start sentences (Myth 1) and prepositions not being able to end sentences (Myth 2) as long as people use such constructions within reason and for rhetorical effects (there might be the rub).

To me, the distressing aspect of the first two myths is that people in power -- whether high school teachers, college professors, human resource directors, employers, et al. -- are applying these diktats arbitrarily. They are passing on and reinforcing beliefs that are at best silly or at worst just pedagogically wrongheaded and aggravating.

Also, I'd like a formal ruling on using they as a singular pronoun, and I would prefer it be a positive ruling since wallowing through using he, she, s/he, his or her is just darn clunky.

Imagine if a decision were to made by an entity -- say a coalition of Oxford Dictionaries, the American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, NCTE, CCCC, WPA, MLA, APA, IEEE, Chicago Style, ASA, and others -- and the judgment was that they can serve as a first person singular pronoun?

On your local college's quadrangle, there would be students with bullhorns announcing, "Yes, we can now use they as a singular pronoun!" And crowds of students would cheer with hearty "Huzzahs!" Well, probably not. That's just a fantasy, but it's an overdue one.

But Grammar Girl's advice about audience/readers pulls me back to another passage in Dweck's book where she says, "You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They're powerful beliefs, but they're just something in your mind, and you can change your mind" (16).

These beliefs about conjunctions and prepositions lurch toward the picayune when you think about the big picture of what writing should do. Writing should make interesting/important points, marshal strong support, exemplify clarity, and be stylistically elegant, among other goals. Good writing should get the job done.

How often do those of us who are instructors not listen to students' ideas with an open mind because we're so focused on sentence-level concerns? Are we noticing errors because they disrupt our reading, or are we reading papers in an error-hunt mode?

Sure, sentence-level concerns are important, but they aren't the only concern. And getting angered by powerful myths about picayune matters might cloud your mind when reading students' papers. You can be seduced by mythical fussbudgetry.

When reading papers and responding to student writing, instructors have to make decisions about what's most important. Often we let established writers break some of the "rules" out there, such as split infinitives, fragments, and others.  Joseph Williams' fine article, "The Phenomenology of Error," demonstrates that much and more.

For advice about changing one's mindset and ideas for productive methods for responding to student writing, I offer these links:

• "13 Ways of Looking at Responding to Student Writing" by Doug Hesse
• "Responding to Writing" by Laura Brady
• "Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers
• "How Can I Handle Responding to Drafts?" main page from the WAC Clearinghouse
• "Think of Yourself First as a Reader" from the WAC Clearinghouse
• "Do I Have to be an Expert in Grammar to Assign Writing?" from the WAC Clearinghouse
•  "Writing Matters #2: Responding to Student Writing" from the University of Hawaii at Manoa Writing Program 

I hope you find the post and the links helpful, and I hope you can stave off mythical fussbudgetry. 

The Power of Therapeutic Writing & Freewriting

The majority of posts for EIU Writes discuss matters that focus on college writing and professional writing.

For this post, however, I want to provide information about unstructured and personal writing that connect to important research done by James Pennebaker, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University Texas at Austin. In addition, scholars are using Pennebaker's research findings to influence pedagogy. For example, EIU's own Nia Klein wrote her excellent Master's thesis in English titled  It's Not Catharsis; It's Cognition: A New Approach to Emotion in Composition in 2010. And she's directed therapeutic writing groups for cancer survivors in the Champaign-Urbana area.

Pennebaker has produced important research over the past thirty years or so, and a recent article from Ode Magazine highlights his psychological research about therapeutic writing and how the words used in personal writing are markers of mental health and growth.

As Inge Schilperoord relates early on in "The Power of Pronouns," "Intuitively, we've known for centuries that this loose kind of writing [diaries, journals, freewriting] is good for our creativity. But what we didn't know until recently is that 15 minutes of free writing a day can help us fight cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and loneliness--and that autobiographical writer who use a variety of pronouns (I and me but also we and you and they) laugh more and take fewer aspirins than those who stick to the first person singular."

Pennebaker and colleagues have done groundbreaking research about language use and the therapeutic uses of writing. And for those interested, on his departmental webpage, he has a page titled "Writing and Health: Some Practical Advice."

His advice coheres with the method of freewriting used in college writing classes made popular by Peter Elbow. As I enjoy saying when I introduce this activity and have my students freewrite in class, "Free your mind, and the ideas will follow." 

As evidenced by the page about "Freewriting & Focused Freewriting" by the Writing Across the Curriculum program at the University of Richmond, this method can be used in various classes, especially when analyzing important reading selections associated with the course. Freewriting can be used a powerful writing-to-learn activity to promote discussion, foster reflection, and help students make connections.

But what Pennebaker's research mostly focuses on is the therapeutic use of writing, and his recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, informs us that people "whose use of causal and insight words continued to increase as they wrote benefited the most, Pennebaker says. That's because causal-word use indicates that a person is making a story out of the experience" (Schilperoord). And "insight words" denote that a person is attempting to make sense of an experience.

Both Pennebaker's research about therapeutic writing and how instructors use freewriting in varied contexts remind me of a passage in "Reflections on Contemporary Currents in Writing Center Work" by Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede [Writing Center Journal 31.1 (2001)]. The authors describe how Lunsford and her student used conversation as a means of discovery: "as Andrea and the student sat there, he literally talked and wrote his way through his problem to a thesis -- a powerful one that was quite different from anything in his current draft. This is what we mean when we say that talking is important to writing and that writing, at its best, is 'epistemic' -- it creates knowledge rather than simply recording it" (16).

Like productive conversations in writing centers, freewriting and personal writing can create discoveries and support growth.

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.

We're not in English class anymore....

When Dorothy Gale landed in OZ she immediately knew she "wasn't in Kansas anymore." Oz was vastly different than her home--suddenly the boring black and white world of Kansas was no more, and instead she saw COLOR!

Dorothy's world changed because of her perspective and the fact that she was able to: analyze her situation, introduce herself to her new peers, organize her ideas, put them into sensible and unified action, do some fabulous quoting ("there's no place like home"), and conclude that this journey was valuable and more than just a dream.

(Wow. The Wizard of Oz sounds more like writing an essay than I ever could have dreamed! What a happy accident.)

This can happen to you too!

Well, not the tornado/drop a house on a wicked witch/ruby slipper scenario. (although, I must admit that sounds pretty rad)

But a transformation like this can happen to you in regards to how you think about: the world, your field of study, communication, emphasizing your opinion, and organization.

Wow. Sounds cool, right?

It is cool, and I bet you having been doing it all semester...in most of your classes.

Tired of guessing? OK. I will tell you.

The secret is Composition.

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR! (that's me imagining your reply)

I know, it tends to come as a surprise and sometimes not a welcome one.

Once in a while students do not like to write. It is true. However, what they do not realize is that they are writing all of the time. Every day. Just like Dorothy was on her adventure in Oz, only this writing is happening in thought and action.

When I explain this to students I am usually met with grumbles and things like, "Well, I know that I will NEVER write a paper again after this, let alone remember this stuff."

But you are already doing it! And you are going to continue to do so!

Silly, silly, silly, students.

(of course I feel this way about Math, but this is a "do as I say not as I do" moment)

Sometimes part of me wants to pull a Nelson and say, "HA,HA" when I hear a student talk this way because with the rise of Writing Across the Curriculum, more and more classes that are not considered English classes are writing papers or just plain writing more in general. There is no escaping "English."

Despite wanting to go full on Simpsons, I contain myself and usually say something like, "Tell me what you don't like about writing?"

Here are some answers that I have gotten:

It's hard.
It takes work.
My teacher never understands what I wrote.
I should not have to go into that much depth about something!
How can writing a paper about my earliest childhood memory help me in my Chemistry course?
Thesis statements do not exist in real life.

Here are the replies that I give:

Everything worth doing is hard. (Shout-out to my Grandma for that one)

Work builds character and helps you to appreciate the things that you have.

If your teacher does not understand you, it means that you are not being clear, and clarity is something that you desperately need in any academic or professional field.

Going into depth about a subject allows you to understand the subject more than you ever would have before, which can result in LEARNING.

Remembering your earliest childhood memory and writing it in a narrative form essay gives you the opportunity to be reflective--an important skill that younger students often have not experienced. Science is all about studying, experimenting, and then reflecting. Being reflective would definitely help you in your Chemistry course--you really do need to reflect on that trial and error.

Thesis Statements = Life. They are your bottom line, your main point--the reason why you do what you do.

Writing transcends the English Comp Course.

Actually, in the Writing Center we see students who are working on writing for classes such as Art, Economics, Physical Therapy, Sociology, Education, Communication Disorders, Family and Consumer Sciences, etc., etc. 

Simply put: you are not done with composition when you are done with your composition course. You will use the skills you learned in this class throughout the rest of your college career.

Professors, not solely English Professors, often ask students to write because writing is so very personal. It is a glimpse into a student's thought process and sometimes more reliable than a multiple choice or true/false test.

'Cause let's face it...multiple choice tests usually mean guessing.
(admit it ... I like to choose C)

And True/False exams are a 50/50 shot! Great for gamblers! Risky and unrewarding for a student.

The ability to organize your ideas, come to a definite conclusion in regards to those ideas, and develop an argument about them proves that you, yes you, are invested.

Invested in not only your education, but in educating others.

Because, other people read that paper! It's true! Your professor reads it, yes, but sometimes your peers will as well--especially if your professor uses Peer Review.

The more people reading your work means your valuable message is getting across. And also that hard work, dedication, intelligence, interest in your field of study, are traits that you find valuable.

This just sounds better and better! Right?

Writing gives you the opportunity to be that individual who believes in the importance of communicating his thoughts, and this also represents the fact that your thoughts are worth sharing.

Major self-esteem fist bump!

Someday, and possibly sooner than later, you will be happy and thankful that you took your composition courses. It may not appear relevant at times, but writing is always there, helping you to organize, emphasize, argue, learn, and teach.

Aren't you glad you came to Oz? Kansas is boring anyway.

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.

Emphasizing Emphasis

When it comes to editorial suggestions / corrections, the issue of sentence combination is often the most frustrating. Why do you want me to split this one? Why should I merge these two? And when we look at the fact that compound sentences and two-sentence splits are equally correct as far as grammar is concerned, it can become near-infuriating.

So what the heck is the difference? Emphasis. Sure, you can opt to do what I did and fake it with italics, boldface, and underline, but understanding how emphasis works within a sentence will give them the most punch. We're talking Evander Holyfield, here. (Not Tyson ... I couldn't think of a literary ear-biting joke)

The great thing about figuring out emphasis is that it will not only allow you to decide how to deal with compound sentences (or the splitting thereof), but it will also allow you to manipulate how the reader feels about your sentences. Neat, huh? Here are some rules of thumb that will ensure your sentences are nice and sharp:

Longer is not better. (Which could also be worded like this: "Deciding to add lots of additional words and phrases simply to enhance the length and academic clout of any given segment of writing really doesn't end up providing the kind of benefits that you might initially hope for nine times out of ten." Eww ... isn't that obnoxious? No bueno.)  

Let's be honest; sometimes we write to fill pages. When you're barely scratching the bottom of page four and that blasted tyrant of a teacher is demanding six, what else is there to do? Resist the temptation to add words for the sake of words. Stronger emphasis and sharper sentences will net you a stronger paper. Most professors are more than willing to help with idea generation if you need more to tackle.

Important points deserve emphasis. Sometimes "and" ends up as a placeholder, a word we use while we're thinking and writing simultaneously. "Ooh," your clever collegiate brain tells you, "don't forget about this! And doesn't it remind you of that?" Not wanting to miss out on the opportunity, we throw these thoughts together.

The problem arises when these ideas don't play nice with one another. If you put two equally important ideas into a compound sentence, one might overpower the other. In a worst case scenario, an exceptionally long sentence feels muddled, killing the emphasis on both would-be stellar ideas.

Check it:

Sarah cried about the accident all night before getting up the next day and drowning her tears with the bottle of Scotch she was going to share with Jim.

There's quite a bit going on here that crowds itself out, squishing and bumping shoulders like a literary mosh pit ... minus the nightmare-inducing B.O. Sure, the reader gets the basic gist of what's happening, but it moves by so quickly that much of the emphasis is lost.  

This is one of those moments where you, as a writer, have to determine exactly what it is that you want to get across to your reader. If, in fact, you want us to feel the time flying by for Sarah now that Jim has suffered whatever horrible fate befell him (I imagine it involved faulty protective measures around the local zoo's lion exhibit), then the above sentence might work. However, in most instances, you don't want this kind of blurry, rushed feeling. An alternate way to re-write the mini-scene from above might be as follows:

Sarah cried about the accident all night. The next morning, she drowned her tears with a fifth of Scotch. She had planned on sharing it with Jim.

I can hear the echoing cries and see the shaking fists: "But Stephen, I'm not a creative writer! I'm working on a research paper / proposal / persuasive essay / job application / et cetera. How do Jim and his foolish shenanigans help me?"

Have no fear, oh-so-cynical reader friend. The basic premise applies to nearly any kind of writing:

- Mike Tyson was a great boxer until he bit someone's ear off and then became a joke and had to retire.

- I would be a wonderful choice for your program since I have many qualifications and have taken many relevant classes.

Regardless of what kind of writing you're doing, it's easy to let information get crammed together if you're not paying close attention. Also, you don't want to assume that all your long sentences are bad. Sometimes a longer sentence can add a nice change in pacing, giving the overall piece a rhythmic feel (And as silly as that sounds, it greatly influences readability). Make sure to keep that main point in your mind -- how many important pieces of information am I trying to convey? If you have a handle on that, it's hard to go wrong.

3. End, Beginning, Middle. Every sentence has three points of emphasis. The strongest of these three is the ending. If you want a particular part of your sentence to carry extra weight, stick it on the end. Do you want that "however" to carry a little extra weight without overwhelming your main point? Break the sentence, start a new one with "however," and back-load the most hard-hitting point.

(i.e. Everyone says Bob is a great man. However, I have seen him kick kittens.)

That period (also known as full syntactic closure) forces the reader to stop, and this stop provides emphasis. This can be another great trick to use when you're splitting things up. Have two points that you want to really jump out? Make two sentences. Stick 'em at the end.

Keep emphasis in mind. I won't promise an end to all your multi-sentence woes, but knowing where you want the big "hits" to fall will definitely make things easier in the long run.

The Case Against the Lecture Format

In a recent article/story from National Public Radio this week, "Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool," Emily Hanford reports that scientists from various universities are changing their teaching methods because of the inefficacy of the lecture format. The link above provides the article, and you can also listen to the story as it ran on NPR stations.

As Hanford relates, "[t]his is something many people have known intuitively for a long time — the physicists just came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing."

The story highlights what Professor Mazur calls "peer instruction," which also could be labeled "active learning."

And the article also provides a link to a documentary series by Hanford titled Don't Lecture Me.

I hope these links and programs provide readers something to think about, but I'd also like to note that the Writing Center and the pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum provide learning platforms that do not espouse the lecture format. 

Put simply, writing consultants (tutors) at the EIU Writing Center offer something akin to Mazur's "peer instruction." While consultants obviously don't grade students' papers, they provide solid feedback about their ideas and drafts while considering the rhetorical principles of audience, purpose, genre, and style, among many other important considerations such as supporting evidence, use of sources, and sentence-level concerns.

Also connected to the science professors who are changing their teaching methods, Writing Across the Curriculum offers pedagogical strategies and tactics that move away from the "sage on the stage" role.

Below are some links from EIU's Writing Across the Curriculum webpage that professors, students, and aspiring educators might find helpful. These links, along with many others, can be found on the "Resources for Faculty" page:

• WAC Clearinghouse Teaching Exchange
• "Integrating Writing Into Any Course: Starting Points" by Kate Kiefer
• Designing Writing Assignments
• Examples of Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
• "What is Writing to Learn?" from the WAC Clearinghouse
• "Using Writing to Improve Reading" from the University of Hawaii at Manoa Writing Program
• Shelley's Quick Guides for Writing Teachers: Critical Reading Assignments

About What I Said on Procrastinating...

Welcome back, folks. If you're like me, chances are you were not as productive as you planned to be over the break. I wrote a list of four goals I wanted to complete by the time this past Sunday evening rolled around. Let's just say I took a loose interpretation of the word "complete." But now is not the time to dawdle! Now is the time to be productive!

...or not. But I can be optimistic, right?

In a way, I'd like to think my goals list was a step in the direction of being productive. The goals were not necessarily the order of steps I had to take in order to have a productive break, but they were obstacles I'd have to overcome if I wanted to minimize my stress levels in the next three weeks.

"Wow, Doug, this is great advice and all, but what the bleep does it have to do with writing?"

It has everything to do with writing, just let me explain.

In one of my moments of productivity (I had them! Pinky swear!), I went back to revise a paper. We had a peer review in the class so I had lots of valuable input from my classmates, operative word here being lots. I felt daunted by the amount of suggestions thrown my way by everybody, all of them excellent suggestions on how to make my better just that much more awesome. Before I started to sob over all of my scratchings, I had brainwave: compile suggestions into a list and check them off as I went.

This made all of the comments I was working with less of a jumble and more of a list of objectives to check off as I completed them. I could then see progress I was making with my paper without having to go back through it over and over. Then, when all of my objectives were checked off, I could go back and read it to make sure it flowed like a river in spring or in my apartment's parking lot.

So, for future reference:

• Finish paper
• Get peer reviewed
• Make checklist
• Eliminate things of checklist as they're completed
• Turn in paper

Do this in whatever order you like, although you might find it helpful to do the first four before you do the last bit.

Citation Spotlight: CBE Style

In my experience, the two major players in the world of citation styles have always been those of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). With my background as an English major, MLA is what you could call "my jam"; it's the style I'm most comfortable with and it makes a far more sense than that rage-inducer APA. But APA is far more widely used than MLA, as MLA is used solely in the field of English and literary studies, unlike APA which is used in basically everything else.

There are other styles, of course. You have Chicago and Turabian, two styles that if you showed me examples of the two I would have no clue which was which. And then there's the Council of Biology Editors (CBE) citation style, which up until the last couple months I had no idea existed.

Ten points to the person who guesses what disciplines it's used for.

Being the inquisitive type, I looked into this mysterious citation style. I began my search on the Purdue OWL website, but I found my search fruitless; the OWL focuses primarily on MLA and APA, the two most commonly used citation styles in the United States.

A Google search, however, yielded far more results. Google compiled 1.6 million results (in an astonishing .17 seconds!) for "cbe citation style," the first ten of which all were websites containing the ".edu" domain suffix. What does that mean? Well, for starters, it means it's legit--".edu" screams credibility.

Further research into CBE showed similarities between CBE and APA, not terribly surprising considering the pervasiveness of APA among science writers. An example provided by the Frederick Douglass Library at University of Maryland Eastern Shore gives the example for citing a book by a single author:

Li TSC. 2000. Medicinal plants: culture, utilization and

phytopharmacology. Lancaster (PA): Technomic. 517p.


Those familiar with APA will notice that certain APA conventions are followed. For example, the title of the book is listed in a similar manner as APA as only the first word of the title has its first letter capitalized. Additionally, first names are initialed as opposed to MLA, which requires the full name of the author. Structurally, the two styles follow the same order of author-to-year-to-title, sharing an emphasis on dates in which the works are published.

Curiously, however, CBE diverges from APA in that it abandons the punctuation following the author's last name, as well as after each initial of her first name. Also, CBE places an importance on where the book was published.

Citation styles continue to evolve and separate like single-cell organisms. Though you may have memorized a particular style a couple of years ago, the moment a new edition comes out all you knew may be torn asunder. Keeping updated with stylebooks can get to be expensive, however, so the most ideal way to keep in touch with the latest changes in your favorite citation style is to pay attention to Purdue's OWL or do a simple Google search.

Further reading and citations:

"How to Cite Using CBE" from the University of Maryland - Eastern Shore

"CBE Citation Style" from the University of Maine at Farmington

"Council of Biology Editors Citation Style" from the University of Wisconsin - Madison

Recommended WAC Resource: Engaging Ideas

Last month the second edition of what some people refer to as the "WAC Bible" was published. Engaging Ideas now has a new edition.

If someone were to ask me what I think is the single best WAC resource out there, my recommendation would be Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean. It's an outstanding resource.

Since the book's first edition in 1996, colleges worldwide have used this text as the basis for professional development workshops because it offers different ideas, approaches, and methods for using writing as a tool for critical thinking and reflective engagement in diverse disciplines.

Bean is a Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment at Seattle University, and he's the author and co-author of a number of writing textbooks. As part of the second edition's "About the Author" section relates, Bean "has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment," and "In 2010 his article "Messy Problems and Lay Audiences: Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum" (coauthored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2008 McGraw Hill-Magna Publications Award for the year's best scholarly work on teaching and learning" (xxi).

Like the first version of Engaging Ideas, the second edition provides a progression from why to how. The book has four parts with sixteen chapters. Below are the chapter titles to show what the text covers:

1. Using Writing to Promote Thinking: A Busy Professor's Guide to the Whole Book
2. How Writing is Related to Critical Thinking
3. Helping Writers Think Rhetorically
4. Using a Range of Genres to Extend Critical Thinking and Deepen Learning
5. Dealing with Issues of Grammar and Correctness
6. Formal Writing Assignments
7. Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
8. Designing Tasks to Promote Active Thinking and Learning
9. Helping Students Read Difficult Texts
10. Using Small Groups to Coach Thinking and Teach Disciplinary Argument
11. Bringing More Critical Thinking into Lectures and Discussions
12. Enhancing Learning and Critical Thinking in Essay Exams
13. Designing and Sequencing Assignments to Teach Undergraduate Research
14. Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria
15. Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Paper Load
16. Writing Comments on Students' Papers

While the book is geared more toward those of us who teach at the college level, the text would also benefit Education majors who could implement a writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines approach in their classrooms.

Writing Really is Everywhere!

Papers, papers, papers. They come in all different forms and styles, especially while you’re in your undergrad program at EIU. I remember thinking that just English majors wrote papers, and everyone else was home free, but I was very wrong. So I wanted to make sure that everyone realized how important the skill of writing is to your future career.

Regardless of your major the Writing Center here at EIU is here to help!

We don’t edit papers, but rather those of us that work in the Writing Center want to help writer’s gain skills that will help them create skills to help with other classes and the careers that you so choose. Because regardless of the place of employment that you end up in, writing will be an aspect of your job, even if it’s engineering or working maintenance.

At the Writing Center we will help you with any assignment that you may have that’s writing related. Here are some examples of the array of things we can help students with.

Narratives

Lesson Plans

Case Studys

Research Papers in any area

Business Proposals

Aspects of writhing a thesis in a masters program

Grad School Application Essays

Essays for scholarship

Lab Reports

APA, MLA, Chicago citations

These are just few of the many areas of writing that you can get help with at the Writing Center.

So don’t be afraid or scared if you hear you have a lot of writing to do in a science class or any other class. Lab reports also require a lot of writing and analysis, and people at the Writing Center can help if you get confused on format or citing or just figuring out where to begin! The biggest help at times may be to also know that you aren’t alone. There are many other students out there who need help on their writing.