PLAINLANGUAGE.GOV (2010 government law requiring plain language
rather than lawyer language) ---
www.plainlanguage.gov
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ---
http://plato.stanford.edu/
Larry Ferlazzo's English Website (helpers for learning the English
Language) ---
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/larry-ferlazzos-english-website
Teacher's Activity Guide: Myths, Folktales & Fairy Tales ---
http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/mff/
Brain Pickings
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading
List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/04/with-hemingway-arnold-samuelson-writing/?mc_cid=a388036da6&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online:
Covers 500 Years of the “Vulgar Tongue” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/the-largest-historical-dictionary-of-english-slang-now-free-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Jennifer Egan on Writing, the Trap of Approval, and the Most Important
Discipline for Aspiring Writers ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/06/borges-and-i/?mc_cid=1ffb15db80&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Video: Umberto Eco Dies at 84; Leaves Behind Advice to Aspiring
Writers ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/02/umberto-eco-dies-at-84-leaves-behind-advice-to-aspiring-writers.html
Khan Academy: Introduction to Storytelling ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/storytelling/we-are-all-storytellers
We celebrate — and mock — Hemingway as a swaggering celebrity, a
revolutionary. But his real talents were listening, mimicry, and
revision ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/03/hemingway-surprise/
Purdue Owl: White Papers (standards for white papers on various topics)
---
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/546/1
Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Romantic Poets:
Shelley, Byron, Keats ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/learn-to-write-through-a-video-game-inspired-by-the-romantic-poets.html
University of Illinois: The Center for Writing Studies ---
http://www.cws.illinois.edu
The NCBI Style Guide (biotechnology writing) ---
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK988
H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 “Types of Mistakes” Young Writers
Make ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/h-p-lovecraft-highlights-the-20-types-of-mistakes-young-writers-make.html
Web English Teacher: AP & IB Resources (literature and writing) ---
http://www.webenglishteacher.com/ap.html
C-Span: American Writers ---
http://www.c-span.org/series/?americanWriters
A Helpful Guide to Essay Writing ---
http://web.anglia.ac.uk/anet/students/documents/2010/helpful-guide-to-essay-writing.pdf
Coursera: Writing in the Sciences ---
www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite
New York Times: Copy Edit This! ---
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/15/insider/copy-edit-this-quiz-9.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=c02935b437544e33aec1dd60ec6b609b&elq=120fbf25b20343698b941ab37c7e8aca&elqaid=9702&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3464
A Classical Dictionary of Vulgar Tongue (1788) ---
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/a-classical-dictionary-of-the-vulgar-tongue-1788/
Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community ---
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/incredible-bridges-poets-creating-community
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things
Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/encyclopedia-science-fiction-17500-entries-things-sci-fi-now-free-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Meet the “Grammar Vigilante,” Hell-Bent on Fixing Grammatical
Mistakes on England’s Storefront Signs ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/grammar-vigilante.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Grammarphobia Blog Language Arts ---
www.grammarphobia.com/blog
"Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of
Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World," by Maria Popova, Brain
Pickings, November 24, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/24/lost-in-translation-ella-frances-sanders/
"John Steinbeck on Writing, the Wellspring of
Creativity, and the Mobilizing Power of the Impossible," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, April 1, 2016 ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/01/john-steinbeck-east-of-eden-journal-letters/?mc_cid=eef0166e83&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Jensen Comment
A myth about adventurers like John Steinbeck is that they spent most of
their life living and wrote part-time fiction and poetry rooted in
mostly living their adventures. In fact these writers lived more in
writing and less in adventure. They studied and perfected their craft in
scholarship and introspection about their inner being. Writing is work,
work, and more work rather than a part-time hobby of collecting notes
about life. It's about the drudgery or writing, editing, re-writing,
editing, re-writing, and on and on to improve a piece that often never
fully satisfies. And Steinbeck's long letter each day to Covici shows
writing is like what a bravo performance in other arts like music
requires --- practice, practice, practice. Are there any great authors
who simply rolled off their books in first draft finales while sitting
in bars and cafes? I doubt it! Good or bad one of the nice things about
writing in a blog each day is that one can write more about living and
scholarship without having to perfect the craft of writing itself. A
blogger can be scholarly, but the blog is seldom, if ever, artful. And
the scholarship itself has to be focused. A blogger cannot write about
love based upon experiences in a brothel. A blogger may write about love
while living in a library without the adventures of brothels.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/22/why-love-hurts-eva-illouz/?mc_cid=eef0166e83&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Maria's advice on living and writing
Thank you Maria Popova
I like the one about being willing to change your mind --- that one is
especially hard for every writer, including me
"Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading,
Writing, and Living," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 23, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/23/7-lessons-from-7-years/
Dictionary of American Regional English
UW Digital Collections: DARE Fieldwork Recordings ---
https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/amerlangs
Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World Language Arts
---
www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/language-power-handmaid-tale-1161.html?tab=4#tabs
Chronicle of Higher Education: Ph.D.s Are Still Writing Poorly
---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/PhDs-Are-Still-Writing/241700?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=b0bc12e8862f4fb0a0cfaeacb1073358&elq=696138ce35514615a75a8813a19b67c4&elqaid=16528&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7157
Chronicle of Higher Education: A Guide (10 articles) to
Writing Good Academic Prose ---
http://www.chronicle.com/resource/a-guide-to-writing-good-academ/5877/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=5a5b6a4376d44410baf7d98f703f459e&elq=696138ce35514615a75a8813a19b67c4&elqaid=16528&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7157
Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen's Major Novels ---
http://austen.unl.edu
The Open Anthology of Literature in English (1650-1800) ---
http://virginia-anthology.org
Google Books: Explore Banned Books Language Arts books.google.com/googlebooks/banned
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/
Adverbs and
United Airlines ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2017/04/18/adverbs-and-united-airlines/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=06b8b46d98e647ffaf1b8d10efc2ed25&elq=3be8f7a5dfcb4ea3aa20ed208da104a5&elqaid=13555&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5630
You might
think nothing more remained to be said about United Airlines Flight
3411 from Chicago to St Louis on Sunday, April 9. Not so. The
coverage left key facts of the case misreported, and the most
interesting linguistic aspects completely unnoticed.
Sean Davis at The Federalist
sensibly dug out
United’s contract of carriage
and read it. But even he failed to note how bad its use of English
is.
The
volitional
subclass of adverbs used as
act-related adjuncts
are the adverbs like
accidentally,
deliberately,
inadvertently,
knowingly,
purposely,
reluctantly,
unwittingly, and
willingly (see
The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language,
Pages 675–679). Crucially,
involuntarily
belongs to this class. The key thing about these words is that they
modify the
agent
in a clause. Jack
voluntarily kissed Jill asserts only that Jack had free
will — not that Jill consented. This holds even for passives:
The suspect was reluctantly
released from jail by the police, attributes reluctance
to the police, not the suspect.
With that in
mind, take a look at part of Rule 25, Denied Boarding Compensation,
subsection 1, in United’s
contract of carriage:
If a Passenger is asked to volunteer, UA will not later deny
boarding to that Passenger involuntarily unless that Passenger was
informed at the time he was asked to volunteer that there was a
possibility of being denied boarding involuntarily …
Consider the
clause UA will not later
deny boarding to that Passenger involuntarily. Adverbs
like involuntarily
target the agent; so that’s
UA. Denying
boarding involuntarily would involve a weird sci-fi scenario where
UA staff are in the grip of some drug or alien mind control that
forces them to deny some passenger boarding even though they want
her to be allowed to board.
United’s
intent, clearly, is to state that if you are first asked to
volunteer to get bumped, United personnel have to tell you certain
things at that point: They can’t ask you to volunteer, fail to let
you know about the $1,000 voucher, and then bump you against your
will. But the ordinary semantics of English does not support that
reading.
The mistaken
use of involuntary
is repeated:
If there are not enough volunteers, other Passengers may be denied
boarding involuntarily in accordance with UA’s boarding priority …
Again, to
deny boarding involuntarily would mean to deny it despite not
wanting to. That’s how volitional act-related adjuncts work.
Continued in
article
Jensen Comment
You probably
did not even notice the other bad (recently banned for political
incorrectness) grammar of United Airlines. Consider the phrase:
"involuntarily unless that Passenger was
informed at the time he
was asked to volunteer ..."
The newer
politically correct way to write the phrase is:
"involuntarily unless that Passenger was
informed at the time they
was
asked to volunteer ..."
Under new
political correctness rules, the word "they" is now singular or plural
and should replace the words "he" and "she" is all writing unless you're
an old fudd like me he who at times refuses to be politically correct.
It's going to take some getting used to as our journals, books, email
messages, letters, etc. do away with the singular (think I, me, he, him,
himself, she, her, and herself) with the plural (think they, their, theirself,
and them) where we used to use the singular case for just one person. The
Wall Street Journal writes about this by quoting an acceptance letter from a
Dean Powell at Brown University where they writes
(now supposedly politically correct grammar) in the new politically correct
(plural) case.
"A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean," by James Freeman,
The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2017 ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-letter-from-an-ivy-league-admissions-dean-1492107041?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb
. . .
Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student
not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our
reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions
to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed
family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That
was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school
congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”
. . .
The letter from Dean Powell included a total of
four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to
join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart
their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide
support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”
Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a
short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit
to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and
“theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone
who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has
probably never set foot on campus.
Jensen Comment
They (meaning I) am going to continue to use such politically-incorrect words
like " I, me, he, him, himself, she, her, herself" just because we is too
old to become two old men (no longer a politically-correct word) in one old
body.
It might be an interesting writing workshop exercise next semester to rewrite
all the politically incorrect graduation speeches that will be given this coming
May and June. What celebrity is going to make a fool out of theirself by
speaking in the new politically correct plural doublespeak in a graduation
speech?
But there were worries expressed in papers and
conversations that p.c.-ness has become a rigid concept, a new orthodoxy
that does not allow for sufficient complexity in scholarship or even
much clarity in thinking. One speaker, Michel Chaouli, a graduate
student in comparative literature at Berkeley, said that "politically
correct discourse is a kind of fundamentalism," one that gives rise to
"pre-fab opinions." Among its features, he said, are "tenacity,
sanctimoniousness, huffiness, a stubborn lack of a sense of humor."
---
Michel Chaouli in "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct," 1990
http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_6308.pdf
TeachingEnglish: Resources ---
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-resource
Teachers & Writers Magazine ---
http://www.teachersandwritersmagazine.org
10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/10-writing-tips-from-legendary-writing-teacher-william-zinsser.html
Get Graphic: The World in Words and
Pictures ---
http://www.getgraphic.org/teachers.php
Teenagers in the Times (learning Blogs) ---
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/category/teens-in-the-times/
Atravist: Make a story and design it your
own way (design tools) ---
https://atavist.com/
Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College
Students ---
https://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides
Lab Lit: Writing Fiction Based on Real Science ---
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/lab-lit-writing-fiction-based-on-real-science
So,
for Americans, it’s traveling, canceled, and focuses; for Brits,
travelling, cancelled, and focusses
"How We Love Spelling," by Kathy Ferriss, Chronicle of Higher
Education, January 18, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/01/18/how-we-love-spelling/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elq=331ae73f64184bda9bd1c359a6892b8e&elqCampaignId=2244&elqaid=7560&elqat=1&elqTrackId=736c8b64bc5c40cfa61be71befeffda2
Jensen Question
Why is it that Americans have good judgment whereas in the U.K. they
have good judgement?
Cost accountants might argue that the ink cost is less in America when
printing books
Little Fiction ---
http://www.littlefiction.com/
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It
Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/13/james-baldwin-the-artists-struggle-for-integrity/?mc_cid=621080c06b&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
That's What they Say (English Language) ---
http://michiganradio.org/programs/thats-what-they-say
A Way With Words (history of phrases) ---
http://www.waywordradio.org
Punctuate (free essays) ---
http://blogs.colum.edu/punctuate
Purdue Online Writing Lab: Job Search Writing ---
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/6/
Storybench ---
http://www.storybench.org
Rilke on Writing and What It Takes to Be an Artist ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/04/rilke-letters-to-a-young-poet-writing/?mc_cid=533d31dcb0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
ReadWriteThink: Videos (k-12 English) ---
http://www.readwritethink.org/videosbv
"The manuscript-editing marketplace: A peer-to-peer website
aims to disrupt the author-services industry," by Jeffrey M. Perkel,
Nature, March 1, 2016 ---
http://www.nature.com/news/the-manuscript-editing-marketplace-1.19457?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160303&spMailingID=50825784&spUserID=MzEyMDU5NjE1OAS2&spJobID=880255771&spReportId=ODgwMjU1NzcxS0
As Sebastian Eggert prepared to submit a
conference article, he realized he had a problem: neither he nor his
research adviser were native English speakers, and neither had much
experience in writing and publishing research papers. But Eggert, a
master's student in mechanical engineering at the Technical
University of Munich in Germany, had heard of a website where he
could purchase editing services from an expert: an online
marketplace called Peerwith.
Launched in October 2015 and still in beta
testing, Peerwith is a forum through which researchers can find and
negotiate with service providers such as editors, translators,
statisticians and illustrators to improve their research papers. The
site boasts “hundreds of experts”, most of them with expertise in
the social sciences and humanities. Users post a job request
detailing the subject area of the document, its length and the
desired turnaround time. Experts then bid for the job, and both
experts and users rate each other afterwards. Peerwith's business
model is akin to freelance marketplaces such as Upwork, says
co-founder Joris van Rossum, who left the journal publisher Elsevier
to start his firm, except with a strictly academic focus.
A market for author services on research
papers already exists; van Rossum estimates it at hundreds of
million of dollars annually. It includes both large editing
companies such as American Journal Experts (AJE), Edanz, Editage and
Macmillan Science Communication (MSC, which is owned by Nature's
parent company), and freelancers. But a peer-to-peer online
marketplace, van Rossum says, makes services more affordable by
cutting out the middleman and efficiently matching buyers and
sellers. (Peerwith receives a cut of 10–20% for each transaction;
the other firms would not comment on their margins). At the site,
authors can review the experts who bid for work to identify the best
fit, and can check to see how others have rated them.
Val Kidd, an editor and translator based in
the United Kingdom, earned €200 (US$223) on Peerwith to translate a
presentation for Emanuel Rutten, a philosopher at the Free
University, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The process, from job
posting to completed document, took less than two weeks, Rutten
says. “It's really smooth.” For her part, Kidd says that the
interaction with her client improved the final product. At most
author-services companies Kidd works with, she says, editors and
translators cannot contact the author should they have questions —
the client interacts with the service, which identifies a freelancer
to handle the job.
Peerwith doesn't vet its service providers,
says Anna Sharman, founder of Cofactor, a London-based
author-services consultancy. So, unlike her own and other such
companies, there is no guarantee that the 'experts' really are
qualified. Editors at Cofactor undergo a rigorous recruitment
process, Sharman says, and she double-checks their work before it is
returned to the client.
Continued in article
From the Scout Report on August 12, 2016
Voyant ---
http://voyant-tools.org
Created by Stefan Sinclair at McGill
University and Geoffrey Rockwell at the University of Alberta,
Voyant is an online tool for analyzing texts. On this website, users
can enter text in a variety of forms, including URL links, plain
text, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language
(XML), Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format (RTF), and Portable Document
Format (PDF). Voyant will then produce a word cloud to represent the
frequency that each word appears in the text. By clicking on a
single word, users can view an analysis of where in the text that
word appears in the Trends box. To analyze or compare multiple
documents, users can select Modify under the Documents tab to add
additional texts. One notable strength of Voyant, is the various
ways it allows visitors to examine written material. While the
Trends visualization tool helps visitors analyze where certain words
and phrases appear in texts, the Bubble Lines feature allows
visitors to compare words across two different texts. A more
detailed explanation of how to use and make use of Voyant can be
found at
http://docs.voyant-tools.org
Pearltrees ---
http://www.pearltrees.com
Pearltrees is an organizational tool that
allows user to clip and save websites, documents, images, and files
of interest. Users can group saved items into categories and share
their lists with other users. With this resource, instructors can
easily share educational resources, group project members can share
ideas and resources, or families can plan a vacation. Pearltrees
will also suggest additional resources based on web pages you have
already listed. Pearltrees can be used online, on any iOS mobile
device, or on Android phones. For a monthly fee, users can create a
private account with additional features.
The future belongs to automated, error-free
prose, no stylistic vampirism, clichéd characters, or shopworn narrative
devices ...
"Proposals Toward the End of Writing," by Tony Tulathimutte,
Believer Magazine, February 9, 2016 ---
http://logger.believermag.com/post/138988654268/proposals-toward-the-end-of-writing
The recent
Hemingway app goes even further,
offering dogmatic editorial guidance to make your prose “bold and
clear”:
The recent Hemingway app goes even
further, offering dogmatic editorial guidance to make your prose
“bold and clear”:
Hemingway highlights long, complex
sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence,
shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence
is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost
trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing
this sentence to remove the red.
It also recommends the indiscriminate
excision of adverbs and passive constructions. Tallying up all
the infelicities, it assigns the passage a numerical grade,
representing “the lowest education level needed to understand
your text,” which oddly equates boldness and clarity with
legibility to young children (presumably, the best score would
be “Illiterate”). Ernest Hemingway’s own prose often fails the
test, though, as Ian Crouch observes, Hemingway is usually
making a stylistic point wherever he trespasses against his own
putative rules. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta” gets the
worst possible score of 25 (a second-year post-doc?).
It also recommends the indiscriminate
excision of adverbs and passive constructions. Tallying up all the
infelicities, it assigns the passage a numerical grade, representing
“the lowest education level needed to understand your text,” which
oddly equates boldness and clarity with legibility to young children
(presumably, the best score would be “Illiterate”). Ernest
Hemingway’s own prose often fails the test, though, as Ian Crouch
observes, Hemingway is usually making a stylistic point wherever he
trespasses against his own putative rules. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s
“Spring in Fialta” gets the worst possible score of 25 (a
second-year post-doc?).
With inventions like these, many of which
are intended to improve prose’s suitability to a particular purpose,
it seems inevitable that we’ll soon have programs aimed at broader
literary purposes. Imagine, for instance, a computer program that
detects clichés at the sentence level.
Existing attempts are based on small
databases of fixed idioms. Suppose our cliché detector is a simple
extension of the language-checking features already baked into most
word processing software, underlining each trite phrase with a
baby-blue squiggle. It analyzes the text for any sequences of words
that statistically tend to accompany each other—and the statistical
database of clichés, in turn, is based on a Zipfian distribution of
word groupings obtained from the quantitative analysis of a large
prose corpus. Every phrase ranked above a certain score is flagged
as a cliché. No more “in any case” or “at this rate,” no more
“battling cancer” or “wry grin” or “boisterous laughter”—though the
program might forgive idioms that lack basic synonyms, like “walking
the dog.”
Continued in article
ENGL Professional Writing Program (University of Maryland) ---
http://lib.guides.umd.edu/content.php?pid=379848&sid=3112046
Connect With English ---
http://www.learner.org/series/cwe/
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/922
Virginia Woolf on Writing and Self-Doubt ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/25/virginia-woolf-writing-self-doubt/?mc_cid=4bdb09d104&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is
Taught in Schools ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teachers-technology-and-writing.aspx
"The Best Books on Writing, NYC, Animals, and More: A Collaboration with
the New York Public Library," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, August
3, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/29/nypl-books/
"Annie Dillard on Writing," by
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, August 9, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/09/annie-dillard-on-writing/
Materials for Teachers: Academy of American Poets ---
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/materials-teachers
Harvard College Writing Center: Strategies for Essay Writing ---
http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/strategies-essay-writing
The Writing Center at Harvard University ---
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html
Harvard Writing Project: Writing Guides ---
http://writingproject.fas.harvard.edu/pages/writing-guides
National Writing Project ---
http://digitalis.nwp.org/
Sometimes what passes as writerly craft
is actually the product of a political agenda. Consider the Iowa
Writers' Workshop in the 1950s ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/books/review/workshops-of-empire-by-eric-bennett.html?_r=0
Essay Writing: The Basics ---
https://student.unsw.edu.au/essay-writing-basics
James Baldwin's Advice on Writing ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/james-baldwin-advice-on-writing/?mc_cid=4c618627a2&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
From the Scout Report on October 9, 2015
Grammarly
---
https://www.grammarly.com
Grammarly is an online spelling and grammar checker that is easy to
use and simple to install as a free browser extension on either
Chrome or Safari. The service flags grammar or spelling issues and
suggests alternatives while explaining the reasoning behind its
suggestions. Like most products of this kind, there is a free
browser extension, which corrects about 150 types of grammar and
spelling errors, and a premium version that will spot and correct
more than 250 kinds of errors. Most people find that the free
version is sufficient. However, those who are writing professionally
or particularly concerned with their grammar may want to upgrade to
the pay version in order to access the full service. Once installed
and an account is created, Grammarly automatically becomes active
during all your online writing, including email and social media.
Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on “the Art of Writing Short Stories” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/roberto-bolanos-12-tips-on-the-art-of-writing-short-stories.ht
The Close Reading of Poetry ---
http://web.uvic.ca/~englblog/closereading/
WordPress Editorial Calendar ---
http://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/
Bukowski on Writing, True Art, and the Courage to Create Outside
Society’s Forms of Approval ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/03/bukowski-on-writing/?mc_cid=702ce5340a&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Read Online Haruki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Baseball Game
Launched His Writing Career ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/read-online-haruki-murakamis-new-essay-on-how-a-baseball-game-launched-his-writing-career.html
Writing Center: Vassar College ---
http://ltrc.vassar.edu/writing-center/
University of Richmond: Writer's Web ---
http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb.html
University College Writing Centre ---
http://www.utoronto.ca/ucwriting/handouts.html
David Ogilvy’s 1982 Memo “How to Write” Offers 10 Pieces of Timeless
Advice ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/david-ogilvys-1982-memo-how-to-write-offers-10-pieces-of-timeless-advice.html
From the University of Chicago
Writing in College: A Short Guide to College Writing ---
http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/resources/collegewriting/
I'm not certain whether some of these are
good or bad
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/support/Writing/writing.caveats.html
Longform ---
http://longform.org/
A University of Pittsburgh writing program connects readers to works of
non-fiction.
"Oliver Sacks on Storytelling, the Curious Psychology of Writing, and
What His Friendship with the Poet Thom Gunn Taught Him About Creativity
and Originality," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, June 15,
2015 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/19/oliver-sacks-thom-gunn-writing/?mc_cid=661f567940&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
ReadWriteThink (nearly a thousand lesson plans) ---
http://www.readwritethink.org/
Work in Progress (writers and
literature) ---
http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/
A Sneak Peek at Junot Díaz’s Syllabi for His MIT Writing Classes, and
the Novels on His Reading List ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/junot-diazs-syllabi-for-his-mit-writing-classes.html
We can probably
all agree that it’s a little premature, but all the same, the BBC has
barreled ahead with its list of “The
21st Century’s 12 greatest novels.”
Topping the list of excellent, if not especially surprising, picks is The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,
Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut
novel about, as he puts it in the interview above, “a closeted nerd
writing about an absolutely out nerd, and using their shared mutual
language to tell the story.” The book has connected with such a wide
swath of readers for more than its appeal to fellow nerds, though that’s
no small thing. A great many readers have seen their own lives reflected
in Díaz’s characters—Dominican immigrants growing up in New Jersey—or
have found their experiences illuminating. And even though Yunior and
Oscar’s very male point of view might have alienated female readers in
the hands of a lesser author, Díaz has the sensitivity and
self-awareness to—as
Joe Fassler argues in The
Atlantic—write sexist
characters, but not sexist books. As the author himself says above, “if
it wasn’t for women readers, I wouldn’t have a career.”
Continued in article
Grammar Conundrums
"Hard questions, not easy answers," The Economist, March
4, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/03/johnson-grammar
TODAY is National Grammar Day in America.
(It really should be International Grammar Day, but Johnson’s
urging on
this point has been unheeded.) It was founded by a group called the
Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, and though the society
itself seems to have last updated its website in 2012, Grammar Day
has outlived it. Many will celebrate by venting about their most
hated grammar mistakes: Poynter.org asks, typically, "What
are your biggest grammar pet peeves?"
This column, instead, will celebrate some
of grammar’s more curious corners. Grammar is not a list of do’s and
don’ts, but a description of the rules of a language. Below are
three legitimate grammar controversies, where good arguments can be
made on different sides. Pondering hard questions, in your
columnist’s view, is a better use of National Grammar Day than
spouting frustration at internet denizens who can’t keep your
and you’re straight.
This is one of those things that
drives me crazy. Many readers will pause mid-sentence on
reading this. Should it not be This is one of those things that
drive me crazy? After all, things is plural; should
not the verb agree with that? The answer is maddeningly unclear:
there are two possible ways of parsing the sentence. It can be
understood as both
This is one [of those things] that drives
me crazy
And
This is one of [those things that drive
me crazy]
One parse has one of those things
as the noun phrase in question. The other has those things.
This is a real ambiguity. It has generated many efforts to impose
hard-and-fast rules, but they are misguided. The best thing about
this is that there are two possible interpretations—and they are
both flawless English. A gift to nervous writers everywhere on
National Grammar Day.
Conundrums? Yes. What to
do with foreign words in English is a conundrum, and there are many
such conundrums in English. English has fairly regular rules for
forming plurals. Add –s or –es, mostly. But
English has also imported many foreign words. Must it also import
the pluralisation rules with them? Some people would have you write
conundra, which is the plural in Latin. After all, we write
data and media, not datums and
mediums. But ultimata and quora look odd;
ultimatums and quorums are more natural. Fora
has a long history in English, but
since 1930, forums has been more common in English books.
Once again, there simply is no hard-and-fast
rule. “Always use the grammar of the foreign language” will make you
the only person at the Italian café in London insisting on a
panino with two espressi. The person behind the
counter may be one of London’s many Italians, but if not, you are
likely to receive either a nonplussed stare or a heavy sigh.
So what is the rule? There are no rules,
only tendencies. Datums is almost non-existent, while
forums is not just common but preferred. Choose a style book
(The Economist’s
has a section on just this issue) or use
Google’s tool to search published books, and go with the majority.
The only rule here is to be internally consistent.
A date which will live in infamy.
Many American style books will tell you that the preceding phrase,
used by Franklin Roosevelt to describe the bombing of Pearl Harbour,
is ungrammatical. Instead, they propose the following rule: that
should introduce relative clauses that define and restrict
the preceding noun. (In other words, they should tell us which day
is meant.) Meanwhile, which should merely introduce some
extra information that is not crucial to defining the preceding
noun. (The Porsche, which is yellow, is for sale describes
a Porsche which just happens to be yellow.)
H.W. Fowler suggested this rule to neaten
English grammar in the 1920s. But it was only a suggestion: he
confessed that relative pronouns as of his time were already “an odd
jumble”. The Lord’s Prayer addresses our father which art in
Heaven and, despite the long pause it is often given in church
services, is meant to refer to the heavenly father as
opposed to the earthly one. In other words, it is a supposedly
forbidden "restrictive which".
So which with a “restrictive”
clause is perfectly fine. Any “rule” forbidding it can be no more
than a preference, without a solid anchoring in syntax. That said,
it is a good preference. Which is used more often with
non-restrictive clauses, and that is only used for
restrictive clauses. (No one says The Porsche, that is yellow,
is for sale). Americans are more likely than Britons to observe
the distinction. But it is worth observing, as a preference if not a
rule. Though commas do most of the work making clear which clauses
are restrictive and which are not, keeping that for one
kind and which for the other reinforces the work that the
commas do. This aids the reader a bit.
There are very good reasons for thinking
hard about grammar, and National Grammar Day is as good a time as
any for that. But resist the temptation to think that “grammar”
always provides an easy, exceptionless answer to tough questions. It
is precisely because tough questions remain that grammar is worth
taking seriously.
This is the "whole ball of wax"
"Crazy English Idioms," by Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl,
March 7, 2013 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/english-idioms.aspx
Poetry Resources (writing and reading) ---
http://www.freebooknotes.com/ultimate-poetry-resource-guide/
Why Do We Hate Cliché?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/books/review/why-do-we-hate-clich.html?_r=0
I can't teach someone to write, but I can
teach someone to rewrite.
John Casey
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/master-class_821848.html?nopager=1#
Willa Cather was against teaching college students how to write
creatively, instead of how to write “clear and correct English” ---
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/one-writer-s-message_822395.html?nopager=1
"Automation in the Newsroom: How algorithms
are helping reporters expand coverage, engage audiences, and respond to
breaking news," by Celeste LeCompte, Nieman Reports,
September 1, 2015 ---
http://niemanreports.org/articles/automation-in-the-newsroom/
Philana
Patterson, assistant business editor for the Associated Press, has
been covering business since the mid-1990s. Before joining the AP,
she worked as a business reporter for both local newspapers and Dow
Jones Newswires and as a producer at Bloomberg. “I’ve written
thousands of earnings stories, and I’ve edited even more,” she says.
“I’m very familiar with earnings.” Patterson manages more than a
dozen staffers on the business news desk, and her expertise landed
her on an AP stylebook committee that sets the guidelines for AP’s
earnings stories. So last year, when the AP needed someone to train
its newest newsroom member on how to write an earnings story,
Patterson was an obvious choice.
The trainee
wasn’t a fresh-faced j-school graduate, responsible for covering a
dozen companies a quarter, however. It was a piece of software
called Wordsmith, and by the end of its first year on the job, it
would write more stories than Patterson had in her entire career.
Patterson’s job was to get it up to speed.
Patterson’s
task is becoming increasingly common in newsrooms. Journalists at
ProPublica, Forbes, The New York Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting,
Yahoo, and others are using algorithms to help them tell stories
about business and sports as well as education, inequality, public
safety, and more. For most organizations, automating parts of
reporting and publishing efforts is a way to both reduce reporters’
workloads and to take advantage of new data resources. In the
process, automation is raising new questions about what it means to
encode news judgment in algorithms, how to customize stories to
target specific audiences without making ethical missteps, and how
to communicate these new efforts to audiences.
Automation
is also opening up new opportunities for journalists to do what they
do best: tell stories that matter. With new tools for discovering
and understanding massive amounts of information, journalists and
publishers alike are finding new ways to identify and report
important, very human tales embedded in big data.
Years of
experience, industry standards, and the AP’s own stylebook all help
Patterson and her business desk colleagues know how to tell an
earnings story. But how does a computer know? It needs sets of
rules, known as algorithms, to help it.
An
algorithm is designed to accomplish a particular task. Google’s
search algorithm orders your page of results. Facebook’s News Feed
determines which posts you see, and a navigation algorithm
determines how you’ll get to the beach. Wordsmith’s algorithms write
stories.
Continued in article
Writing Tutorials and Software
From the Scout Report on November 7, 2014
1. National Novel Writing Month
http://nanowrimo.org
Freelance writer Chris Baty declared
November as National Novel Writing Month in the fall of 2000. Since
then, the number of participants has grown from 21 aspiring authors
hacking away at manuscripts to over 300,000. The project's "No Plot?
No problem" slogan tells it all. No perfectionistic haute culture
here. Participants are simply encouraged to put at least 50,000
words on paper between 12:00 am on November 1 and 11:59:59 on
November 30. Scout readers can explore this official website via
section subheadings such as, About, How It Works, Press Information,
and Testimonials to find out all about the process. Signing up to
participate in the challenge is easy and free, and the website will
help track your progress, link you to support in your geographical
area, and provide platforms to meet fellow writers in person and
online. NaNoWriMo, as it's called, is a great resource for
encouraging novice and veteran writers alike to work through their
writer's block and delve into their creativity. [CNH]
2. Writing and Publishing Solutions
http://www.novel-writing-help.com
Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel
will agree on at least one basic fact: it's deceptively difficult.
This site, from novelist Harvey Chapman, provides beginners with
helpful step-by-step advice. He lays it all out in simple,
digestible categories including, The Writing Process, Becoming a
Writer, Elements of Fiction, and How to Write. Each category
includes helpful, targeted articles designed to take some of the
sting out of putting words on screen or paper. For instance, How to
Write a Novel Step-by-Step breaks down the novel writing process
into eleven linear stages. Prose Writing 101, found under How to
Write, is another great feature of the site that details the
importance of writing with a clear, concise, and uncluttered style.
[CNH]
3. How Writers Write Fiction
http://courses.writinguniversity.org/course/how-writers-write-fiction
The International Writing Program at the
University of Iowa is often considered the best fiction writing
program in the United States. Not everyone can dedicate the blood,
sweat, and two years it takes to complete the program, but this new
MOOC series allows fiction writers to engages with the material over
a few short weeks. The course is free and the teachers are extremely
well known literary novelists. After signing up, access to videos,
transcripts, assignments, and tools will be at your fingertips.
Through video lectures and various writing assignments, the series
is a great way to learn about the writing process and interact with
other students/writers working on their craft. [CNH]
4. Fiction Writers Review
http://fictionwritersreview.com
If you want to write, read. And if you want
to read about fiction writing, a good place to start is the Fiction
Writers Review. Completely free and jam packed with writers writing
about writing, this continually updated online periodical will fill
you up with ideas and images. Start with the homepage, where you can
explore numerous Features, ranging from interviews to essays. Then
explore Popular Posts to see what other visitors have found
valuable. There is a lot of fantastic stuff on this site, and author
Philip Graham's praise is quite illuminating: "I no longer much
bother reading The New York Times Book Review, and your site is one
of the reasons- what great work you're doing for literature." [CNH]
5. The Official SCBWI Blog
http://scbwi.blogspot.com
There are many great resources for those
who want to write stories for adults. But what if your market is
more in the seven to twelve range? Well, then this site, the
official blog of the Society of Children's Book Writers and
Illustrators (SCBWI), is for you. Continually updated, blog entries
offer a variety of topics ranging from interviews with award winning
children's book authors, editors, and publishers to advice on
innovative marketing techniques, writing, and networking in
children's literature. It is a must for anyone looking to engage in
the wide world of writing and publishing for kids. [CNH]
===== Technical & Science Writing ===
6. Introduction to Technical Communication
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/writing-and-humanistic-studies/21w-732-5-introduction-to-technical-communication-explorations-in-scientific-and-technical-writing-fall-2006/
What if you could take a technical
communication class with a world class professor at a leading
university? What if it was all laid out for you - the readings, the
lectures, the assignments? And what if the only thing you had to pay
for was a couple of books? That's exactly what Dr. Donald N.S. Unger
and the MIT Open Courseware system are offering here. On this site,
viewers can browse the syllabus, have a look at the required
readings, and ponder the ten assignments that form the foundation of
this writing intensive class. Self-directed learners who want to
improve their technical and scientific writing need look no further
than this web-based adaptation of an MIT classic. [CNH]
7. The Purdue OWL: Conducting Research
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/8/
Good research and good writing go hand in
hand. This site from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) introduces
students to the principles of conducting good research. The clear
and helpful information on the site is divided into six digestible
categories: Research Overview, Conducting Primary Research,
Evaluating Sources of Information, Searching the World Wide Web,
Internet References, and Archival Research. Within each of these
categories are numerous informative subcategories, such as Research
Ethics and Searching with a Search Engine. This last area is a great
tool for students learning how to conduct better searches, including
information on Boolean operators. [CNH]
Also see Purdue Online Writing
Lab: ESL Teacher Resources ---
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/586/1/
8. Scientific Reports - The Writing Center
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/scientific-reports/
Learning to write a good scientific report
is no easy task. Thank goodness this handout from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center provides you with
everything you need to get started. Beginning with Background and
Pre-Writing and proceeding with explanations of the Introduction,
Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of research reports, the
site answers such burning questions as, "What should I do before
drafting the lab report?" and "When should you use a figure?" In
all, students new to the art of technical science writing will be
much comforted by this detailed and user-friendly explanation of the
entire report writing process. Also of interest, the Other Resources
section links out to more useful resources around the web. [CNH]
9. National Association of Science Writers
http://www.nasw.org
Founded in 1934, the National Association
of Science Writers (NASW) has always sought to "encourage conditions
that promote good science writing." Today, the NASW boasts a roster
of over 2,000 members, almost 300 of them students. The site itself
is a panoply of bustling information. Featured articles (for
instance, "Coming soon to this planet: More of us") touch into
issues relevant to science writers and bloggers, but also will
appeal to anyone with an interest in empirical research. A Twitter
feed, ripe with science-y links and hashtags, is available on the
homepage and more than a dozen writer resources are on bold display.
If you think science writing might be in your future, look here for
the latest on how it's done. [CNH]
10. Sentence Structure of Technical Writing
http://web.mit.edu/me-ugoffice/communication/technical-writing.pdf
This visually clear treatise outlines "Good
Tech Writers Practice" in three pieces of sage advice: Plan your
project, understand good technical writing, and know that writing is
a habit that takes time to develop. Presented as lecture materials
from Nicole Kelley at MIT, this 24-page PDF leads students of
technical writing through seven steps (planning, clarity, brevity,
simplicity, word choice, active voice, committing to writing as a
process), and is ripe with graphs, charts, tables, and other
compelling visuals. Adapted from The Craft of Scientific Writing by
Michael Alley and "The Science of Scientific Writing" by Gopen and
Swan, this is a great resource providing the basics of technical
writing in an easily digestible format. [CNH]
11. LabWrite for Students
http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/
This National Science Foundation funded
site from North Carolina State University "guides you through the
entire laboratory experience, from before you walk into the lab to
after you get back your graded report." Start with How to Use
LabWrite for a comprehensive Powerpoint overview of the program.
Then, navigate slowly through the steps of PreLab, InLab, PostLab,
and LabCheck, each of which provides careful instructions on
everything from formulating a hypothesis to presenting results.
Teachers will especially recognize this tool as a welcome supplement
to in class discussions of best lab practices. [CNH]
===== Literary Greats ===
12. The Official Site for Alice Walker
http://alicewalkersgarden.com
Alice Walker, who has won the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award, is one of America's best known
and well loved writers. Since publishing her first book of poems in
the late 1960s, she has been churning out books of essays, novels,
short stories, and poetry at a prodigious clip. Productivity,
however, is not her real calling card; what Walker is known for,
above all, is her compassion and clarity. This official site
contains dozens of Walker's recent blog posts on a wide range of
literary, artistic, and social issues, from her thoughts on books
and paintings to her fierce musings on the state of the
Palestine/Israel conflict. The About section provides a great
biography of Walker and her work. Additionally, Books and New Books
allows viewers to browse her ample collection of literary
achievements. [CNH]
13. Faulkner Collection
http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu
William Faulkner was born in 1897 in
Oxford, Mississippi and toiled away in relative obscurity until
unexpectedly winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. His
novels henceforth earned him two Pulitzer prizes, and several of
them are almost always listed on "best of" lists for 20th century
literature. This University of Virginia site is a Faulker treasure
trove. From the homepage, visitors can navigate to Contexts for an
overview of Faulkner and his times. Next, the Browse section
provides a list of Faulkner's recorded lectures and classes at UVA -
a rare and wonderful peek at a man from another era. Readers can
also search the site by Tapes & Transcripts and Rest of Archive.
Selected clips, organized by the author's novels, are also
available. [CNH]
14. The Official Site of Richard Feynman
http://www.richardfeynman.com
The video on the homepage of the Official
Site of Richard Feynman is reason enough to visit. It features
Feynman, the theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and best
selling author, lecturing to a group of undergraduates on the topic
of scientific and unscientific understandings of nature. The talk is
wildly entertaining, vivacious, and intellectually clear; viewers
are left with a vivid sense of who this man was and why he so deeply
impacted the popular imagination. A detailed About section provides
information on Feynman and his work, as well as quotes and a small
photo gallery. The Notable Works section lists his writings for
scientific and popular audiences, though, sadly, none of them are
available on the site. [CNH]
15. Charles Dickens at 200
http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Charles-Dickens-at-200
The Christmas Carol, which Dickens wrote in
the six weeks leading up to the Christmas of 1843, has continuously
been in print ever since, spawning adaptations into the forms of
plays, films, TV specials, mime performances, abstract performance
art, and opera. This online exhibition, hosted by the Morgan Library
& Museum in New York, features a leather bound manuscript of the
author's first draft, presented to his friend and debtor, Thomas
Mitton, just before it's publication. This excellent site allows
viewers to visit half a dozen pages of the original document,
replete with cross outs and scribbles, corrections and revisions.
The accompanying essays cover topics such as Dickens at Work, which
explains the sense of Dickens "writing at a fast pace, usually
enacting second thoughts and changes of mind in the heat of original
composition." [CNH]
16. Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No.
78, James Baldwin
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin
Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin moved to France in the late
1950s because he didn't want to be read as "merely a Negro; or,
even, merely a Negro writer." He lived the rest of his life in Paris
and the French Riviera, publishing fiction and essays that deeply
influenced American literature from afar. This interview with
Baldwin, published in the Paris Review a few years before the
author's death, touches on such topics as his choice to permanently
leave the United States for Europe, his writing process, and his
thoughts on race and racial justice. It's a rare gift to find a
freely available window into this revered writer's thoughts and
feelings in his later years.
James Baldwin's Advice on Writing ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/james-baldwin-advice-on-writing/?mc_cid=4c618627a2&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
===== Writing Tools ===
17. SelfControl
http://selfcontrolapp.com
Whether you're writing the Great American
Novel or just trying to finish a term paper by tomorrow morning, the
biggest threat to productivity is distraction. And the biggest
progenitor of distraction is the very machine you are working on to
write that novel or term paper. This open source app blocks access
to distracting websites, as well as mail servers and everything else
on the internet. Just set the timer, and write. [CNH]
18. Merriam-Webster
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary-apps/android-ipad-iphone-windows.htm
Every writer needs a dictionary. The
Merriam-Webster app provides "America's most useful and respected
dictionary," plus synonyms, antonyms, example sentences, and many
other bonus functions. It's free, it's easy, and it's available for
iPhone and iPad (iOS 7.0+) as well as Android (2.3.3+). [CNH]
Jensen Comment
Don't Forget Wikipedia's various writing modules.
Also check on the MOOCs focused on how to improve writing ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
From the Scout Report on September 19, 2014
ettrs ---
http://lettrs.com
Email, text, twitter, chat. Communication
has become fast, easy, and - as the lettrs website would like to
remind you - disposable. This app allows you to write and send
beautiful letters using a variety of templates. You can post letters
publicly, send them privately over text and email, and even, for a
small fee, mail them via USPS. This nifty app is currently available
for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.
"The Year's Best Books on Writing and Creativity," by Maria
Popova, Brain Pickings, December 18, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/18/best-books-writing-creativity/
After the year’s best books in
photography,
psychology and philosophy,
art and design,
history and biography,
science and technology,
“children’s” (though we all know
what that means), and
pets and animals, the season’s subjective
selection of
best-of reading lists concludes with the
year’s best reads on writing and creativity.
The question of why writers write holds
especial mesmerism, both as a piece of psychological voyeurism and
as a beacon of self-conscious hope that if we got a glimpse of the
innermost drivers of greats, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to
replicate the workings of genius in our own work. So why do
great writers write? George Orwell itemized
four universal motives.
Joan
Didion saw it as
access to her own mind. For
David
Foster Wallace, it was
about fun.
Joy Williams
found in it
a gateway from the darkness to the light.
For Charles Bukowski, it
sprang from the soul like a rocket.
Italo Calvino found in writing the comfort of
belonging to a collective enterprise.
Continued in a very long article
Eight Common Grammar Mistakes ---
https://www.openforum.com/articles/8-common-grammar-mistakes-you-should-never-make-again/?extlink=of-syndication-sb-p
English Grammar Lessons ---
http://www.englishgrammar.org/
Grammar Girl: Quick and Dirty Tips ---
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl
Grammar Girl Tips ---
www.englishgrammar.org
"Finding Joy in Writing,"
by Eva Lantsoght, Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/finding-joy-writing
This is great advice to give on a syllabus for students in courses that
have major writing components. The title maybe should be changed to
"Finding Work in Writing."
Subtle Distinctions in
Technical Terminology
Machine Learning, Big Data, Deep Learning, Data Mining, Statistics,
Decision & Risk Analysis, Probability, Fuzzy Logic FAQ ---
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=6465
"SAT Tip: Ignore Prepositional Phrases," Bloomberg
Businessweek, December 5, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-05/sat-tip-ignore-prepositional-phrases
Bob Jensen's threads on business, finance, and accounting glossaries
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbus.htm
Dictionary of Art Historians ---
http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/
22 lessons from Stephen King on how to be a great writer ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-king-on-how-to-write-2014-8#ixzz3j4E1KuYo
Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/stephen-kings-top-20-rules-for-writers.html
Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/stephen-king-creates-a-list-of-96-books-for-aspiring-writers-to-read.html
“Weird Al” Yankovic Releases “Word Crimes,” a Grammar Nerd Parody of “Blurred
Lines” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/weird-al-yankovic-releases-grammar-nerd-parody-of-blurred-lines.html
5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia
Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/5-very-long-literary-sentences.html
But never Hemingway.
From the Scout Report on February 14, 2014
Vocabulary Notebook ---
https://www.vocabularynotebook.com/
If you're looking for a fine way to get
your vocabulary up to speed, you should definitely check out
Vocabulary Notebook. Teachers can use the program to study words
with their students in the classroom and individuals can use it to
craft their own personalized vocabulary lists for reviewing while on
the go. This version is compatible with all operating systems.
The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (creative ideas in
writing, art, and photography) ---
http://www.salt.edu/
John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize
Speech ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/john_steinbecks_nobel_prize_speech_and_his_six_tips_for_the_aspiring_writer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The James Merrill Digital Archive Lets You Explore the Creative Life
of a Great American Poet ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-james-merrill-digital-archive.html
Jack Kerouac’s 30 Revelations for Writing Modern Prose
---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/jack_kerouacs_30_revelations_for_writing_modern_prose.html
Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, and Anne Enright Give Ten Candid
Pieces of Writing Advice Each ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/richard-ford-jonathan-franzen-and-anne-enright-give-ten-candid-pieces-of-writing-advice-each.html
Tom Clancy's Advice To Writers ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/tom-clancys-advice-to-writers-2013-10
When you’re trying to create a career as a
writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way
"Michael Lewis on Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of
Creativity," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, August 26, 2013
---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/26/michael-lewis-on-writing/
See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great
Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/princeton-digitizes-f-scott-fitzgeralds-handwritten-manuscripts.html
Helpers for Starting and Finishing the Writing of Your First Book
Walter Mosley, author of 25 books, gives tips,
tricks and practical advice for stalled writers in his new book, This Year You
Write Your Novel.
"Stop Reading and Start Writing," NPR, April 17, 2007 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9620861
Project for Excellence in Journalism: Journalism Tools ---
http://www.journalism.org/resources/j_tools
Advice from Artists on How to Overcome Creative Block, Handle
Criticism, and Nurture Your Sense of Self-Worth ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/28/creative-block-krysa/
Psychologists Go
Bipolar: Much Ado About Writing Style
Hell hath no fury like a style-guide user
scorned. When the American Psychological Association published the sixth
edition of its Publication Manual, in July, it didn't take long for APA
style mavens to pick up on errors and inconsistencies—and to start
complaining on e-mail lists and blogs . . . The association published
online an eight-page list of corrections, along with a set of corrected
sample papers. That wasn't enough to satisfy purchasers who considered
their new manuals faulty merchandise. At least one scholar, John D.
Foubert, an associate professor in the School of Educational Studies at
Oklahoma State University, called for a boycott of the edition by
scholars, instructors, and journal editors. The cumulative outrage
finally carried the day. The association has just announced that it will
"recycle" remaining softcover copies of the sixth edition. Anyone who
gets in touch with the association between November 2 and December 15
and asks for a replacement will receive a free copy of the emended
second printing, according to Rhea Faberman, director of communications.
(She recommends that people contact the APA's service center to submit
those requests.)
Jennifer Howard, "Hot Type: Style Guide's Errors Prompt a Recall and
Doubts About Manuals' Value," Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 27, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Style-Guides-Errors-Prompt-a/48947/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily
Routine," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, Aubust 25, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/08/25/the-psychology-of-writing-daily-routine/
How to sculpt an environment that optimizes
creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term
memory through the right retrieval cues.
Reflecting on the ritualization of
creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that
“air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.”
Samuel Johnson similarly contended that
“a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to
it.” And yet some of history’s most
successful and prolific writers were women and men of
religious daily routines and
odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself
ended up sticking to a
peculiar daily routine.)
Such strategies, it turns out, may be
psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. In the altogether
illuminating 1994 volume
The Psychology of Writing (public
library), cognitive psychologist
Roland T. Kellogg explores how work schedules,
behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of
time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time
is spent in a state of
boredom,
anxiety, or
creative flow.
Kellogg writes:
[There is] evidence that environments,
schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and
amplify performance… The principles of memory retrieval suggest
that certain practices should amplify performance. These
practices encourage a state of flow rather than one of anxiety
or boredom. Like strategies, these other aspects of a writer’s
method may alleviate the difficulty of attentional overload. The
room, time of day, or ritual selected for working may enable or
even induce intense concentration or a favorable motivational or
emotional state. Moreover, in accordance with encoding
specificity, each of these aspects of method may trigger
retrieval of ideas, facts, plans, and other relevant knowledge
associated with the place, time, or frame of mind selected by
the writer for work.
Kellogg reviews a vast body of research to
extract a few notable findings. Among them is the role of background
noise, which seems to fall on a bell curve of fecundity:
High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance
on complex tasks but improves it on simple, boring tasks — noise
tends to raise arousal level, which can be useful when trying to
stay alert during mindless and monotonous work, but can agitate you
out of creative flow when immersed in the kind of work that requires
deliberate, reflective thought. (The psychology of writing, after
all, as Kellogg notes in the introduction, is a proxy for the
psychology of thinking.) The correlation between skill level and
task difficulty also plays a role — feeling like your skills are not
up to par raises your level of anxiety, which in turn makes noise
more bothersome.
Continued in article
Pale King (an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace at the time of his
suicide) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_King
Read David Foster Wallace’s Notes From a Tax
Accounting Class, Taken to Help Write The Pale King ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/david-foster-wallaces-notes-from-a-tax-accounting-class.html
. . .
In writing
The Pale King, a novel of 1980s IRS
agents stultified by boredom in Peoria, Illinois,
David Foster Wallace joined the latter
group. Although Wallace had left an unfinished manuscript when he
committed suicide in 2008, he had spent more than a decade working
on it. In fact, a year after the release of his opus,
Infinite Jest, Wallace enrolled in
accounting classes at Illinois State University to learn about
precisely what IRS agents did.
According to The New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler,
the author began “plowing through shelves
of technical literature, transcribing notes on tax scams, criteria
for audit and the problem of ‘agent terrorism’ into a series of
notebooks.”
Today, we bring you two pages of his notes
(click the images to enlarge). In the first, above, Wallace has
jotted down a few key points about
accrual and deferral, alongside what is
likely a note to self on the subject’s difficulty: “A BITCH.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Butterick's Practical Typography ---
http://practicaltypography.com
The Words That Are Most Known To Only Brits And Americans ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-words-most-known-to-the-us-compared-to-the-uk-2014-8#ixzz3BJbPJe5n
"David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who
We Are," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, August 11, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/08/11/david-foster-wallace-quack-this-way/
PennSound Cinema (on writing and literature) ---
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/video.php
Australian Slang Vocabulary ---
http://www.australianslang.org/
Don't equate pauses in sentences to place marks for commas
"Where Do I Use Commas?" by Mignon Fogerty, Grammar Girl,
February 15, 2013 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/where-do-i-use-commas.aspx
"Toward" Versus "Towards"
From the Grammar Girl Newsletter on July 16, 2013
"Toward" or "Towards"?
Jamie, Mia, Beverly, and Gen all wrote to
me wondering what the difference is between "toward" and "towards."
"Toward" and "towards" are both correct and
interchangeable: you can use either one because they mean the same
thing.
Many sources say the "s" is more common in
Britain than in the United States. The safest choice is to consider
your audience:
If your audience is primarily American, use
"toward." If your audience is primarily British, use "towards."
From Grammar Girl on August 21, 2013
"Further" Versus "Farther"
"Farther" is for physical distances, and "further"
is for metaphorical distances.
How much farther do we have to walk? He won't take
the case further.
From Grammar Girl on August 27, 2013
"Lay" Versus "Lie"
In the present tense, "to lie" is something
you do, and "to lay" is something you do to an object.
I want to lie on the couch. Lay the book on
the table.
The past tense is trickier because "lay" is
the past tense of "lie."
Yesterday, I lay on the couch. Yesterday, I
laid the book on the table.
Apophasis (Paralipsis versus Proslepsis) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeteritio
Zeugma ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma
"The ‘Times’ Tries Zeugma, and Readers’ Patience," by Ben
Yagoda, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review,
September 10, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/09/10/the-times-tries-zeugma-and-readers-patience/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Lewis Carroll’s 8 Still-Relevant Rules For Letter-Writing ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/lewis-carrolls-8-still-relevant-rules-for-letter-writing.html
Aaron Sopher Collection: Enoch Pratt Free Library ---
http://epfl.mdch.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/scsc
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project,
1936-1940 ---
http://memory.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html
What Books Do Writers Teach?: Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart’s
Syllabi from Columbia University ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/zadie-smith-and-gary-shteyngarts-syllabi-from-columbia-university.html
The Curious History of Punctuation: Author Reveals the Beginnings of the #,
¶, ☞, and More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-history-of-punctuation.html
From the Scout Report on August 23, 2013
Fidus Writer ---
http://fiduswriter.org/
The Fidus Writer is an application that
academics will be most excited to learn about. This version
functions as an online collaborative editor made specifically for
academics who need to use citations and formulas. The program is
focused on the content rather than the layout, which means users can
publish it later in a variety of formats. The site also contains an
FAQ and information about updates. This version is compatible with
all operating systems running Google Chrome.
Jensen Note
The Wolfram Alfa site is fantastic for computing answers from
formulas, generating graphs, and formatting formulas for documents
---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
For illustrations see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm
"Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should
Read," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, June 17, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/17/nabokov-inspiration-1972/
RIP, Elmore Leonard: The Beloved Author's 10 Rules of Writing ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/21/elmore-leonard-10-rules-of-writing/
In “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” Artist John Koenig Names
Feelings that Leave Us Speechless ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/in_the_dictionary_of_obscure_sorrows_artist_john_koenig_names_feelings_that_leave_us_speechless.html
"Ex Post Facto," by Michael W. Flynn, Legal Lad,
February 16, 2013 ---
http://legallad.quickanddirtytips.com/legal-ex-post-facto.aspx
"The Adverb Is Not Your Friend: Stephen King on Simplicity of
Style," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, March 13, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-adverbs/
"Sorted Books Revisited: Artist Nina Katchadourian’s Playfully
Arranged Book Spine Sentences," by Maria Popova, Brain
Pickings, March 15, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/15/sorted-books-nina-katchadourian-book/
Computers and Composition Online ---
http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/home.ht
In preparing
the Spring 2012 issue of Computers and
Composition Online with our ever talented Senior Editor
Joe Erickson, I am struck by the ways in which many of these
pieces so strongly connect to the composition classroom and
profile a range of tools that remediate both the composing
process and the writing classroom itself, questioning not only
what writing is but also the spaces in which it is taught and
assessed.
Our
Theory into Practice section features
five complementary webtexts. First, in “Gender and Games in a
First-Year Writing Class,” Rebekah Shultz Colby reports the
results of series of case studies with women enrolled in a World
of Warcraft themed writing course to determine their gaming
literacy practices and the impact of those practices on their
attitudes about the course. Clearly, a game-based composition
course provides alternative composing content and form, and as
Cynthia Davidson addresses in "Cyborg Literacy Acquisition
Through Second Life: Contesting 'Old' School Spaces with
vPortfolios,” students need to develop awareness of the impact
of such virtual environments on their learning process. Davidson
argues for SecondLife as one space among several where students
can create eportfolios that foster such awareness. Just as
Davidson documents the ways in which writerly identity spans a
range of virtual contexts, Bryan Lutz’ “Composing to Change
Nations: Teaching New Media and the Arab Spring in First-Year
Composition” bridges the gap between the academic and the
political in his call to harness the power of social movements
online in our own writing classrooms through blogs and other Web
2.0 tools. Virginia Tucker’s "How is a Forum Community Like a
Classroom? Dramatistic Lessons from an Online Community" also
makes a compelling connection between the academy and the
community in the analysis of the various types of
knowledge-making discourse that define the community and how
such strategies can and should be implemented in our own online
writing courses. The final piece I discuss in this section,
Laura R. Micciche, Hannah J. Rule, and Liv Stratman’s
“Multimodality, Performance, and Teacher Training,” explores the
impact multimodality had on teacher identity in the context of a
graduate-level course Micciche taught, Teaching College Writing.
Such reflection on the part of both teachers and students is a
vital part of successfully integrating technology into the
college-level writing spaces.
This
spring’s
Virtual Classroom section includes Joe
Bisz’ “Composition Games for the Classroom,” which aligns gaming
strategies with various aspects of the composing process and
provides a range of useful resources. Meanwhile, in
“Internationalizing Campus through Rhetoric, Writing, and
Multimodal Compositions,” Erin Laverick profiles the role
multimodal composing played in a project designed to allow
international students at the University of Findlay to have a
voice in plans to make the campus more inclusive. Finally, in
“Forming Assessment of Machinima Video,” Dirk Remley continues
his important work with Second Life and machinima video to help
teachers consider “how criteria with which they are familiar may
be reconceptualized to permit assessment of multimodal
products.”
Our
Professional Development section
includes Julie Daoud’s “Probiotics for Composition-Health?
Building an Ecology of Memoir Writing and Blended Learning,” in
which Daoud reflects on the successes and challenges of a
semester-long study of memoir writing and the
technologically-supported activities related to the course
readings. Daoud concludes that teachers must be willing to
contemplate the ever-changing factors that provide an optimum
ecology for a learning-centered classroom, including a blended
approach between online-and-face to face activities. Given
Daoud’s point, it is fitting that the section concludes with a
video tribute to one of the field’s founders, Gail Hawisher, as
contributors from across the country discuss the ways in which
her groundbreaking work has paved the ways for the successful
integration of technology into the teaching of writing.
Last but
not least, our
Reviews section features three reviews
by our very own: Katherine Fredlund’s review of the interactive
slideware tool VoiceThread, Em Hurford’s review of Bradley
Dilger and Jeff Rice’s award-winning collection
From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup,
and Estee Beck’s review of Multiliteracy
Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric,
edited by David Sheridan and James Inman. Such efforts by our
talented group of current and former Rhetoric and Writing
doctoral students is a powerful reminder to me that the success
and sustainability of both Computers and
Composition Online and now Computers
and Composition print is a collective effort and
represents one of the significant collaborations of my career
for which I am eternally grateful.
Kris Blair
Editor
Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of
His Newly Released Letters ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/
New “Hemingway” App Promises to Make Your Writing “Strong and Clear” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/new-hemingway-app-promises-make-writing-strong-clear.html
"Polishing Your Prose How to refine your writing, word by word,
phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence," by Steven M. Cahn,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Polishing-Your-Prose-Word-by/137327/
Here is the opening of an early draft of an
essay about teaching mathematics written years ago by a celebrated
professor. As he himself has acknowledged, he is a less than gifted
writer, and our goal is to maintain his ideas while presenting them
more clearly and gracefully.
It is important to recognize the fact that
every subject, given that its content is not totally reducible to
some other subject area, presents a special set of pedagogic
problems arising as a result of the distinctive character of their
contents and their essential nature. The problems may be regarded as
particularizations of the general pedagogical considerations which
must be treated by any and all teachers who seek to seriously
discharge his or her educational responsibilities in a highly
efficacious manner.
Where to begin?
The opening construction ("It is important
to recognize the fact that ...") is overwritten. Ninety-five percent
of the time when you write "the fact that," you can cut "the fact."
Let's do so here, and the phrase now reads: "It is important to
recognize that ..."
Better, but can we cut more? How about "It
is"? When "it" has no antecedent, the combination is best avoided,
and here is an ideal opportunity to excise it. But why not go
further? After all, these opening words merely alert us to an
"important" thought. Why not eliminate the warning and simply state
that thought?
The sentence now begins: "Every subject."
How about the next phrase: "given that its
content is not totally reducible to some other subject area"?
First, the adverb "totally" can be cut with
no damage. Either something is "reducible" or it isn't. How about
"area"? Can we distinguish between a "subject" and a "subject area"?
Not easily. Let's remove "area."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What is interesting is the question of when to take time to polish
grammar and prose. Seldom is the time right when your sending a text
message. Seldom is the time right when you are blogging, because
spending a lot of time on the quality of writing in your blog means less
time for the depth and breadth of your blog.
Obviously the time is right when you are crafting a special essay for
your Website, providing writing examples for your students and peers,
and preparing something to be refereed for publication.
The Oxford Comma
"Commas and Feelings," by Anne Curzan, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, March 14, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/03/14/commas-and-feelings/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
A student in my “History of the English
Language” course stopped me after class a few weeks ago and asked,
“I was just wondering—how do you feel about the Oxford comma?” She
could have asked about the rationale behind the Oxford comma (the
comma after the penultimate item in a list—e.g., apples, chocolate,
and peanut butter) or about the history of the Oxford comma. But
instead, she asked how I felt about the Oxford comma, the suggestion
being that a punctuation mark could be meaningful enough to arouse
personal feelings.
I like the Oxford comma (she was right: I
do have feelings about it), and I told her so. I am not an advocate
of comma proliferation, but this one can support clarity and even
usefully disambiguate some lists—e.g., my two brothers, the doctor,
and the nurse (to indicate there are four people, not just my
brothers, who happen to be a doctor and a nurse). That said, it
should be noted that there occur very few such lists. I tend to use
the Oxford comma in my own prose, and I tend to notice when others
don’t.
Continued in article
"The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen
Theses: Walter Benjamin’s Timeless Advice on Writing," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, April 15, 2013
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/15/the-writers-technique-in-thirteen-theses-walter-benjamin/
From the Scout Report on February 15, 2013
TwinDocs ---
https://www.twindocs.com/EN/
TwinDocs is a novel way to upload documents
to a personal storage device quickly. Visitors need to sign up for a
free account and then they can get started. The TwinDocs application
gives users the ability to access any document remotely from
technology such as an iPhone, iPad, or Android device. The free
version of TwinDocs gives users 1GB of storage and the ability to
store 25 documents a month. This version is compatible with all
operating systems.
ProfessorWord ---
http://www.professorword.com/
If you want to learn new words quickly, you
can take a look at Professor Word. This bookmarklet gives users the
ability to learn these words while surfing the Internet. The
application can be customized to help users study for the SAT or
ACT, learn English, or to just improve their vocabulary.
ProfessorWord recognizes over 5,000 SAT and ACT vocabulary words, so
it is a powerful tool. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
From the Scout Report on June 28, 2013
Critic Markup ---
http://criticmarkup.com/
Everyone's a critic, but some of those
critics use Markdown, Sublime Text, or other text editors instead of
word. The CriticMarkup tool allows authors and editors to track
changes to documents in plain text, which is most useful. Visitors
can use the program to highlight insertions, deletions,
substitutions, and comments. To see a full list of tools that Critic
Markup is integrated with, visit the website.
New York Public Library's Surprisingly Tricky Online Spelling Bee ---
http://pages.email.nypl.org/spellingbeequiz
"Grammar to the Rescue," by Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle of
Higher Education, December 20, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/12/20/grammar-to-the-rescue/
I only recently got around to reading an
article by Peg Tyre in The Atlantic in October
which described a very successful experiment
in teaching writing at a high school on Staten Island (Lucy Ferriss
discussed the controversy that followed it
here on October 11). The story has an
oddly conservative twist. Let me summarize a bit.
In subjects like English and history, New
Dorp High School students were failing way too often on the essay
parts of the Regents exams (a New York State graduation
requirement). They could write a sentence or two but not a
convincing and coherent paragraph.
Trying to figure out why, one teacher
developed a quiz on coordinators (traditional grammar’s
“coordinating conjunctions”): and, but, for,
nor, or, so, and yet. The
surprising result was that many students seemed unable to use them
effectively.
This led to a consideration of words like
although, because, despite, if,
since, unless, etc. These are traditionally called
“subordinating conjunctions” but more accurately treated as
prepositions taking clause complements (see
The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Chapter 7).
An exercise on Of Mice and Men that involved completing a
sentence that begins “Although George … ” drew some predictable
sentences like Although George worked very hard, he could not
attain the American Dream, but also answers like “Although
George and Lenny were friends.” Many students weren’t clear on the
difference between an independent clause and a phrase containing a
subordinate clause. They normally never used although, and
hardly knew what it was for.
The article relates the relevant background
from the recent history of teacher training in America as follows:
Fifty years ago, elementary-school
teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure
of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid
paragraphs into full-blown essays. Some kids mastered it, but
many did not. About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven
instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education
began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was
that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Stephen
Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State
University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give
students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that
writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work.
Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to
be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence
structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative
expression.
New Dorp decided to try going back to old
ways. They brought in Judith Hochman, former head of a White Plains
private school with a great record of teaching writing. Hochman’s
students construct prose the old-fashioned way:
They are explicitly taught how to turn
ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex
sentences from simple ones … . They are instructed on how to use
appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later
on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to
pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea
on their own.
The New Dorp teachers started revamping
their whole curriculum under Hochman’s tutelage. Essay practice
became a part of almost every subject. A chemistry lesson on
hydrogen and oxygen would be followed up by getting the students to
write sentences with subordinate clauses.
With although as the prompt, they
had to construct something like “Although hydrogen is explosive and
oxygen supports combustion, a compound of them puts out fires.”
With the prompt unless: “Unless
hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and
dangerous.”
Or given if: “If hydrogen and
oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being
explosive and supporting combustion.”
Comprehension of the subject matter
improved dramatically under this regime. But the crucial thing is
that writing in general also improved. Pass rates for the Regents
tests in English and global history soared. The school’s dropout
rate had been 40 percent in 2006, and it has fallen to 20 percent.
Apparently students’ ability to write prose
that looks literate and serious can be decisively improved through
the perhaps unlikely strategy of explicitly drilling one or two
dozen common words that function as attachment points for coordinate
or subordinate finite clauses.
Perhaps the list of clause-taking
prepositions could be lengthened a little (with given,
lest, notwithstanding, provided, since,
while, etc.), and maybe it would be useful to get students
to try using a third class of useful words, the adverbs that
function as connective adjuncts (however, moreover,
nevertheless/nonetheless, therefore,
though, thus, and so on).
Continued in article
Spellchecker.org
Spelling, grammar, and writing checker ---
http://www.grammarcheck.net !
“I” is singular, so why does
it take plural verbs
Why do we say “I go to the store on Fridays” instead of “I goes to the store on
Fridays”?
by Neil Whitman, Grammar Girl, May 28, 2013 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/why-does-i-take-a-plural-verb.aspx
This is the "whole ball of wax"
"Crazy English Idioms," by Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl,
March 7, 2013 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/english-idioms.aspx
Ebonics and Why It is controversially the Required Language Skill in
the Oakland School System Rather Than Standard American English ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics
Digital Story Telling at Ohio State University ---
http://digitalstory.osu.edu/
Discover
digital storytelling at Ohio State! Join faculty, staff and
students from a variety of departments who use digital storytelling
in academia, research and outreach. We offer a
workshop program, coordinate storytelling
events and showcase stories created by the OSU community.
Participate in
a
digital storytelling workshop! Plan to
attend our winter workshop. Join in story circles to craft your
script, then learn software to produce your multimedia story. Our
next workshop is December 17-19, 2012. Please check back soon for
registration information.
Do you belong to a group that would like a
custom workshop? Find out about planning a
workshop for your group.
Learn in a
hands-on workshop or by reviewing our resources and tutorials.
Please explore the site for more information.
June 25, 2013 message from Bryan A.
Garner and LawProse <lawprose@bridgemailsystem.com>
Forego
vs. forgo
Confusing these terms is a persistent error in legal and other
writing.
Forego traditionally means "to go before; to precede in
time or place." But it's most common in the participial forms
foregone and, less often, foregoing.
Ex.: The outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Ex.: In an effective brief, the discussion flows
from the foregoing statement of facts.
Ex.: The agenda states that the secretary's
report will forego the board's vote. (Rare.)
Forgo means "to do without; to pass up voluntarily;
waive; renounce."
Ex.: He will forgo the claim to the property
if Smith settles before the trial starts.
Ex.: Don't forgo the opportunity to persuade
the judge on the first page of your brief.
Here's a good way to remember the distinction: think of
fore as in before (things in sequence), and think of
forgo's resemblance to forget (a common reason that
things are not done). One of the most common errors in legal and
other writing is the use of forego where forgo is
meant. For example:
- "[T]he record does not indicate the degree of
counsel's awareness or, more important, whether the decision to
forego
[read forgo] presentation of such evidence was premised
upon strategic or tactical concerns." Commonwealth v. Hughes,
865 A.2d 761, 814 (Pa. 2004) (forego used for forgo
four times).
- "But the eye-popping purchase price offered .
. . raises fears that to recoup its investment, Clipper would
forego [read forgo] its subsidies and attempt to
raise rents, eventually forcing out many of Starrett's 14,000
tenants." "Protecting Affordable Housing," N.Y. Times, 18
Feb. 2007, § 14, at 11.
How common is the
misuse? It's so common that modern dictionaries list forego
as a variant of forgo. In 1983, the President's Commission
for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine used it in the title
and throughout its report "Deciding to Forego Life-Sustaining
Treatment." It wasn't changed when the report was updated in 2006.
The opposite mistake -- misusing forgo for forego
-- is less common:
- "Based on the forgoing [read
foregoing] authorities, we hold that the allegations . . .
state a cause of action . . . ." Garrido v. Burger King Corp.,
558 So.2d 79, 83 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1990).
Forewent and forwent
are the past-tense forms, foregone and forgone the
past-participles. A foregone conclusion is a predictable
result (the conclusion "went before" the question because everyone
knew the answer before the question was posed). But be careful not
to use foregone when forgone is intended {the lawyer
explained that her client had foregone [read forgone]
settlement of the claim by refusing to respond to the creditor's
calls and e-mails}.
We hope that the foregoing discussion will help you forgo any
confusion.
Sources:
Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage 371-72
(3d ed. 2011).
Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage 122 (1982).
R.W. Burchfield, The New Fowler's Modern English
Usage 306 (3d ed. 1996).
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
490-91 (11th ed. 2011).
Thanks to Jeffrey R. Babbin for suggesting this topic.
Correction to LawProse Lesson #122 (it's vs. its): The
quotation from United States v. Boardwalk Motor Sports, Ltd.
should have been attributed to the dissent. Our apologies to Judge
Jerry E. Smith, the author of the majority opinion, for this error.
Writing for Web Crawlers
From a Grammar Girl newsletter on March 19, 2013
Although both "pled" and "pleaded" are in
common use, language sticklers prefer "pleaded," and professional
writers seem to have received the message: a Google News search
returns about twenty times as many hits for "pleaded guilty" than
for "pled guilty." To be safe, you should say, "They pleaded
guilty."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This is something I'd not given thought to previously. If you want your
documents to be found by users of Web search engines, it may well make a
difference how you write your modules and/or whether you add
parenthetical inserts to quotations.
For example, if you paste a quote that uses the phrase "pled
earnestly" you may want change the quotation into "pled (pleaded)
earnestly" or "pled earnestly (pleaded earnestly)" just for the
Web crawlers.
One of my all-time favorite authors is Sherwood Anderson. He's
one of the authors I've read and re-read and re-read again in my dreams
of becoming a great fiction writer. Sigh!
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Sherwood Anderson ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwood_Anderson
"Sherwood Anderson on Art and Life: A Letter of Advice to His
Teenage Son, 1927," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
January 9, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/09/sherwood-anderson-letter-to-son/
. . .
The following year, after Anderson and his wife took
eighteen-year-old John and his sister Marion to Europe, the boy
remained in Paris to study painting. Drawing on his own artistic
experience and the parallels between writing and painting, Sherwood
sent John another poignant letter of advice in April of 1927, adding
to
history’s finest definitions of art and stressing
the importance of discipline in cultivating “talent”:
In relation to painting.
Don’t be carried off your feet by
anything because it is modern — the latest thing.
Go to the Louvre often and spend a good
deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.
Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so
unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without
your having to think of your hands.
Then you can think of the thing before
you.
Draw things that have some meaning to
you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t
matter so much.
It’s what you feel about it, what it
means to you.
A masterpiece could be made of a dish
of turnips.
Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings.
Try to remain humble. Smartness kills
everything.
The object of art is not to make
salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Any cleanness I have in my own life is
due to my feeling for words.
The fools who write articles about me
think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to
produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing
or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I
produced anything with any solidity to it.
[…]
The thing of course, is to make
yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a
stupor.
The point of being an artist is that
you may live.
[…]
You won’t arrive. It is an endless
search.
I write as though you were a man. Well,
you must know my heart is set on you. It isn’t your success I
want.
There is a possibility of your having a
decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a
man of you.
Jensen Comment
Sherwood Anderson has a long bibliography of great works and a long
posting on Wikipedia. His son John remained an unknown, which shows that
great works take more than great advice. One interesting point is how
Sherwood Anderson's talent interacted with his mental health.
Anderson moved to Chicago near his Brother
Karl's home and worked as a manual laborer until near the turn of
the century, when he enlisted in the United States Army. He was
called up but did not see action in Cuba during the Spanish-American
War. After the war, in 1900, he enrolled at Wittenberg University in
Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a job as a copywriter in
Chicago and became more successful.
In 1904, he married Cornelia Pratt Lane
(1877-1967), the daughter of Robert Lane, a wealthy Ohio
businessman. The couple had three children—Robert Lane (1907-1951),
John Sherwood (1908-1995), and Marion (aka Mimi, 1911-1996)—while
living in Cleveland, Ohio, and later Elyria, Ohio, where Anderson
managed a mail-order business and paint manufacturing firms.
In November 1912 he suffered a mental
breakdown and disappeared for four days. He was found in a drugstore
in Cleveland, having walked almost thirty miles. Soon after, he left
his position as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in
Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and three small children to pursue
the writer's life of creativity. Anderson described the entire
episode as "escaping from his materialistic existence," which
garnered praise from many young writers, who used his courage as an
example.
Anderson moved back to Chicago, working
again for a publishing and advertising company. In 1916, he divorced
Cornelia and, three days later, married his mistress, sculptor
Tennessee Claflin Mitchell (1874—1929).
I like to think that I'm not a famous author because I could not
escape my materialistic existence. But something in my brain admits that
it takes a whole lot more than such an escape from one's self and one's
dependents. History is replete with bums on the rails who remained bums
on the rails.
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Question
As robots take increasingly displace labor in almost any market, are
writers and music composers safe?
"Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds Of Thousands
Of Books On Amazon," by David J. Hull, Security Hub, December
13, 2012 ---
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School,
has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s
created a computer system that can write books about specific
subjects in about 20 minutes. The patented algorithm has so far
generated hundreds of thousands of books. In fact, Amazon lists over
100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed
for his company,
ICON Group
International, Inc. This doesn’t
include the private works, such as internal
reports, created for companies or licensing of the system itself
through a separate entity called
EdgeMaven Media.
Parker is not so much an author as a
compiler, but the end result is the same: boatloads of written
works.
Now these books aren’t your typical reading
material. Common categories include specialized technical and
business reports, language dictionaries bearing the “Webster’s”
moniker (which is in the public domain), rare disease overviews, and
even crossword puzzle books for learning foreign languages, but they
all have the same thing in common: they are automatically generated
by software.
The system automates this process by
building databases of information to source from, providing an
interface to customize a query about a topic, and creating templates
for information to be packaged. Because digital ebooks and
print-on-demand services have become commonplace, topics can be
listed in Amazon without even being “written” yet.
The abstract for the U.S. patent issued in
2007 describes the system:
The present invention provides for
the automatic authoring, marketing, and or distributing of title
material. A computer automatically authors material. The
material is automatically formatted into a desired format,
resulting in a title material. The title material may also be
automatically distributed to a recipient. Meta material,
marketing material, and control material are automatically
authored and if desired, distributed to a recipient. Further,
the title may be authored on demand, such that it may be in any
desired language and with the latest version and content.
To be clear, this isn’t just software alone
but a computer system designated to write for a specific genre. The
system’s database is filled with genre-relevant content and specific
templates coded to reflect domain knowledge, that is, to be written
according to an expert in that particular field/genre. To avoid
copyright infringement, the system is designed to avoid plagiarism,
but the patent aims to create original but not necessarily creative
works. In other words, if any kind of content can be broken down
into a formula, then the system could package related, but different
content in that same formula repeatedly ad infinitum.
Parker explains the process in this nearly
10-minute video:
Scroll down to the video ---
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
Continued in article
Jensen Questions
If you publish an average of 1,267 books per year in your discipline can
you possibly be denied promotion and tenure?
Will you continued to require a single essay that counts 50% of the
grade in your theory course?
How do you sue an anonymous computer for plagiarism?
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Case on Professional Writing in the Work Place
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on June 22, 2012
This Embarrasses You and I*
by: Sue Shellenbarger
Jun 19, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com ![WSJ Video]()
TOPICS: Accounting
SUMMARY: The article highlights the need for
correct grammar in the workplace, particularly in corporate
interactions with customers and other outsiders. It describes many
corporations providing grammar training at the workplace, including
holding spelling bees and other grammar-oriented competitions to get
employees' competitive juices flowing. The narrative describes many
industries including accounting via a paragraph about the chief
internal auditor at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is helpful for
all instructors wanting to motivate students in their writing
efforts for these WSJ Reviews. Good references to aid accounting
instructors in leading this discussion are May, Claire B. and Gordon
S. May, Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants, 9th Edition.
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2011. ISBN #9780132567244
Strunk, W. Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 5th Edition.
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2009. ISBN 978-0-205-31342-6.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Identify all professions or industries
highlighted in the article.
2.
(Advanced) How have firms in each of the industries listed
above been affected by diminished use of proper grammar?
3.
(Introductory) According to the author's discussion in the
related video, what is the overall major concern with slippage in
business use of appropriate English grammar?
4.
(Advanced) Take the online quiz offered in the interactive
graphic for the article available at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html?KEYWORDS=grammar+workplace#project%3DWORKFAM0619%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
How many questions did you answer correctly? List all questions you
answered incorrectly for which you do not know the reason behind
your error.
SMALL GROUP ASSIGNMENT:
Assign the WSJ article in one class. Then, in the ensuing class,
break students into groups to discuss the errors listed in answer to
question 4. Have students help one another to determine the reasons
for the errors, then report out: 1. The most common grammatical
errors in the group. 2. The reasons for the errors. Conduct
discussion to ensure that all students have correct reasons for
solutions to the common errors.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"This Embarrasses You and I*," by: Sue Shellenbarger, The
Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid&mg=reno64-wsj
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent
staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don
Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse
"is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations
officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences
with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for
each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of
grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping
skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang
and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create
bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause
communications errors, many managers say.
There's no easy fix. Some bosses and
co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult
business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this
year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing
employee-training programs to improve employees' grammar and other
skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and
AARP.
"I'm shocked at the rampant illiteracy" on
Twitter, says Bryan A. Garner, author of "Garner's Modern American
Usage" and president of LawProse, a Dallas training and consulting
firm. He has compiled a list of 30 examples of "uneducated English,"
such as saying "I could care less," instead of "I couldn't care
less," or, "He expected Helen and I to help him," instead of "Helen
and me."
Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at
letters employees were sending to customers at a Jersey City, N.J.,
hair- and skin-product marketer when she joined the firm in 2009.
The letters included grammar and style mistakes and were written "as
if they were speaking to a friend," says Ms. Ferrier, a
human-resources executive. She had employees use templates to
eliminate mistakes and started training programs in business
writing.
At Work
Readers weigh in on the grammar gaffes and
malapropisms that make them fume. Share yours.
Most participants in the Society for Human
Resource Management-AARP survey blame younger workers for the skills
gap. Tamara Erickson, an author and consultant on generational
issues, says the problem isn't a lack of skill among 20- and
30-somethings. Accustomed to texting and social networking, "they've
developed a new norm," Ms. Erickson says.
At RescueTime, for example, grammar rules
have never come up. At the Seattle-based maker of
personal-productivity software, most employees are in their 30s.
Sincerity and clarity expressed in "140 characters and sound bytes"
are seen as hallmarks of good communication—not "the king's
grammar," says Jason Grimes, 38, vice president of product
marketing. "Those who can be sincere, and still text and Twitter and
communicate on Facebook—those are the ones who are going to
succeed."
Also, some grammar rules aren't clear,
leaving plenty of room for disagreement. Tom Kamenick battled fellow
attorneys at a Milwaukee, Wis., public-interest law firm over use of
"the Oxford comma"—an additional comma placed before the "and" or
"or" in a series of nouns. Leaving it out can change the meaning of
a sentence, Mr. Kamenick says: The sentence, "The greatest
influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna,"
means something different from the sentence, "The greatest
influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna,"
he says. (The first sentence implies the writer has two celebrity
sisters; the second says the sisters and the stars are different
individuals.) After Mr. Kamenick asserted in digital edits of briefs
and papers that "I was willing to go to war on that one," he says,
colleagues backed down, either because they were convinced, or "for
the sake of their own sanity and workplace decorum."
Patricia T. O'Conner, author of a humorous
guidebook for people who struggle with grammar, fields workplace
disputes on a blog she cowrites, Grammarphobia. "These disagreements
can get pretty contentious," Ms. O'Conner says. One employee
complained that his boss ordered him to make a memo read, "for John
and I," rather than the correct usage, "for John and me," Ms.
O'Conner says.
In workplace-training programs run by Jack
Appleman, a Monroe, N.Y., corporate writing instructor, "people are
banging the table," yelling or high-fiving each other during grammar
contests he stages, he says. "People get passionate about grammar,"
says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing.
Continued in article
March 28, 2013 (LawProse Lesson 111) from Brian A., Garner
Why do plural possessives cause so much
trouble?
Much confusion surrounds plural possessives. Is it as
simple as adding an apostrophe to the final -s? What if the
plural noun doesn't end in -s? How do you form a possessive
for units of time? What about joint possessives? The list goes on.
This confusion became apparent when our last LawProse Lesson,
on the misuses of apostrophes, generated a few e-mails from readers
objecting to our illustration of a plural possessive: The
fugitive fled to the Joneses' house, not the Smiths'. That
example is correct. Why is it not "Jones's house" and "Smith's
house"? Because the fugitive fled to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Jones
(the Joneses, plural), not to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(the Smiths, plural). This is a spot-on illustration of the
general rule for plural possessives:
When forming a plural possessive, use the word's
standard plural form and add an apostrophe after
the final -s.
Pluralize first, then form the possessive. If the fugitive had fled
to the house of Mark Jones {Mark Jones's house} or to the
house of Connor Smith {Connor Smith's house}, then the
readers' objections would have been sustained.
Of course, as with most rules, there are nuances. So here are
some go-to guidelines for the most common issues that arise with
plural possessives:
Irregular plurals -- that is, those not ending in -s.
Add -'s just as you would to the singular form {children's
or men's clothing} {the three mice's cages}.
Units of time or value. For times or values, follow the
general rule and add the apostrophe after the final -s {seven
days' notice} {ten years' experience} {40 dollars'
worth}. In these examples, the units of time and value are
adjectives preceding the nouns notice, experience, and
worth. They could also be rendered as fully expressed
genitives {notice of seven days} {experience of ten years} {a worth
of 40 dollars}. But five months pregnant takes no apostrophe
because the main word pregnant (as in pregnant for five
months) is an adjective, not a noun.
Nouns ending in -s that are plural in form but singular in
meaning. For singular terms that derive from plurals, treat the
term as a plural. Just add an apostrophe after the final -s
{politics' impact} {the United States' influence on commerce}
{General Motors' market share}. Some people try to make it *General
Motors's cars, but this form is both highly pedantic and
alien-looking since the singular proper name General Motors
is actually formed from a plural.
Joint possessives. To indicate joint possession, add -'s
to just the last element in the series {Strunk and White's book (Strunk
and White are coauthors)}. To signal individual possession, add -'s
to each element in the series {King's and Taylor's books (King and
Taylor wrote separate books)}.
Acronyms and initialisms. It doesn't come up often (and it's
easily avoided), but the plural possessive of acronyms and
initialisms follows the general rule. Take the singular {an MRI},
make it plural {two MRIs}, and add an apostrophe {the three MRIs'
role in the diagnosis}. If there's a plural word in an initialism --
as when Lloyd's Register Drilling Integrity Services becomes
the singular name LRDIS -- treat the full initialism as a
singular and make the possessive form singular {LRDIS's
contentions}.
The toughest thing to remember is to pluralize first. Mr. and Mrs.
Flowers are the Flowerses (it's the only plural accepted by
recognized grammarians). Their house is the Flowerses' house.
George Flowers's garden is beloved by all the other Flowerses. And
now we see plural possessives in full bloom. If you're surprised,
don't worry. You're not alone, and there's no punishment (such as
30 days' hard labor).
Sources:
Garner's Modern American Usage 644-47 (3d
ed. 2009).
The Chicago Manual of Style 353-58 (16th ed. 2010).
"The Evolution of English Words and Phrases Since 1520," MIT's
Technology Review, December 11, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508611/the-evolution-of-english-words-and-phrases-since-1520/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121212
The digitisation of the world’s books
reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved
since the 16th century. And the Top 100 lists for each year are now
free to browse online.
The digitisation of the world’s books
reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved
since the 16th century. And the database is now freely browsable
online
Last year, the Google Books team released
some 4 per cent of all the books ever written as a corpus of
digitised text, an event that has triggered something of a
revolution in the study of trends in human thought. The corpus
consists of 5 million books and over 500 billion words (361 billion
in English) dating from the 1500s to the present day.
In a single stroke, this data gives
researchers a way to examine a whole range of hitherto inaccessible
phenomena. Since then a steady stream of new results has emerged on
everything from the evolution of grammar and the adoption of
technology to the pursuit of fame and the role of censorship.
Today, Matjaz Perc at the University of
Maribor in Slovenia uses this data to examine the evolution of the
most common English words and phrases since 1520.
As expected, the results show various power
laws at play. Power laws are thought to arise in social systems
because of a phenomenon of self-organisation called preferential
attachment.
This is the idea that in a network, a node
with more connections is likely to attract more connections in
future. That’s why it is also known the rich-get-richer effect or
the Matthew effect (a biblical reference).
So it’s really no surprise that the
popularity of words and phrases over time follows a similar law,
given that the spread of language can be modelled by a network
model.
What’s interesting about Perc’s work,
however, is that he’s published the results on his website at http://www.matjazperc.com/ngrams/evolution.html.
Here you can see lists of the top 100 most
popular 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5-word phrases for each year of data from
1520 until 2008.
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals," by John Coleman,
Harvard Business Review Blog, November 27, 2012 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/the_benefits_of_poetry_for_pro.html
Wallace Stevens was one of America's
greatest poets. The author of
"The
Emperor of Ice-Cream" and
"The Idea of Order at Key West" was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and offered a
prestigious faculty position at Harvard University. Stevens turned
it down. He didn't want to give up his position as Vice President of
the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
This lyrically inclined insurance executive
was far from alone in occupying the intersect of business and
poetry. Dana Gioia, a poet, Stanford Business School grad, and
former General Foods executive,
notes that T.S. Eliot spent a decade at
Lloyd's Bank of London; and many other poets including
James Dickey,
A.R. Ammons, and
Edmund Clarence Stedman navigated stints
in business.
I've written in the past about how
business leaders should be readers, but
even those of us prone to read avidly often restrict ourselves to
contemporary nonfiction or novels. By doing so, we overlook a genre
that could be valuable to our personal and professional development:
poetry. Here's why we shouldn't.
For one, poetry teaches us to wrestle with
and simplify complexity. Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman
once told
The New York Times, "I used to tell
my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original
systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and
they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand."
Emily Dickinson, for example, masterfully simplified complex topics
with poems like
"Because I could not stop for Death," and
many poets are similarly adept. Business leaders live in
multifaceted, dynamic environments. Their challenge is to take that
chaos and make it meaningful and understandable. Reading and writing
poetry can exercise that capacity, improving one's ability to better
conceptualize the world and communicate it — through presentations
or writing — to others.
Poetry can also help users develop a more
acute sense of empathy. In the poem
"Celestial Music," for example, Louise
Glück explores her feelings on heaven and mortality by seeing the
issue through the eyes of a friend, and many poets focus intensely
on understanding the people around them. In January of 2006, the
Poetry Foundation released a landmark study,
"Poetry in America," outlining trends in
reading poetry and characteristics of poetry readers. The number one
thematic benefit poetry users cited was "understanding" — of the
world, the self, and others. They were even found to be more
sociable than their non-poetry-using counterparts. And bevies of new
research show that reading fiction and poetry more broadly develops
empathy. Raymond Mar, for example, has conducted studies showing
fiction reading is essential to
developing empathy in young children (PDF)
and
empathy and theory of mind in adults (PDF). The
program in
Medical Humanities & Arts (PDF) even
included poetry in their curriculum as a way of enhancing empathy
and compassion in doctors, and the intense empathy developed by so
many poets is a skill essential to those who occupy executive suites
and regularly need to understand the feelings and motivations of
board members, colleagues, customers, suppliers, community members,
and employees.
Reading and writing poetry also develops
creativity. In an
interview with Knowledge@Wharton, the
aforementioned Dana Gioia says, "As [I rose] in business ... I felt
I had an enormous advantage over my colleagues because I had a
background in imagination, in language and in literature." Noting
that the Greek root for poetry means
"maker," Dana emphasizes that senior
executives need not just quantitative skills but "qualitative and
creative" skills and "creative judgment," and feels reading and
writing poetry is a route to developing those capabilities. Indeed,
poetry may be an even better tool for developing creativity than
conventional fiction. Clare Morgan, in her book
What Poetry Brings to Business, cites
a study showing that poems caused readers to generate nearly twice
as many alternative meanings as "stories," and poetry readers
further developed greater "self-monitoring" strategies that enhanced
the efficacy of their thinking processes. These creative
capabilities can help executives keep their organizations
entrepreneurial, draw imaginative solutions, and navigate disruptive
environments where data alone are insufficient to make progress.
Finally, poetry can teach us to infuse life
with beauty and meaning. A challenge in modern management can be to
keep ourselves and our colleagues invested with wonder and purpose.
As
Simon Sinek and others have documented,
the best companies and people never lose a sense of why they do what
they do. Neither do poets. In her Nobel lecture
"The Poet and the World," Wislawa Szymborska writes:
The world — whatever we might think when
terrified by its vastness and our own impotence ... is
astonishing ...
Granted, in daily speech, where we
don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the
ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of
events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is
weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not
a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night
after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's
existence in this world.
What if we professionals cultivated a similar outlook? We might
find our colleagues more hopeful and purposeful and our work
revitalized with more surprise, meaning, and beauty.
Continued in article
"Why Memorize a Poem?" by Catherine Robson, Chronicle of
Higher Education's Chronicle Review, November 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Memorize-a-Poem-/135878/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I suggest starting out by memorizing a relatively short metered poem
such as a Shakespeare
sonnet in iambic pentameter or a Robert Frost poem such as Robert
Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in iambic
tetrameter. I think it's so much harder to write metered poetry, and
believe it when I say that I've seriously tried in vain to do so ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm
Whose
woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
More at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm
"Yes, College Essays Are Ruining Our Economy," by David
Silverman, Harvard Business Review Blog, July 12, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/yes_college_essays_are_ruining.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Some view it as a scandal that the CEO of
J.P. Morgan "knew" about the risky trades long ago. Or that the Bush
administration knew "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.." Or
that the average cell phone customer can know when they're roaming,
and yet still be surprised by the data charges from vacation,
whether it's $100 to upload a photo to Facebook, or $62,000 for
downloading Wall-E.
What is rarely mentioned is the amount of
information that lands on the desk of a CEO or a President, or every
single one of us, every day.
In that tsunami of information, spotting
the information you need to act on is as hopeless as identifying the
rain drops that will flood your house. Is it the clause in the
iTunes agreement on page 10 that matters or the third page of your
credit card agreement? Does your mortgage rate go up when the moon
is full? How would you know? Sifting out important from extraneous
requires reading everything. Thus: it's all important.
In fact, everyone, not just CEOs, should be
seriously worried about the time-bomb waiting to go off in their
inbox. Consider this: I regularly meet with people who develop
methods of improving the email experience. They tell me that it's
not unusual to find several thousand emails in the average inbox,
thousands more squirreled away in stored folders, and that most of
us receive hundreds to that collection every day. The technological
solution they propose is to use algorithms to sort your missives by
importance based on what they can infer about who and what you think
is important. In theory, that sounds great. The critical, must-read
items tend to come from people we communicate with regularly and
knowing if it's an email from the boss or a salesperson should
assist in getting to first things first. But what about that email I
got out of the blue from a friend I hadn't talked to in years
alerting me to a news article about the breach of LinkedIn email
passwords? The email prioritization software put it at the bottom of
the pile, which wasn't so good because I (used to) use that same
password for several sites. Without quick action, my personal
identity would have been further compromised.
Ultimately, the problem is that we write
too many words. We simply make too much Content, and that starts
with "C" which rhymes with "E" which stands for Education. As a
teacher I've witnessed how we imply that an increase in word count
equals an advancement in learning. In elementary school, we identify
"key sentences" and write one- or two-page essays, which is
wonderful, but then it all goes wrong. By junior high we're on to
10-page papers, by high school we're up to 25 pages, in college, the
triumph is a 50-page thesis, and then the Ph.D. produces 100-plus
pages to prove their smarts.
But more doesn't mean better for anything
other than active cranial hair follicles (of which I have very few).
Consider this chart:
. . .
My suggestion: require a class in headline
writing for all students in high school and college. Give them A+
marks for turning this:
In today's turbulent times, it is more
important than ever to remember that we are living in a world
that, currently, is now more difficult to live in, and that we
should be exercising extreme caution because of the evolution
and advancement of artificial intelligence combined with
mechanical apparatus that provides a method and capability for
these new beings created in laboratories around the world to
develop their own impulses, agendas and goal states, which, we
have been lead to believe by reliable experts and a variety of
eyewitness accounts, have already evolved via a combined
intelligence network and communications subsystem into
semi-sentient destroyers of life, liberty and happiness.
Into this:
Killer Robots!
Teach them that the best message is one
that lets you know if you don't need to read it at all (or if,
alternatively, there is a killer robot behind the door).
And for the rest of us, let's simply make
this pledge:I
solemnly swear that I will take the time to make it short.
Grammatically Correct English
"A Matter of Fashion," by John McWhorter, The New York Times,
July 9, 2012 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/a-matter-of-fashion/
“Much was said, and much was ate, and all
went well.” Clearly this sentence was written by a fourth grader –
or at best someone not ushered into acquaintance with “proper”
grammar. Like, say, Jane Austen? That’s straight out of her novel
“Mansfield Park.”
Linguists insist that it’s wrong to
designate any kind of English “proper” because language always
changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all
people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the
public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social
handicap.
Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground.
We can teach people which forms of English are acceptable without
thinking of the more colloquial phrases and words as errors. Rather,
what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of
fashion.
Those who ignore rules of fashion exercise
little influence in society, whether we like it or not. But we
wouldn’t see someone wearing breeches or petticoats as mentally
ungifted, and the same should go for the person who, as millions of
English speakers do every day year round, use they in the singular
as in Tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4.
We are taught that a proper language makes
perfect logical sense, and that allowing changes willy-nilly
threatens chaos. But we get a different perspective with a trip back
in time.
Not to the Stone Age: just to the 19th
century, to the characters in, say, Edith Wharton’s novels.
Not to the Stone Age: just to the 19th
century, to the characters in, say, Edith Wharton’s novels. Certain
expressions that were considered mistakes unworthy of polite company
then seem utterly normal today. It’s almost funny how arbitrary
these things seem from our vantage point. “Properly,” one was to say
the two first people in a line. The well-spoken person said first
two only if the people in the line were divided into pairs. Um, O.K.
– one sees the logic, but senses a certain triviality. Or, one
talked about how a street was well-lighted: lit was considered
vulgar, as was have a look at rather than look at. (In fact, it’s
the style of this newspaper to use well-lighted.)
¶To say the house is being built felt
slangy and newfangled to many. Better, grammarians thought, was the
house is building. Again, we can perceive that they weren’t crazy:
“is being” certainly can seem a little weird if you roll it around
in your mouth and imagine hearing it anew. Yet who among us would
welcome going back to the house is building?
¶An especially enlightening read is William
Cobbett’s book-length lecture to his son called “A Grammar of the
English Language.” Cobbett’s sense of what good English was in 1818
seems, in 2012, so bizarre we can scarcely imagine someone speaking
in such a way and being taken seriously.
¶To Cobbett, the past tense forms awoke,
blew, built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung,
meant, spat, stung, swept, swam, threw and wove were all mistakes.
The well-spoken person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and
builded a house last year. In Google’s handy Ngram viewer, using
data from millions of books over several centuries, one can see that
builded only started falling out of disuse around 1920. Not for any
reason; no one discovered that builded was somehow elementally
deficient. Fashion changed.
¶So, hemlines went up, while Lobster
Newburg, chintz and sarsaparilla fell out of fashion. Likewise did
concerns like chiding people for saying first two – or for saying
chided rather than chid, another token of Cobbett’s day.
¶Today, we have our own fads. We’re more
likely to hear about using nouns as verbs – structure a lesson,
impact a discussion – or making new verbs from nouns, such as
liaise. Yet the verbs copy, view, worship and silence were born from
nouns to no complaint. The fashion simply hadn’t yet arisen to
condemn them. Or, for that matter, no fuss was made at the time when
William Shakespeare and William Makepeace Thackeray, both celebrated
as masters of the tongue, used they in the singular form.
¶Charles Dickens is one more example
demonstrating the magnificent evanescence of what is considered
sophisticated. In “David Copperfield,” Aunt Betsey says “Mr. Dick is
his name here, and everywhere else, now – if he ever went anywhere
else, which he don’t.”
Continued in article¶
June 25, 2012 message from Phillip Drake at Arizona State University
- Professor Jensen,
- As a lurker on AECM, I wanted to share
with you an Accounting Review article from 1951 lamenting the
writing skills of junior accountants along with Northwestern's
innovative approach to addressing it.
- Apparently we, as a profession, have
struggled with this issue for generations.
- Respectfully,
- Phil Drake
- Clinical Professor of Accounting
- Arizona State University
"Can Junior Accountants be Trained to Write Better," by George A. Owen
and Richard C Gerfen, The Accounting Review, Volume 26, No. 3,
1951, pp. 313-320.
The article is available from JSTOR.
Jensen Comment
The research is based on survey methodology. It's main conclusion is
that there is incremental advantage to specialized (in this case
on-the-job) writing of accounting reports. It also recommends that
writing skills become more of a part of job performance expectations.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature
Saves Civilization ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/ray_bradbury_on_how_to_write_and_why_literature_saves_civilization.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a
Spy ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/the-cia-style-manual-writers-guide.html
Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic
Writing is So Bad.---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/steven-pinker-uses-theories-from-evolutionary-biology-to-explain-why-academic-writing-is-so-bad.html
"Well-chosen words: The guardians of English may be unable
to resist linguistic change but they do have the power to influence it
," by Michael Skapinker, Financial Times, December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f90b88dc-462f-11e2-b780-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2FiN1oOSo
Spell it Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling,
by David Crystal, Profile, RRP£12.99, 224 pages
The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language and the Most
Controversial Dictionary Ever Published,
by David Skinner, HarperCollins, RRP£16.99/$26.99, 368 pages
Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English
Dictionary,
by Sarah Ogilvie, Cambridge University Press RRP£17.99/$29.99, 257
pages
Employers have told David Crystal that if
they receive a job application with a spelling mistake, it goes
straight in the bin. I am not sure I believe that. Who throws
anything, apart from food wrappers and empty coffee cups, in the bin
these days? I imagine the misspelling applicants get an email saying
“We are afraid your application has been unsuccessful” and never
discover why.
Misspelling is not a modern malady. In
Spell it Out, Crystal reproduces a 1910 cartoon from Punch magazine
in which a boss berates his secretary for typing “income” as “incum”.
“Good Heavens!” exclaims the secretary. “How did I come to leave out
the ‘b’?” And in 1750 Lord Chesterfield, the statesman, advising his
son to brush up on his spelling, warned: “I know a man of quality,
who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled ‘wholesome’
without the ‘w’.”
You would not get either “incum” or
“holesome” today. As soon as I typed them, Microsoft Word inserted
wavy red lines beneath telling me I had made a mistake. But, as
Crystal points out, electronic spellcheckers are less helpful when
you misspell a word in such a way as to spell another, as in a poem
by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar:
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Why, for centuries, have people struggled
to spell? Because English spelling is horribly hard. It is not just
that we have “for” and “four”, “stake”, “steak” and “mistake”. We
also have “peak”, “peek” and “pique”. “Horrid” has a double
consonant in the middle, “timid” a single one. “Prefer” has one “f”,
“proffer” two.
Why is English spelling such a tangle? It
all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in
the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had
23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon
languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The
Romans didn’t have a letter, for example, for the Anglo-Saxon sound
we spell “th”. The problem continues. Most English-speakers today
have, depending on their accents, 40 phonemes, which we have to
render using 26 letters. So, we use stratagems such as doubling
vowels to elongate them, as in “feet” and “fool”.
With the Norman invasion in 1066, spelling
became more complicated still; French and Latin words rushed into
the language. As the centuries went by, scribes found ways of
reflecting the sounds people used with the letters that they had.
They lengthened vowels by adding a final “e”, so that we could tell
“hope” from “hop”.
From the late 1300s, scribes used the
letter combination “gh” in words such as “night”, to represent the
back-of-the-mouth noise people then used. Why did it remain even
after the sound died out? Because by the end of the 15th century,
William Caxton had introduced printing to England, and the printers
decided to keep it.
It is often thought that printing
standardised English spelling but much variation remained. While
Caxton would usually write “fynysshed”, Crystal also found “finisshed”,
“fynisshed”, “fyn-ysshid” and “fynysshyd”. “Musik” sometimes
appeared as “musycque” and “them” as “theym”.
Samuel Johnson’s dictionary largely fixed
English spelling. By the 19th century, Crystal says, every educated
family had a copy. But Johnson’s dictionary wasn’t the last word.
For example, he said that no word could end with a “c”. So he
insisted on “musick”.
Language and spelling change. Crystal, one
of the most prolific writers on English, has helped popularise that
truth. If, as internet use suggests, people are now starting to
write “rhubarb” as “rubarb”, that, he says, may one day become an
acceptable alternative. But Crystal cannot stop himself wanting to
teach people to spell the old way. If only, Crystal writes, young
people understood the derivations of words. If they learnt a little
Latin, they would realise that “aberrant” had one “b” and
“abbreviate” two because they came from the Latin source words
ab+errant and ab+breviate. Crystal is as entertaining
and erudite as ever in this book but he has probably spent too long
at his desk if he thinks young people are eager for etymology
lessons. Those who really want to know how to spell and what words
mean can look them up in a dictionary.
Dictionaries have been setting people right
for a long time. In a letter to the periodical The World in 1754,
Lord Chesterfield said he accepted the authority of Johnson’s. “I
hereby declare that I make a total surrender of all my rights and
privileges in the English language, as a freeborn British subject,
to the said Mr Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship.”
Across the Atlantic, people no longer
wanted to be British subjects and Noah Webster wanted a dictionary
that would give the new republic pride in its own way of speaking.
His great work, An American Dictionary of the English Language,
published in 1828, contained the now-familiar “humor”, “labor” and
“center”. It became the standard American reference book well into
the 20th century, when US schools had Good Grammar Weeks, during
which children were encouraged to go seven days without splitting an
infinitive.
In everyday speech, people split
infinitives all the time. Americans also used words such as “ain’t”,
unrecognised by Webster’s, and sang along to “Ain’t We Got Fun”.
In The Story of Ain’t, David
Skinner recalls the convulsion that, in 1961, accompanied the
publication of Webster’s third edition, which contained not only
then-current words such as “pin-up”, “astronaut” and “beatnik”, but
the dreaded “ain’t”.
The New York Times said Webster’s had
“surrendered to the permissive school”. The Atlantic called the new
dictionary “a very great calamity”. In the Detroit News, the Rt Rev
Richard S. Emrich declared it “bolshevik”. The uproar was good for
sales. “But,” Skinner writes, “Noah Webster’s ideal of a country
unified by his dictionary was in tatters.”
Why did the editors of Webster’s Third
drop this lexicographic A-bomb (another addition to the
dictionary)? Because views on dictionaries, indeed on language
itself, had changed. Instead of laying down rules on how people
should write and speak, dictionaries became records of how people
did write and speak. And that meant all the people, not just those
who spoke the educated language of New England. The new trends in
lexicography went along with the growth of scientific method and
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: lexicographers observed what
was happening to the language, rather than handing down precepts.
Continued in article
"GMAT Tip: That vs. Which," Bloomberg Business Week,
July 18, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-18/gmat-tip-that-vs-dot-which
The GMAT Tip of the Week is a
weekly column that includes advice on taking the Graduate Management
Admission Test, which is required for admission to most business
schools. Every week an instructor from a top test prep company will
share suggestions for improving your GMAT score. This week’s tip
comes from Brent Hanneson, creator of
GMAT Prep Now,
a Web site offering on-demand videos that
teach GMAT skills.
In this post we’ll examine the age-old
dilemma of “that” vs. “which.” For example, which of these is
correct?
A) Gina enjoys television shows that
have laugh tracks.
B) Gina enjoys television shows, which
have laugh tracks.
Here’s what you need to know.
A clause beginning with “that” is a
restrictive clause. It takes a bunch of things and restricts the
topic of discussion to a certain subset of those things. We use a
“that clause” when the topic of discussion is unclear up to that
point.
Conversely, a clause beginning with “which”
is a non-restrictive clause. It does not attempt to restrict the
topic of the discussion. We use a “which clause” when the topic of
discussion is clear up to that point.
The first parts of the two sentences above
read, “Gina enjoys television shows.” Up to this point, is the topic
of discussion clear? Is this discussion about ALL television shows,
or do we wish to restrict the discussion to a certain subset of
television shows?
We want to restrict the discussion to just
those television shows that have laugh tracks. As such, we need to
use “that” to get “Gina enjoys television shows that have
laugh tracks.”
So “that” functions as a sieve to filter
out unwanted elements and limit the topic of discussion. Conversely,
“which” doesn’t try to limit the discussion; it’s there to add color
by providing additional, non-essential information.
For example, in the sentence, “Juan visited
Lima, which is the capital city of Peru,” the clause “which is the
capital city of Peru” adds color by telling us a bit more about
Lima.
Now, the big problem with “that” vs.
“which” is that it often requires us to know something about the
nouns in a sentence. As such, it is unlikely that the GMAT would
ever have a question that relies solely on the ”that” vs. “which”
distinction.
Consider these two sentences:
A) My favorite painting is the Mona Lisa,
which hangs in the Louvre.
B) My favorite painting is the Mona
Lisa that hangs in the Louvre.
Which one is correct?
Well, it depends.
If there is only one painting in the world
titled the Mona Lisa, then sentence A is correct, since the
clause “which hangs in the Louvre” tells us a bit more about this
one, unique painting.
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Question
What's the difference between kudo and kudos?
Answer
A kudo does not exist. Kudos is a singular in the same sense that
congratulations is singular.
Grammar Girl ---
Click Here
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/staticcontent/101-troublesome-words.aspx?et_cid=29196104&et_rid=496441372&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fgrammar.quickanddirtytips.com%2fstaticcontent%2f101-troublesome-words.aspx&utm_campaign=%%__AdditionalEmailAttribute2%%
Kudos means "praise" or "glory" and
is often used where congratulations would fit. It comes
directly from Greek and is singular, just as praise and
glory are singular. However, because kudos ends in s
and congratulations is plural, some people mistakenly believe
that kudos is plural and use kudo as a singular form.
Such use is incorrect.
From Grammar Girl on August 21, 2012
"Shudder the Thought" or "Shutter the
Thought"?
Ken R. from Scottsdale, Arizona, wrote
"It is 'shudder the thought' or 'shutter the
thought'?"
The correct phrase is "shudder at
the thought." The literal meaning-the
thought was so horrible that I physically
shuddered-should make it easy to remember,
but without the "at" I can imagine someone
mishearing "shudder" as "shutter" and
thinking the phrase means the thought is so
horrible it should be hidden behind
shutters. It doesn't.
I have seen the error addressed in other
sources, so it appears that people somewhat
regularly confuse "shutter" and "shudder"
because of the close pronunciation. Another
reason you may be confused is that
photography websites seem to enjoy the play
on words that comes from using "shutter" for
"shudder." |
|
|
Grammar Girl Tip on "Nauseous" Versus "Nauseated" on August 314, 2012
Nauseous" Versus "Nauseated"
Giuseppe M. objected to my use of "nauseous" to mean "feel sick"
in a recent newsletter.
I had written "You're anxious for school to start if you feel
nauseous every time you think about it," and Giuseppe believes
"one cannot feel nauseous" and that I should have written "You're
anxious for school to start if you feel nauseated every time
you think about it."
First, Guiseppe is correct that these are the most conservative and
traditional distinctions: "Nauseous" describes something that
induces nausea, and "nauseated" means feeling sick. That's how I
suggest people use the words when they want to be safe, for example,
when they are writing cover letters for jobs (although I have a hard
time imagining when you'd use either word on a job application).
Had I noticed that I had written "nauseous," I would have changed it
to "nauseated" to avoid upsetting anyone. I simply didn't notice.
I'm not perfect, nor have I ever claimed to be.
However, the rules also aren't as black-and-white as Giuseppe
believes. It's more of a style choice than a rule.
I wrote about it way back in 2007 (in an article that also
covers the difference between "octopuses" and "octopi"), and more
recently, John E. McIntyre wrote a blog post summarizing
the current thinking on the nauseous-nauseated debate.
Free Grammar Girl book chapter ---
Click Here
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/static/GG101TroublesomeWordsExcerpt.pdf?et_cid=29431896&et_rid=496441372&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.quickanddirtytips.com%2fstatic%2fGG101TroublesomeWordsExcerpt.pdf&utm_campaign=
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Writing at Colorado State University ---
http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/index.cfm?guides_active=engineer&category1=41
From the Scout Report on June 8, 2012
DefinePlug ---
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfaknacboecanofknlibmefckmanhjnh
Perhaps you are reading along with some
text and you'd like to know the meaning of an unfamiliar word. You
may not want to switch over to another webpage to look up the word,
and this is where DefinePlug comes in handy. DefinePlug incorporates
word definitions from abbreviations.com, allowing visitors to click
on a word and see its definition. This version is compatible with
all computers running the Google Chrome browse
Memory Tricks for Better Spelling
"Palette," "Palate," and "Pallet," by
Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl, January 23, 2012 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/palette-palate-pallet.aspx?WT.mc_id=undefined
Academic Doublespeak ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AcademicDoublespeak.htm
Writing Forum on the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
Writing Across the Curriculum: George Mason University
http://wac.gmu.edu/
At our large state institution, we are
proud of the
culture of writing that has been created
and fostered over the years by faculty, academic departments, and
higher administration, all of whom share a commitment to student
writers and writing in disciplines. Central to our
WAC mission
is the belief that when students are given
frequent opportunities for writing across the university curriculum,
they think more critically and creatively, engage more deeply in
their learning, and are better able to transfer what they have
learned from
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
"Economical Writing, Second Edition [Paperback], by Deirdre McCloskey
(Waveland Press, ISBN-13:
978-1577660637, 1999)
One Amazon Review
Review "Deirdre McCloskey's Economical
Writing, originally aimed to help economists write better, is in
this second edition clearly a book that should be read by scholars
in every field. Her thirty-one rules, offered with wit and
delightful brevity, include the essential warning that though rules
can help, bad rules hurt. McCloskey's are all of the helpful kind."
-- Wayne Booth, University of Chicago
"If you want to be read [and who doesn't]
and be remembered [better yet], Economical Writing is for you. This
entertaining volume will teach you how to write meaningful and
joyful economics. A dose of McCloskey banishes the dismal from the
'dismal science.' McCloskey is the Strunk and White of economics,
and Economic Writing should be required reading for all economists."
-- Claudia Goldin, Harvard University
"McCloskey tells economists to say what
they have to say clearly and economically, and then shows them how.
Students can learn to write so that the professor will know what
they mean and, more important, professors can learn to write so that
the rest of the world will know what they mean." -- Howard S.
Becker, University of Washington
"Professor McCloskey has written the best
short guide to academic prose in the language. Is this language
English and not the Academic Official Style? Does McCloskey write
with a sense that is also a sense of humor? All true. Buy and
believe." -- Richard Lanham, University of California, Los Angeles
"Mistakes Are Made (but Using the
Passive Isn’t One of Them)," by Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 1, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2011/10/01/mistakes-are-made/
Thank you Dan Stone for the heads up.
National Writing Project ---
http://www.nwp.org/
In particular note the Resources for Teachers at
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/teaching_writing
Note that many of the resources are not free.
One of the resources is a book called Breaking the Rules, by
Edgar H. Schuster
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/1293
. . .
Schuster devotes eleven pages on how to
teach students the difference between the active and passive
voices. A simpler explanation—that the active voice, where the
subject is performing the primary action and not having it performed
on him, leads to more concise, lively writing, but the passive voice
is acceptable at times—would eliminate Schuster's stultifying morass
of lessons that evoke the following quote from Shakespeare's
Macbeth: ". . . I am . . . . stepp'd in so far that, should I wade
no more/Returning were as tedious as go o'er . . ." (III, iv,
135-137).
Continued in this book review.
"How to Write a Lot for the Sciences," by Heather M. Whitney,
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-write-a-lot-for-the-sciences/37966?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
I’ve often been frustrated by the
how-to-succeed-in-academia advice that’s out there. To be honest, a
sizable portion of it is not applicable to my work in science. Grad
school was an especially dim time. Most of the advice doled out
online and in other venues was along the lines of “just write!
write! write!” and I would sigh and ask myself, “but what about
getting productive at planning and doing experiments?”
But lately I’ve had a bit of a change of
heart. Maybe there is something I can glean from the advice
on writing. I read a fascinating post by Holly Tucker, a historian
of science and medicine, in which
she details the practice of her writing group.
Tucker describes how the book How
to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
changed her point of view on writing and has
led to a greater productivity in this slice of her job.
I figured, if a historian of science
can get something out of this, maybe so can I. So I purposed with a
faculty friend of mine and we both read the book over the holiday
break.
I won’t give all the details of the book
here, but in short, the author, Paul Silvia, advises that you write
and meet with an accountability group regularly. He claims that if
you make appointments with yourself to write, and give these
appointments the level of importance that you give other items in
your schedule (such as teaching a class), you will see productivity.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I plan to post this to the AAA Commons Writing Forum commenced by our
AECM friend Zane Swanson ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
"Top 3 Rules for Good Facebook Manners," by Richie Frieman,
Quick and Dirty Tricks, December 2, 2011 ---
http://manners.quickanddirtytips.com/top-3-rules-for-good-facebook-manners.aspx?WT.mc_id=0
I added the above link to the Writing Forum on the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
Jensen Comment
Another good manners idea is to give credit where credit is due,
particularly on heads up messages. However, when you have friends who
often send you messages you should understand their wishes. I have
friends, often from CPA firms, who send me messages that as a rule they
would like me to post but not associate their names with the posts.
And I have friends who send me messages who generally want me to give
them credit for their finds. For example, David Albrecht sometimes sends
me humor finds that he would like to have me give him credit for
finding.
For example, a few days ago David sent me links to the following
hilarious videos:
http://www.youtube.com/v/gBnvGS4u3F0?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/mgCIKGIYJ1A?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/LuVPnW0s3Vo?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
Question
Barbara wants to know how to deal with "you" when it's part of a
compound subject or the compound object of a preposition.
Should she say, "You and John are invited to the party" or "John and you
are invited to the party"?
Answer
Barbara should say, "You and John are invited" because all pronouns
(except "I" and "me") normally come before the noun in compounds:
"Ordering Your Pronouns," Grammar Girl, February 17,
2012 ---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/does-you-come-first-or-last.aspx?WT.mc_id=0
Jensen Comment
I added the above to the AAA Commons Writing Forum at
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
"What We Say Here: an American Regional Dictionary Explores
the Power of Place," by Heidi Landecker, Chronicle of Higher
Education, March 4, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-We-Say-Here/130969/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Can a person fall in love with a
dictionary? If the work in question is the Dictionary of
American Regional English, which has just published its
fifth volume, Sl-Z, the answer appears to be yes.
"I hope people look at
DARE," as the series is known, "and fall in love with it
just the way anyone who starts to use it ends up doing," says
Michael Adams, an associate professor of English at Indiana
University at Bloomington.
"I think everyone who runs into
DARE loves everything about it," says Erin McKean, founder
of the online dictionary Wordnik.
"A national treasure," says Kirk Hazen,
a linguistics professor at West Virginia University.
I am by profession a copy editor. We
love defining words so much, we do it for a living. Yet most of
us aren't as ebullient over, say, Merriam-Webster as
the members of the American Dialect Society (like those quoted
above) are about DARE. Copy editors need to work fast;
we want our dictionaries accessible and contemporary—online. The
dialect society's project has taken half a century, and Volume
VI, which includes indexes by region and etymology to all the
words in I through V, won't be out until next year. Each volume
has at least 900 pages; the latest? 1,244. And you can get to
them only in libraries, where they sit on the shelf, all five of
them, tall, blue, inaccessible. I wasn't feeling the love.
Besides, who cares where Americans stop
saying "bucket" and start saying "pail"?
Then I learned that Harvard University
Press, DARE's publisher, will put the project's
entries, audiotapes, and perhaps even maps online in 2013. And I
read a few pages in the books. I wasn't smitten, but a seduction
of sorts had begun.
Most dictionaries, like the Oxford
English Dictionary and American Heritage, are made
by lexicographers who cull words from written texts. James
Murray, the primary editor of the OED, wrote letters,
asking, Is this a term you use for such and such, and could you
please reply? Few if any lexicographers get words from people
face to face.
For the regional dictionary that
Frederic G. Cassidy began in 1962, the English professor at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison wanted something different: a
broad, systematic sample of both the written and spoken words of
a nation—a snapshot of America's regional expressions at a
particular time.
So from 1965 to 1970, he sent
researchers, mostly graduate students, out in "word
wagons"—campers equipped with tape recorders—to talk to people
in America.
Nineteen sixty-five? Word wagons and
tape recorders? Today's linguists write Python scripts to search
tweets; online-dictionary editors use algorithms to find words
on the Internet. How could DARE be relevant?
"We tend to think nowadays that
anything worth knowing is digital," says Wordnik's McKean, an
adviser on DARE's board. "But in fact there are huge
swaths of information that people just haven't bothered to write
down," like names for children's games, plants, foods, charms
that bring good or bad luck, terms for weather and physical
geography. "These are all things that we find fascinating, but
if we don't take the time to write them down, they'll be lost."
Her favorite word in the dictionary is "mubble-squibble," which
to turn-of-the-last-century North Carolinians meant the
knuckle-rub you give a child on his head.
Not all DARE's words are as
onomatopoeic or cute. Hazen, a linguist in the English
department at West Virginia, sends history-of-language students
to the books to look for names for people from different
regions—"hillbilly," "Hoosier"—or for racial groups, like the
inflammatory alternative pronunciation of "Negro." (That word is
too offensive to be printed in today's newspapers, but DARE
devotes 14 and a half pages to it and its related compounds,
culminating in one that ends in"-wool" and is sometimes used to
refer to a sedge, Carex filifolia.)
He then asks his students to discuss
their findings; they are not always comfortable with that. "For
some it is eye-opening to look at the history of derogatory
terms and how openly they were used," he says, because certain
words in newspapers, quoted in DARE, would be
unimaginable today. Many students won't say the words, even in
class. But they are always surprised when they learn, for
example, that the etymology of "Hoosier" proves it not the
endearing nickname many Indianans assume, but a term used by
Southern blacks for racist white people.
Joan Houston Hall, who took
over as chief editor when Cassidy retired (he died in 2000 at
age 92), says the books don't flinch at American speech, no
matter how offensive, scatological, or sexual. While editors
omit terms used too widely to count as regional, they would
never "bowdlerize the dictionary."
Indeed, what Cassidy wanted was a
corpus of words unlikely to get into print, phrases like "lick 'im
so's his hide won't hold hay" or "ish kabibble" (meaning "I
couldn't care less") that people might say but never write.
To get words like that, a questionnaire
would be key, and Cassidy was the person to write it. As a
graduate student in the 30s at the University of Michigan, he
had worked on the "Early Modern English Dictionary," which,
though never published, had introduced him to dictionary making.
In 1947, at Wisconsin, he carried out the Wisconsin English
Language Survey, a methodical vocabulary study of 50 communities
in the state. In the 1950s, a Fulbright took him to his native
Jamaica—he had emigrated at age 11—where he made recordings of
Jamaicans talking about growing pineapple, cutting sugar cane,
fishing, and making dugout canoes. That work became a book,
Jamaica Talk. He eventually helped write a dictionary of
Jamaican English.
Cassidy was the right person
to get the money for DARE, too. The dictionary
he had worked on as a graduate student at Michigan sought big
financing and failed. Now a professor, Cassidy insisted that the
dialect society publish his full questionnaire, more than 1,800
questions he wrote with Audrey R. Duckert, a graduate student,
so that potential backers would see the project's scope.
And the National Endowment for the
Humanities, a young agency looking for novel ways to spend
taxpayers' money to help scholars, was ready for a project like
Cassidy's. "The diversity of America is never more evident than
in its speech," says Judy Havemann, director of communications
at the endowment. "We and the dictionary grew up together."
Continued in article
Case on Professional Writing in theWork Place
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on June 22, 2012
This Embarrasses You and I*
by: Sue Shellenbarger
Jun 19, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com ![WSJ Video]()
TOPICS: Accounting
SUMMARY: The article highlights the need for
correct grammar in the workplace, particularly in corporate
interactions with customers and other outsiders. It describes many
corporations providing grammar training at the workplace, including
holding spelling bees and other grammar-oriented competitions to get
employees' competitive juices flowing. The narrative describes many
industries including accounting via a paragraph about the chief
internal auditor at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is helpful for
all instructors wanting to motivate students in their writing
efforts for these WSJ Reviews. Good references to aid accounting
instructors in leading this discussion are May, Claire B. and Gordon
S. May, Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants, 9th Edition.
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2011. ISBN #9780132567244
Strunk, W. Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 5th Edition.
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2009. ISBN 978-0-205-31342-6.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Identify all professions or industries
highlighted in the article.
2. (Advanced) How have firms in each of the industries
listed above been affected by diminished use of proper grammar?
3. (Introductory) According to the author's discussion in
the related video, what is the overall major concern with slippage
in business use of appropriate English grammar?
4. (Advanced) Take the online quiz offered in the
interactive graphic for the article available at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html?KEYWORDS=grammar+workplace#project%3DWORKFAM0619%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
How many questions did you answer correctly? List all questions you
answered incorrectly for which you do not know the reason behind
your error.
SMALL GROUP ASSIGNMENT:
Assign the WSJ article in one class. Then, in the ensuing class,
break students into groups to discuss the errors listed in answer to
question 4. Have students help one another to determine the reasons
for the errors, then report out: 1. The most common grammatical
errors in the group. 2. The reasons for the errors. Conduct
discussion to ensure that all students have correct reasons for
solutions to the common errors.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"This Embarrasses You and I*," by: Sue Shellenbarger,
The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid&mg=reno64-wsj
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent
staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don
Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse
"is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations
officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences
with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for
each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of
grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping
skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang
and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create
bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause
communications errors, many managers say.
There's no easy fix. Some bosses and
co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult
business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this
year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing
employee-training programs to improve employees' grammar and other
skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and
AARP.
"I'm shocked at the rampant illiteracy" on
Twitter, says Bryan A. Garner, author of "Garner's Modern American
Usage" and president of LawProse, a Dallas training and consulting
firm. He has compiled a list of 30 examples of "uneducated English,"
such as saying "I could care less," instead of "I couldn't care
less," or, "He expected Helen and I to help him," instead of "Helen
and me."
Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at
letters employees were sending to customers at a Jersey City, N.J.,
hair- and skin-product marketer when she joined the firm in 2009.
The letters included grammar and style mistakes and were written "as
if they were speaking to a friend," says Ms. Ferrier, a
human-resources executive. She had employees use templates to
eliminate mistakes and started training programs in business
writing.
At Work
Readers weigh in on the grammar gaffes and
malapropisms that make them fume. Share yours.
Most participants in the Society for Human
Resource Management-AARP survey blame younger workers for the skills
gap. Tamara Erickson, an author and consultant on generational
issues, says the problem isn't a lack of skill among 20- and
30-somethings. Accustomed to texting and social networking, "they've
developed a new norm," Ms. Erickson says.
Enlarge Image WORKFAM-JUMP WORKFAM-JUMP
At RescueTime, for example, grammar rules
have never come up. At the Seattle-based maker of
personal-productivity software, most employees are in their 30s.
Sincerity and clarity expressed in "140 characters and sound bytes"
are seen as hallmarks of good communication—not "the king's
grammar," says Jason Grimes, 38, vice president of product
marketing. "Those who can be sincere, and still text and Twitter and
communicate on Facebook—those are the ones who are going to
succeed."
Also, some grammar rules aren't clear,
leaving plenty of room for disagreement. Tom Kamenick battled fellow
attorneys at a Milwaukee, Wis., public-interest law firm over use of
"the Oxford comma"—an additional comma placed before the "and" or
"or" in a series of nouns. Leaving it out can change the meaning of
a sentence, Mr. Kamenick says: The sentence, "The greatest
influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna,"
means something different from the sentence, "The greatest
influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna,"
he says. (The first sentence implies the writer has two celebrity
sisters; the second says the sisters and the stars are different
individuals.) After Mr. Kamenick asserted in digital edits of briefs
and papers that "I was willing to go to war on that one," he says,
colleagues backed down, either because they were convinced, or "for
the sake of their own sanity and workplace decorum."
Patricia T. O'Conner, author of a humorous
guidebook for people who struggle with grammar, fields workplace
disputes on a blog she cowrites, Grammarphobia. "These disagreements
can get pretty contentious," Ms. O'Conner says. One employee
complained that his boss ordered him to make a memo read, "for John
and I," rather than the correct usage, "for John and me," Ms.
O'Conner says.
In workplace-training programs run by Jack
Appleman, a Monroe, N.Y., corporate writing instructor, "people are
banging the table," yelling or high-fiving each other during grammar
contests he stages, he says. "People get passionate about grammar,"
says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing.
Continued in article
English spelling is notoriously
inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most
awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from
linguists, one American, one Austrian.
"The myth of English as a global language," by Tom Shippey, The
Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 2012 ---
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1044656.ece
English spelling is notoriously
inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s
most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these
from linguists, one American, one Austrian). Maybe this is just
because our alphabet only has twenty-six letters to represent more
than forty phonemes, or distinctive speech-sounds, and some of those
– notably q and x – are not pulling their weight, while j is not
allowed to (see “John” but also “George”). If we gave s and z a
consistent value (“seazon”) and extended this to k and c (“klok” and
“sertain”), we could free c up for other duties, such as maybe
representing ch, as once it did. But then there are all the vowels .
. . .
How did this unsystematic system come
about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few
hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them
are common. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle even went so far as to
claim that we have “close to an optimal system”, though that takes a
deal of argument to convince. The History of English Spelling does
not, in any case, try to resolve the dispute. It is based on a very
large collection of data made by the late Christopher Upward – much
of which has had to be excluded, though available from
www.historyofenglishspelling.info –
put in order by George Davidson. Successive chapters look at the way
words were spelled in Old and Middle English, how Franco-Latin and
other words were dealt with, before going on to “The Exotic Input”.
Each chapter is organized by letters, in alphabetical order. This is
not, in other words, a book easily read. The most convenient way to
use it may be to look up individual words for their histories in the
forty-page word index.
Richard J. Watts’s Language Myths and the
History of English has a much more evident polemical and narrative
structure. It is concerned to correct what the author sees as an
interlocking and mutually reinforcing system of myths about English,
which have been deployed in the service of elitist and often
nationalist ideology. The trouble is, one person’s myth is someone
else’s securely established datum, and vice versa.
One can agree that there are some familiar
metaphors applied to language generally, and sometimes more
particularly to English, which should not be taken too far. Watts
notes the metaphor of language as a human being – which means it can
have qualities applied to it, like “noble” or “healthy” or
“diseased” – and also language as family member (French as a
“daughter” of Latin), or language as geological formation (so
English has “strata”). The dangerous one as regards English, I would
suggest, is language as threatened female, whose “purity” is
continually being “violated” or “polluted” by vulgarisms,
Americanisms, anything one doesn’t happen to like. If one pursued
this image, one would have to say that English, far from being a
pure maiden, looks like a woman who has appeared out of some distant
fen, had more partners than Moll Flanders, learned a lot in the
process, and is now running a house of negotiable affection near an
international airport. But metaphors can be taken too far.
Watts’s first assaults are on the myths of
English as ancient, and of the unbroken tradition of English. He
seems in neither case to be on sure ground. The first straw men set
up to be demolished are Richard Chenevix-Trench (1855) and Thomas
KingtonOliphant (1878), neither of them any longer authoritative. In
any case I cannot see what objection there is to the former’s belief
that “the beginnings of Old English go well back into the past
beyond the written evidence we possess”. Of course they do. Just as
every creature now alive has an ancestry going back to the
primordial ooze – if it didn’t have such an ancestry, it wouldn’t be
there – so every language in the world (except maybe the
artificially invented ones like Esperanto) has an ancestry going far
back into prehistory. Along the way, there have been continual
changes, mutations, even speciation – the question of where Vulgar
Latin turns into French, or Early Runic becomes Old Norse, is a
judgement call. However, one powerful reason for calling the
language Anglo-Saxons spoke “Old English”, a custom Watts rejects,
is that that’s what they called it: first englisc, and then ald
englis.
Continued in article
From the Scout Report on January 6, 2012
An annual tradition from Lake Superior State University identifies
the
most overused words of 2011
'Baby bump', 'Man cave' make banned words list
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/story/2011-12-30/banned-words-list/52287668/1
Don't let these words occupy your vocabulary in 2012
http://goo.gl/cW3jb
Lake Superior State University: Banished Words List
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php
Word Warriors' 2012 Top 10
http://www.wordwarriors.wayne.edu/2011/
A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/
1828 Edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary
http://1828.mshaffer.com/
From the University of North Carolina
Writing Center Handouts ---
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/
Mathematics papers have a reputation for being poorly written on top
of dealing with topics not easily understood
Here are some examples of award-winning writing
Mathematical Association of America Writing Awards ---
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/22/
Stanley Fish ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
Controversy often follows Professor Fish. He's sometimes given credit
for coining the term "political correctness"
In reality he's notoriously independent and cannot be pigeon holed as a
liberal or conservative. Mostly he just wants to be viewed as a leading
scholar.
I don't particularly go along with his somewhat permissive views on
plagiarism, although he certainly does not advocate plagiarism.
How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One
"School of Fish," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed,
February 23, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee_on_new_stanley_fish_book
Stanley Fish's latest book is How
to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One, published by
HarperCollins, and it is doing pretty well. As I write this, it is
the 158th best-selling book on Amazon, and ranked number one in
sales for reference books in both education and rhetoric. It is also
in eighth place among books on political science. This is peculiar,
for it seems perfectly innocent of political intention. The title is
not playing any games. It is a tutorial on how to recognize and
learn from good sentences, the better to be able to fashion one. It
could be used in the classroom, though that does not seem its true
remit. Fish has pedagogical designs going beyond the university. The
“intended reader” (to adopt an expression Fish used during an
earlier stage of his work) appears to be someone who received the
usual instruction in composition, in secondary school or college,
without gaining any confidence about writing, let alone a knack for
apt expression. And that describes a lot of people.
His advice to them, if not in so many
words, is that they learn to practice Fishian literary criticism.
How to Write a Sentence offers a series of lessons in “affective
stylistics,” as he called the approach he developed three or four
decades ago. This is not an interpretive method but a form of close
reading, focusing less on what a given line in a literary work
means than on what it does: how it creates its effects in
the reader's awareness. This requires taking a sentence slowly – and
also taking it apart, to determine how its elements are arranged to
place stress on particular words or phrases, or to play them off
against one another. (One formulation of Fish's work in affective
stylistics is found in
this essay,
in PDF.)
A fair bit of the book -- roughly half of
each chapter, and sometimes more -- amounts to a a course in
affective stylistics, though happily one conducted without resorting
to jargon. Fish examines individual sentences from Edgar Allen Poe,
Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, and dozens of other authors to show how
they work. Most are literary figures, though Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Antonin Scalia also make the cut. Most of the rest of it
consists of explanations of some basic stylistic modes and how they
impose order on (or extract it from) the world. Fish suggests a few
exercises intended to encourage readers to experiment with creating
sentences that are tightly structured, or loose and rambling, or
epigram-like. That is part of getting a feel for the flexibility of
one's options in sentence-making, and of becoming comfortable with
experimentation. The scrutiny of how a line from Hemingway or Donne
functions is made in the service of demonstrating how much force can
be generated by the right words in the right order. Imitating them
isn't a matter of insufficient originality, but rather a way to
absorb some of their power.
The result is a handbook that seems very
different from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, with its
list of prescriptions and prohibitions. I don't want to bash
Elements; there has been too much of that lately. But Strunk and
White's emphases on brevity, clarity, and vigor of diction and
syntax, while still having value, tend to imply that good writing is
largely a matter of following rules. Fish's book is more open-ended
and pluralistic. He shows that there are numerous ways for a piece
of writing to be effective -- that there are a various registers of
expression that are worth learning. And his approach recognizes the
element of playfulness and experimentation with language that a
writer can cultivate, making it more likely that a precise though
unexpected turn of phrase might come to mind. It is not that there
are no rules, and you can learn some of them from Strunk and White.
But the rules are not the game.
Having now recommended the book, let
me quickly register a few concerns, lest this column seem like an
unqualified endorsement of Fish™ brand textual goods and services.
How to Write a Sentence is not at
all innovative. The guiding principle is an ancient one -- namely,
that learning to write requires taking lessons from authors who have
demonstrated great skill in their craft. Not in the sense of
attending semester-long workshops with them, but through years of
concentrating on their work, combined with frequent, shameless
pilfering of their techniques. (You read what you can, and steal
what you must.) The book can't be faulted for relying on an old,
reliable approach, but there's something to say for acknowledging
that it does.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's helpers
for writers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Plagiarism Is Not a Big
Moral Deal: Yeah Right!
Although I admire Professor Fish, I don't quite share his views on
plagiarism. And even if you share his views, this may not protect you or
your students from the thunderbolts of wrath that sometimes strike
plagiarists --- such thunderbolts as loss of job, loss of a degree (yes
your prized college degree can be withdrawn), your publications may be
withdrawn, you can be sued for your life savings, and you may face a
lifetime of disgrace.
The scarlet letter "P" around your neck is serious business and
becomes even worse with a record of addiction. Of course there are
examples of plagiarists who are highly regarded in spite of their
plagiarism, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Vladimir Putin ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
"Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," by Stanley Fish, The
New York Times, August 9, 2010 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/?scp=1&sq=Plagiarism&st=cse
During my tenure as the dean of a college,
I determined that an underperforming program should be closed. My
wife asked me if I had ever set foot on the premises, and when I
answered “no,” she said that I really should do that before wielding
the axe.
And so I did, in the company of my senior
associate dean. We toured the offices and spoke to students and
staff. In the course of a conversation, one of the program’s
co-directors pressed on me his latest book. I opened it to the
concluding chapter, read the first two pages, and remarked to my
associate dean, “This is really good.”
But on the way back to the administration
building, I suddenly flashed on the pages I admired and began to
suspect that the reason I liked them so much was that I had written
them. And sure enough, when I got back to my office and pulled one
of my books off the shelf, there the pages were, practically word
for word. I telephoned the co-director, and told him that I had been
looking at his book, and wanted to talk about it. He replied eagerly
that he would come right over, but when he came in I pointed him to
the two books — his and mine — set out next to each other with the
relevant passages outlined by a marker.
He turned white and said that he and his
co-author had divided the responsibilities for the book’s chapters
and that he had not written (perhaps “written” should be in quotes)
this one. I contacted the co-author and he wrote back to me
something about graduate student researchers who had given him
material that was not properly identified. I made a few half-hearted
efforts to contact the book’s publisher, but I didn’t persist and I
pretty much forgot about it, although the memory returns whenever I
read yet another piece (like one that appeared recently in The
Times) about
the ubiquity of plagiarism, the failure of
students to understand what it is, the suspicion that they know what
it is but don’t care, and the outdatedness of notions like
originality and single authorship on which the intelligibility of
plagiarism as a concept depends.
Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot
button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and
morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1)
Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical
issue.
Of course every sin is learned. Very young
children do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they
assume that everything belongs to them; only in time and through the
conditioning of experience do they learn the distinction between
mine and thine and so come to acquire the concept of stealing. The
concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized
contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get
from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car
to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing
him.
The rule that you not use words that were
first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less
like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally
universal, than it is like the rules of golf. I choose golf because
its rules are so much more severe and therefore so much odder than
the rules of other sports. In baseball you can (and should) steal
bases and hide the ball. In football you can (and should) fake a
pass or throw your opponent to the ground. In basketball you will be
praised for obstructing an opposing player’s view of the court by
waving your hands in front of his face. In hockey … well let’s not
go there. But in golf, if you so much as move the ball accidentally
while breathing on it far away from anyone who might have seen what
you did, you must immediately report yourself and incur the penalty.
(Think of what would happen to the base-runner called safe at
home-plate who said to the umpire, “Excuse me, sir, but although you
missed it, I failed to touch third base.”)
Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it
is not unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives
with rule book in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S.
official. Both fans and players are aware of how peculiar and
“in-house” the rules are; knowledge of them is what links the
members of a small community, and those outside the community (most
people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see what the
fuss is about.
Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s
obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic
historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist,
the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value
of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is
a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the
boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some)
and if you’re a politician it may not occur to you, as it did not at
one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything wrong when you
appropriate the speech of a revered statesman.
And if you’re a student, plagiarism will
seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive
rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of
plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a
foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular
verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of
what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice
is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end
up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that
students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not
committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to
the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through
no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which
doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished
— if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just
that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not
a breach of the moral universe.
Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes
sense only in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is
not a normative philosophical notion, inquiries into its
philosophical underpinnings are of no practical interest or import.
In recent years there have been a number of assaults on the notion
of originality, issuing from fields as diverse as literary theory,
history, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, Internet
studies. Single authorship, we have been told, is a recent invention
of a bourgeois culture obsessed with individualism, individual
rights and the myth of progress. All texts are palimpsests of
earlier texts; there’s been nothing new under the sun since Plato
and Aristotle and they weren’t new either; everything belongs to
everybody. In earlier periods works of art were produced in
workshops by teams; the master artisan may have signed them, but
they were communal products. In some cultures, even contemporary
ones, the imitation of standard models is valued more than work that
sets out to be path-breaking. (This was one of the positions in the
famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in England and
France in the 17th and 18th centuries.)
Arguments like these (which I am reporting,
not endorsing) have been so successful in academic circles that the
very word “originality” often appears in quotation marks, and it has
seemed to many that there is a direct path from this line of
reasoning to the conclusion that plagiarism is an incoherent, even
impossible, concept and that a writer or artist accused of
plagiarism is being faulted for doing something that cannot be
avoided. R.M. Howard makes the point succinctly “If there is no
originality and no literary property, there is no basis for the
notion of plagiarism” (“College English,” 1995).
That might be true or at least plausible
if, in order to have a basis, plagiarism would have to stand on some
philosophical ground. But the ground plagiarism stands on is more
mundane and firm; it is the ground of disciplinary practices and of
the histories that have conferred on those practices a strong, even
undoubted (though revisable) sense of what kind of work can be
appropriately done and what kind of behavior cannot be tolerated. If
it is wrong to plagiarize in some context of practice, it is not
because the idea of originality has been affirmed by deep
philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that
take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the
possibility of being original were not presupposed.
And if there should emerge a powerful
philosophical argument saying there’s no such thing as originality,
its emergence needn’t alter or even bother for a second a practice
that can only get started if originality is assumed as a baseline.
It may be (to offer another example), as I have argued elsewhere,
that there’s no such thing as free speech, but if you want to have a
free speech regime because you believe that it is essential to the
maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish said — after
all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as lawyers
and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance
of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest
on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation
of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or
topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its
conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them
will have negative consequences.
This brings me back to the (true) story I
began with. Whether there is something called originality or not,
the two scholars who began their concluding chapter by reproducing
two of my pages are professionally culpable. They took something
from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited
— if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I
had done and signed. That’s the bottom line and no fancy
philosophical argument can erase it.
Jensen Comment
The really sad fact about professors who plagiarize or otherwise cheat
is that their employers may be tougher on student plagiarists than on
faculty plagiarists ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Attribution of an American Accounting Position to One Published
Article in an AAA Journal
One of the problems among journalists and bloggers is that they
sometimes extrapolate attribution. And we, as professors, are sometimes
sloppy in our writing. Ed Ketz has always been up front that his grumpy
blogs should not be extrapolated as being opinions of his colleagues or
his employer (Penn State). We generally take it for granted than an
opinion or conclusion in any article of an AAA journal is not an
official position of the AAA.
However we probably need to better communicate what we take for
granted. For example, the AAA only rarely takes official positions on
articles it publishes in its journals.
"AAA Warns: Watch Your Language on Earnings Reports," The
AccountingWeb, January 18, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/accounting-auditing/aaa-warns-watch-your-language-earnings-reports
. . .
Complaints about such corporate
self-congratulation and optimism are a common feature of securities
lawsuits – but also a hotly debated one, with some judges dismissing
expansive or optimistic language cited by plaintiffs as immaterial
and defendants labeling it mere "puffery."
Yet now, a study recently published in an
accounting journal finds that, puffery or not, such language makes a
major difference in whether or not shareholders initiate lawsuits
against companies. According to the current issue of The
Accounting Review, published by the American Accounting
Association (AAA), research shows that "sued firms use substantially
more optimistic language in their earnings announcements than do
non-sued firms." Managers, the study concludes, "can reduce
litigation risk by dampening the tone of their earnings
announcements either by decreasing their use of positive language or
by tempering their optimism with statements that are less
favorable."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I plan to post this to the AAA Commons Writing Forum commenced by our AECM
friend Zane Swanson ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
Creative Computers Replacing Writers and Composers
And the frightening thing about this is that what might be
"cheating" becomes possible with zero chance of being caught for
plagiarism of things stories and songs written by Hal.
"30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers," by
Jason Boog, Media Bistro, February 17, 2012 ---
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/forbes-among-30-clients-using-computer-generated-stories-instead-of-writers_b47243
Forbes has joined
a group of 30 clients using Narrative
Science software to write computer-generated stories.
Here’s more about the program,
used in one corner of Forbes‘ website:
“Narrative Science has developed a technology
solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives
are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully
customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are
created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines,
Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”
The New York Times revealed last year
that trade publisher
Hanley Wood and sports journalism site
The Big Ten Network also use the tool. In
all, 30 clients use the software–but Narrative Science did not
disclose the complete client list.
What do you
think? The
Narrative Science technology could
potentially impact many corners of the writing trade. The company
has a long list of stories they can computerize: sports stories,
financial reports, real estate analyses, local community content,
polling & elections, advertising campaign summaries sales &
operations reports and market research.
Here’s an excerpt from
a Forbes earnings preview story about Barnes & Noble, written
by the computer program:
While company shares have dropped 17.2%
over the last three months to close at $13.72 on February 15,
2012,
Barnes & Noble
(BKS)
is hoping it can break the slide with solid third quarter
results when it releases its earnings on Tuesday, February 21,
2012.
What to Expect: The Wall Street
consensus is $1.01 per share, up 1% from a year ago when Barnes
& Noble reported earnings of $1 per share.
The consensus estimate is down from
three months ago when it was $1.42, but is unchanged over the
past month. Analysts are projecting a loss of $1.09 per share
for the fiscal year.
The company originated with two electrical
engineering and computer science professors at Northwestern
University.
Here’s more about the company:
“[It began with] a software program that automatically generates
sports stories using commonly available information such as box
scores and play-by-plays. The program was the result of a
collaboration between McCormick and Medill School of Journalism.
To
create the software, Hammond and Birnbaum and students working in
McCormick’s
Intelligent Information Lab created
algorithms that use statistics from a game to write text that
captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key
plays and players. Along with the text is an appropriate headline
and a photo of what the program deems as the most important player
in the game.”
Many of you probably never even heard of the popular "I've Got a Secret" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Got_a_Secret
More of you have probably read about artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil
(an expert on computer music composition)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, 17 Years Old, Appears on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1965) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/futurist_ray_kurzweil_17_years_old_appears_on_ive_got_a_secret_1965.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Do as I says, not as I does!
I'll be the first to admit that I make a lot of grammar mistakes on
quickly-fired off messages and postings to my Website that I did not
even proof read in my rush to get more things done. But the following
grammar mistakes on the Read/Write Blog disturb me more from a
fundamental grammar problem in society as a whole --- the mixing of
singular nouns with plural verbs and vice versa. Countless people make
these errors even after proof reading! Particularly troubling is the use
of the word data as either singular or plural. Also the name of a
company is singular but is often used with a plural verb. I find these
two types of examples particularly annoying.
"Big Java Joins the Age of Big Memory," by Alex Williams,
Read/Write Blog, September 14, 2010
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/09/big-java-joins-the-age-of-big.php
Terracotta is
trying to solve one of the biggest issues for Java developers. It's
called garbage collection. And it wastes time. It can makes a mess
of big data, causing all kinds of latency issues.
Terracotta
says they
solved the issue by creating their
own memory manager. The product, called Big Memory, pushes the data
into the cache. Traditional trash collectors will store the data in
a tree format. The data is networked
to different nodes
on the tree. Terracotta uses the cache so all trash goes into
memory. Instead of a tree, the trash looks like a huge map.
Continued in article
What is a good formula for balancing creative license with
historical accuracy?
Case in Point: A woman with a tattoo on her chin
"She's a Character Who Could Have Stepped Out of Melville or Hawthorne"
by Michael Stratford, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15,
2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/An-English-Professor-Explores/130344/
"Medium Of Exchange Revisiting the quaint
custom of writing letters and having something to say," by Charles Peterson,
The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2009 ---
Click Here \
Letters are a biographer's best friend—and
worst enemy. They are a vivid way of tracking a subject's day-to-day
thoughts and activities, but they can also have an up-staging
effect. William Faulkner, in a letter to his parents, wrote about a
ride on a New York subway: "The experiment showed me that we are not
descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice." No mere
biographer's narrative, however conscientious, can compete with such
personal confidences.
Thomas Mallon, a novelist and literary
historian, does not shrink from this challenge and has instead made
first-person writing the center of his critical attention. A
quarter-century ago, with "A Book of One's Own," he took on that
other great "frenemy" of biographers, the diary. Now, with "Yours
Ever," his prose aims to illuminate not the juicy self-revelations
of diarists but the best that the epistolary genre has to offer.
Lord Byron, for instance, on his latest masterpiece: "It may be
profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man
have written it who has not lived in the world?—and fooled in a
post-chaise? in a hackney-coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a
court carriage? in a vis-à-vis? on a table? and under it?"
Or Colette, on her preferred style of
living: "I have very often deprived myself of the necessities of
life, but I have never consented to give up a luxury." And on her
idea of luxury: "All I want to do is go on with the unbridled life I
lead here: barefoot, my faded bathing suit, an old jacket, lots of
garlic, and swimming at all hours of the day."
Reading through "Yours Ever," one can't
help compiling one's own best-of list. Best Reply, H.L. Mencken, on
receipt of a Christmas letter: "Christmas be damned." Best
Disappointed Love Letter, George Bernard Shaw: "Infamous, vile,
heartless, frivolous, wicked woman! Liar! lying lips, lying eyes,
lying hands, promise breaker, cheat, confidence-trickster!" Best
Valediction, Marcel Proust: "I was your truly sincere friend." Best
Postscript, Theodore Roosevelt: "P.S.—I have just killed a bear."
Beat that!
It is to Mr. Mallon's credit that he
doesn't try to and presents his book as no more than a "long cover
letter" to the "cornucopia" of collected-letters editions listed at
the back. For younger readers, for whom putting pen to paper is a
quaint and vague notion, "Yours Ever" may also serve as a letter of
introduction to the joys of letter writing. Today, Mr. Mallon
complains, we rarely see "the kind of considered exchange to which
e-mail is . . . doing such chatty, hurry-up violence."
True enough, though it's not hard to
imagine many versions of the examples quoted above showing up in
email—or, echoing Byron, in instant messages or blog comments, where
so much bombast and bragging can now be found. Indeed, one comfort
of "Yours Ever" comes from seeing a few of the hallmarks of the
electronic age in earlier correspondence. No less a writer than the
poet Philip Larkin, it turns out, was a master of all caps, a
technique that today's twenty-somethings may have thought they had
invented. "The US edition of ["High Windows"] is out, with a
photograph of me that cries out for the caption 'FAITH HEALER OR
HEARTLESS FRAUD?' "
Old love letters, as Mr. Mallon notes,
inevitably leave something to be desired. "Whenever the lovers do
manage to get together," he writes, "the letters stop dead." By
contrast, a collection of contemporary lovers' correspondence would
likely overflow with daily emails and text messages, even if the
beloved were a mere five minutes away by cab. This is where Mr.
Mallon's argument about the death of "considered" communication
finds its greatest force. A young woman sends a sweet photo of
herself by cellphone and her boyfriend taps out a quick note to
thank her; Héloïse, locked up in a nunnery in the 12th century,
looks at her lonely portrait of Abelard and writes: "If a picture,
which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such
pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can
speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the
transports of the heart."
As Mr. Mallon notes, "the small hardships
of letter writing—having to think a moment longer before completing
utterance; remaining in suspense while awaiting reply; having one's
urgent letters cross in the mail—are the things that enrich it,
emotionally and rhetorically." If the Internet age has seen the
renewal of the written word—email, blog post, text message,
"tweet"—it remains true that none of these forms naturally supports
the soulful writing of Héloïse or, to take another example, of
Keats, whose entire philosophy of life we find in his letters. "Do
you not see how necessary a World of Pain and troubles is to school
an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Together with the many
amusements of "Yours Ever"—Keats also wrote: "I never intend
hereafter to spend any time with Ladies unless they are
handsome"—Mr. Mallon's fine book shows how important it is that we
take pains to continue writing soulful letters today, whether on
paper or in pixels.
Mr. Petersen, an editor for n+1 magazine, lives in Montana.
How to Publish in Top Journals, Edited by Kwan
Choi, March 7, 2002 ---
http://www.roie.org/how.htm
Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science
Students ---
http://writing.engr.psu.edu/
University College Writing
Workshop: Writing Handouts ---
http://www.utoronto.ca/ucwriting/handouts.html
Mike Kearl's guide to writing a research paper ---
http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/methods.html#rp
Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages ---
http://www.bartleby.com/89/
From the Scout Report on November 24, 2010
The origins of "OK" explored. OK: How Two Letters Made 'America's
Greatest Word'
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/17/131390650/ok-how-two-letters-made-america-s-greatest-word
The Straight Dope: What Does "OK" stand for?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-stand-for
Linguistically, America is A-OK
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102907644.html
The 'O' Word
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/books/review/Blount-t.html?src=me
American Languages: Our Nation's Many Voices
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/AmerLangs/
Dictionary of American Regional English
http://dare.wisc.edu/
Writing and Revising," by Daniel Simons, Daniel Simons Blog
---
http://www.dansimons.com/resources/writing_tips.html
Over the past 20 years of teaching,
writing, and editing, I have compiled a set of tips, tricks, and pet
peeves that I share with students and colleagues. I've decided to
make this writing guide more widely available in case others will
find it useful. The emphasis is on scientific writing, but the same
principles apply to most non-fiction (including journalism). I will
maintain a link to the most recent version of the file on this page.
The first part of the file gives some broad
principles of effective writing. The next section gives guidance on
how to edit and revise your manuscript. After that comes a list of
common writing mistakes and my pet peeves. The last section provides
a revision worksheet. The worksheet is perhaps the most useful part
of this guide. It is a systematic way to edit papers, progressing
from high-level organization to the word level, with a box to check
after you complete each step. By following the steps in the revision
worksheet, your writing will be more concise, more precise, and
easier to read.
If you use this guide or the worksheet for
one of your own revisions, I'd be curious to hear whether it helped
you. If you have suggestions for future versions of this file, I'd
love to see those too. To that end, here is a permanent link to a
post on Google+ where you can add comments or suggestions (and I can
respond to them). If you like the guide, please let me know.
Dan's Writing and Revising Guide ---
http://www.dansimons.com/resources/Simons_on_writing.pdf
I added this to the Writing Forum on the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
101 Best Websites for Writers
---
http://www.writersdigest.com/101sites/2005_index.asp
World Wide Words ---
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/lfsh.htm
The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125
Famous Authors ---
Click Here
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/30/writers-top-ten-favorite-books/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
"Job Coaches Help Get Professors Back on Track Academics seek advice when
writer's block threatens their careers," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle
of Higher Education, September 26, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05a00102.htm
The
List:
Study
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