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CJ’s blog: A lesson in personification…with Tommy the Truck

Posted on February 4, 2015 at 5:57 am by Katie Anton with

As I sit down on my comfy sofa to write blogs, she welcomes me like one of Grandmum’s warm oatmeal cookies…

…cushions made with just the right amount of butter and water, taken from the oven while still soft, enveloping my posterior as if to say, “There, now. You are safe, warm and loved.”

My couch; I love her so.

Whether you use one word or a whole sentence, personification (when not overdone) can make your writing relatable.

Most of us know the nature of people–what they are like, how they behave; but any time you apply human qualities to inanimate objects, you use personification.

You can achieve personification subtly; one well-placed human trait can personify your words and create a memorable image for your reader:

The stars winked at me as I embarked on my voyage.

I paused to listen with joy as the wind sang in my ears.

Stars winking? Wind singing?

If you’re someone who takes thing literally, you might find personification is not for you.

But don’t forget what is possible within your imagination!

You have experienced the stars and the wind as inanimate elements in your daily life. Now you add a “human” trait to deepen your familiarity, and, presto! Out comes a personification.

Similes, metaphors, and personification

Personification in the form of a word or a few words can also be considered a metaphor or a simile. In fact, some may say that all personifications are metaphors and similes, but not all metaphors and similes are personifications.

However, certain brands of personification do not qualify as similes, which happens when you clearly treat an inanimate object as if it were human (usually in fiction or maybe in a journal—used just for humor).

Tommy the Truck: a bittersweet story of personification

The following posts, adapted from my Facebook page, involve the ill health and eventual passing of my pickup truck; judging from the emotional reactions, comments, and LIKEs elicited from my posts on Tommy, well, my truck may as well have been human:

January 7^th: Downtown Springfield: Tommy had to take a ride in an ambulance to a garage for a diagnosis tomorrow. Poor twuk has never been away from Mommy this long.

January 10th: Tommy made it through his surgery. He is still running roughly, however. As he limps down the road, I feel his pain.

January 20^th: Poor Tommy, my truck, had to be towed again from work last Thursday. He was in the truck hospital again and had computer board surgery. He got a used computer, but he will need to be replaced. His compression is poor. I will have to get a different vehicle in a month or so when I can afford it.

“Alas, poor Tommy (Yorick)! I knew him, Horatio…” (But I moved four times with all my stuff in his truck bed, and he is only a 4 cylinder.) Poor little guy.

My Facebook status updates for Tommy were not only met with an outpouring of LIKEs and comments, but with heartfelt wishes for Tommy to “get well soon.”

When later I announced Tommy’s poor prognosis, wishes for recovery becoming condolences, my Facebook friends didn’t disappoint:

…Tommy had lived a full life.

…May he rest in peace in junkyard heaven.

…Maybe he just wants to take early retirement.

So, in my case, on Facebook, personification worked on its audience and delivered the sympathy I probably had been craving at the time.

Still skeptical about the effectiveness of personification?

Let’s try an experiment.

Let’s remove personification from my post to a stripped-down (forgive me) version:

My truck broke down.

And its lackluster follow-up post:

My truck broke down, again.

How many LIKEs, comments, shares and sympathies might be warranted now?

I rest my case.

stock-photo-17388058-crying-african-american-female-nurse As an aside…It’s not nice to “LIKE” something tragic, but people do it every day:

“My father died.”

Susie likes your post.

Bad, bad, bad. Be careful.

REMEMBER: Use personification sparingly in writing that allows for a degree of individual flair.

Be sure you stay in context, too.

Where personification does not belong

Personification has no business poking its nose into serious reports…nor should personification butt in where scholarly writing is concerned… except possibly when writing in a style that might allow for or even reward personification (e.g. when your essay is about a genre that uses personification).

Thou shalt not commit a syntax error

Do not interject a phrase that is worded informally (meaning the same way you speak) using the syntax you developed from childhood until now. Resist the temptation to insert your brand of poetic flair into formal writing. If you simply cannot help yourself, do so at your peril.

Read up on syntax clashes and syntax errors, and you’ll find it can be quite technical. The least you need to know: stick with one style throughout your writing. Failing that, contact us for help with your scholarly writing.

And may your day be filled with all the glow of a kid with a lollipop.

Molly’s guest edublog: How to write a literature review

Posted on September 9, 2014 at 3:14 am by Katie Anton with

Guest blogger: playwright, satirist, and stand-up writer, Molly Bixby, offers her take on literature reviews

Literature reviews for your bachelor’s or master’s program are a far cry from your fifth-grade book report.

Don’t feel dumb if you don’t know what a lit review is. Higher ed should require a course called Literature Reviews 101 as early as possible for every student.

Maybe you were taught basic concepts of the lit review and how to design one, but your instructor didn’t teach it in a way you could understand.

When a professor or TA presents something new and complex in a monotone voice with all the excitement of a toilet running all night, well, good luck staying awake, much less retaining any content.

You may only now be learning the term “literature review”–as you write your thesis for a master’s degree–which might seem to you like too little too late.

I hope the following conversation between two college students will help you understand and remember the basics of a literature review.

What’s a lit review? Meet Jarod and Jenny

Jarod, a tall, handsome psych major, strolled up to a round table in the college student union and plopped down his heavy book bag. It landed on Jenny’s right foot.

“Ouch! Ya JERK!” Jenny said as she laughed and slapped Jarod’s shoulder. Jenny and Jarod were, so far, just friends, but it was obvious to even the most casual observer that the attraction was mutual.

“Hey, I’m not doing anything tonight. You?” Jarod asked, as he poured salt on the top of her hand, wooing in a primitive way.

“Well,” Jenny said as she blew the salt into Jarod’s shiny, thick hair, “I have to write a ‘literature review’ of some sort as part of my final thesis, but that should only take about fifteen minutes if I pick a short book about whatever psychology topic I decide to grab out of the textbook.”

“Whoa! Wait!” Jarod dropped the flirting and added genuine concern. “A lit review is a very time-consuming step in your thesis. You don’t just write a review about a book.”

Jenny blushed. “It is a book review, though, right? I mean, I wrote tons of book reviews in fourth, fifth and sixth grades. They’re simple.” Even though Jenny said that to Jarod out loud, she was already worried she had just made a fool of herself in front of the guy she liked.

A literature review is a book report–times 30 or 40

Jarod reassured Jenny. “A book report, a literature review….they sound like they would be exactly the same, don’t they? Well, there is a tiny thing they have in common. A literature review is a book report–times thirty or forty.”

“Yikes!!! I have to read that many books?”

“Well, you don’t necessarily have to read whole books. And not all of your sources need to be books, either. You can use journal articles, white papers, and other sources.

Your professor will ask you to list tons of sources from professional literature. Be sure to:

1. Get articles written by credible researchers who have already analyzed the topic that relates to the thesis you want to prove…or improve upon.

2. Make a bibliography and wade through the best of the best on your topic.

3. Build upon theories already established by researchers.

“I will make a huge bibliography, then. That’s harder, but not like walking on water.” Jenny smiled at Jarod.

“Well…that’s just the start. The bibliography is just in your notes. When you weed through all of your sources and pick the best ones, you then need to write the lit review.

How to organize and write a literature review

Jenny got flustered. “This could take forever to do! Maybe I should just withdraw from school!”

“Jenny, don’t panic. Here’s what you do:

1. Review all of the sources you’ve collected. That means skim/read your sources!

2. Once you understand the research you’ve collected, describe how these past discoveries are connected.

3. Explain how you concluded what you did. Add a different spin to your work. Try to conclude something that others haven’t.

4. You can also talk about how earlier studies were limited in what they did. Explain what you plan to do differently to deal with those limitations in your study.

5. In fact, addressing a limitation in a past study can be the slightly different spin you offer! Make constructive criticisms of past research designs.

Jenny shrieked. “This is just too much, Jarod. So, what now? Go online and find tons of bibliography sources tonight?”

Examples of sources that are not scholarly

“Jenny, I know you hate the library, but go there anyway.

Avoid Wikipedia. Anyone can claim anything as fact on Wiki, even though the people at Wikipedia seem to be cleaning it up to become more credible. The content is written by…anybody. That’s why Wiki is frowned upon as a credible source.

Don’t use anything from Ask.Com or Yahoo Answers, either. Those people will tell you that a jellyfish eats more than a peanut butter fish.

****Get the best and most sources you can from databases. Learn to use them! Then wade through them.

How to read sources, form ideas, and build connections

Jarod tried to reassure Jenny, “Now don’t freak out…but you need to actually read your sources. I don’t mean read them word for word, but at least skim each article, pamphlet, book, etc., until you decide what you’re going to try to prove.

Remember, try to add something new to what the experts have already done. It’s an ego trip, kind of, to find something others may not have correlated, but you have correlated!”

“So,” thought Jenny aloud, “…in this case, my class is psychology. You’re saying I need to think of something new to say about psychology that all of the greats haven’t already thought about? How can little ol’ me do that?”

“Oh, come on,” Jarod challenged. Almost everything has psychology behind it. Name something.”

Jenny poked her finger into the factory-made hole in the expensive jeans Jarod was wearing. The new jeans were made to look worn, with a hole on the thigh. “How about this hole, Dr. Freud?” She taunted.

“Well,” Jarod said, “I could go with Freud, actually, and talk about how he thought so many things were phallic, but I think I would go with Pavlov’s dog.

Yes! Pavlov’s dog and its correlation to fashion trends. The dog learned to salivate when it heard a bell because it knew the bell meant food was coming. If I wear these jeans, both females and males say to me, ‘Hey, I love those jeans!’ but I notice their eyes go to the hole in the denim. So, like Pavlov’s dog, I like that, and I want to buy new holey jeans each time I get eyed.”

“Oh, psychology and fashion! You’re right, Jarod! There must be tons of things that I could theorize to be related to psychology!”

“Yes! But, if your prof wants you to write a literature review, just think of your third grade math teacher who always said, “You must show your work!”

The purpose is not to make you want to jump off a bridge but to show that you truly understand the works of those who paved the way for us.

How to write the thesis statement: Start broad, end narrow (the inverted triangle approach)

“Do I need to start with the same thesis statement that my final thesis will start with?”

“No way, Jenny! Here’s what to do:

1. Start with a broad area and narrow it down.

2. No thesis statement should ever be too broad. In fact, you can take that upside-down triangle and move from the broadest of the great thinkers to the smallest point you created and flip it over.

3. In other words: start your final paper with your point. Then use points that are broader to show how you plan to support that point in your thesis paragraph.”

Need more help?

“Jenny, here’s a cool link to The Writing Center at UW-Madison if you want to learn more about lit reviews.”

“You’re so smart, Jarod. You never make me feel dumb, either.”

“Well, you can’t know something you aren’t taught. If you don’t learn it on your own or by a caring person, well…I once knew a guy with a developmental disability who at age 70 still didn’t know how to toilet himself because his impatient trainer stopped trying halfway through.”

Jenny laughed but then looked at Jarod sideways. “Are you saying I don’t know how to toilet myself?” She had a little nervous giggle.

“No! Ha ha ha! I’m saying that you’ll do a fabulous job now that somebody who cares about you has just….told you how fabulous you are.” He looked down, nervously, cleared his throat, and added, “You need to read more about lit reviews now, though. And get your stockpile of expert writings from a database and/or other credible sources so you can get your thesis done.

Then maybe we can talk about the sex appeal of holes in $75 jeans firsthandedly.”

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Mike’s blog: Make a smooth transition

Posted on August 8, 2014 at 4:47 am by Katie Anton with

You have thoroughly researched your content. You’ve distilled your arguments into cogent and concise sections.

You’ve assembled your paper in a manner that implies direct relationships between topics, but your instructor still says you’re missing something, that your paper is “choppy” or that your thoughts “jump all over the place.”

Clearly, your instructor is missing something, right? All of the information is right there, in a straight line, what could be missing?

In this scenario, hopefully your instructor would be kind enough to clue you in to the missing element: transitions.

The train analogy

Transitions can be easy to ignore–because they come so naturally. If your paper is a train, your thesis statement is the engine and your arguments are the cars.

Transitions are the links between cars. The cars will still be filled with material, but without the links, they’ll fall away without getting delivered.

The Billy Joel method

If you are of a certain age, you’ve probably heard Billy Joel’s song We Didn’t Start the Fire more times than you care to imagine.

The song is a perfect example of how removing transitions also removes any meaningful relationship between topics.

Do Sputnik and Chou en-Lai have anything in common? Maybe, but you wouldn’t know from the song.

REM “logic”

A better example is REM’s classic It’s the End of the World.

What does Leonard Bernstein have to do with anything? No one knows. Just sing the chorus.

Linear thoughts don’t always translate to paper

While transitions typically come naturally in linear thought, there are many ways they can become lost in constructing a paper. Often times papers are not written in a linear fashion, or the order of arguments will be shifted from one draft to another. A transition appropriate from one argument to the next might not work when the order is rearranged.

When sections of a group project are individually crafted, the leader of the group needs to craft reasonable transitions between one person’s thoughts and another’s to illuminate the greater purpose of the paper.

Haste makes…I forget

stop sign

Writing too quickly can lead to logic leaps that make sense in the writer’s brain but will leave readers wondering how topics relate. This can happen when the writer has a very clear understanding of the topics or arguments they want to cover, and they want to get them all into the document before they forget any of them.

This can also happen when “the perfect sentence” pops into the writer’s mind. The goal then shifts to getting all of the perfunctory writing out of the way before the sentence is lost in the hollows of the mind.

The best way to avoid mistakes caused by writing too quickly? Keep a detailed outline of your paper.

Inside your outline, you can use shorthand markers to get to the better-formed thoughts, allowing you to write in as little or as much detail as you like before worrying about the specific ways to connect your thoughts.

If you work exclusively within a word processor, it’s not a bad idea to keep a good ol’ pen and paper on hand to scrawl out a spontaneous epiphany without having to worry about switching back and forth between your outline and main document.

Words, phrases, sentences

Transitions take a handful of forms across a multitude of categories. The forms include these transitional words:

but

while

then

Transitional phrases:

in this scenario

for that purpose

in the meantime

Or transitional sentences:

Clearly, your instructor is missing something, right? All of the information is right there, in a straight line, what could be missing?

The University of Wisconsin and Michigan State both have an excellent compilation of transitional words and phrases broken down by contextual category.

Transitions serve as the signposts of logic within a text. They don’t describe a thought or argument specifically, but they do illustrate how thoughts and arguments are connected and therefore related, or not.

Without them, your paper will be no better than a Billy Joel song. You’re better than that. I know you are.

For further reading, UNC-Chapel Hill has a terrific virtual handout that digs deeper into the specifics of transitions and transitional expressions.

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Mike’s blog: Metaphorically speaking

Posted on July 31, 2014 at 7:19 am by Katie Anton with

Metaphors, in their simplest form, are powerful tools to convey ideas that may be deep, complex or difficult to describe succinctly into a broadly understandable analogue.

Put another way, metaphors draw a comparison between two very different things with the purpose of making a meaningful comment upon one or both of them.

Metaphor appears in many forms. They can be as short as a single sentence:

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Or a metaphor can be as long as an entire book, such as a novel where a man is constantly making repairs to a house that’s determined to fall apart, while struggling to hold together a broken marriage, a failed career and children on the verge of delinquency.

Metaphor in art

Some metaphors don’t have to be written. A work of art is often a metaphor for an aspect of life. This is especially true of propaganda.

Consider this iconic World War II image of of a solo motorist riding with a ghostly depiction of Hitler, commissioned to encourage carpools and gasoline conservation for the war effort.

Or take this image of an hourglass with melting glaciers slowly dripping onto a city as a warning about the long-term dangers of global warming.

These examples are heavy-handed, but they demonstrate the concept.

Metaphor in music

Music can be steeped in metaphor as well. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is a well-known example of this, with each character represented by a particular instrument and theme. The piece is often performed without the original narration, allowing the story to be told entirely through the movements of the symphony. This technique has become the standard for composition of modern film scores.

It has been argued that the human ability to recognize metaphor is the common basis for all art, and largely responsible for our capacity to learn.

Metaphors offer lots to the writer skilled enough to employ them wisely.

But before we continue…

An important side note about similes and metaphors

We’ve all had a high school English teacher who scolded us that “similes are not metaphors.” That isn’t precisely accurate. It is true that not all metaphors are similes, but similes are, in fact, a form of metaphor. However, the simile is a weak aspect of the form, because it reduces the comparison between objects to a very narrow aspect:

He was like a lizard, cold and dispassionate with others.

This sentence is fine, but an editor with a keen eye will be unimpressed and ask for a rewrite that eliminates the simile, like this:

The man was a lizard whose blood ran cold to compassion for others.

The second is a stronger sentence and imbues lizardness into the whole of his character, rather than just a particular aspect. Depending on how much time we spend with him, we can layer other lizard-like tendencies into further description of his character without having to revisit the comparison.

And on we go with our discussion of metaphor.

In his famous ballad The Highwayman (1906) , Alfred Noyes uses metaphor in the first stanza to establish mood and theme:

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

In these two lines alone, we know that this is not to be a happy tale.

Dead metaphors

Most clichés are a form of metaphor, but they’re a special, insipid member of the category known as dead metaphors. A dead metaphor is one whose meaning is understood absent of the original intent of the phrase.

Notable examples of dead metaphors include “dialing the phone number,” which is only true if you still employ a rotary phone; or the archaic “world wide web” which was the term we used to describe the internet to our parents 20 years ago. Originally evocative of how the interconnected network of networks is like a spider’s web of information, it evolved to become its own definition of the internet, before we all just decided to call it the “internet” and be done with it.

Dead metaphors don’t provide any of the benefits of a well-crafted original metaphor. Clichés are worse, because they’re simply rehashes of old, tired metaphors that have been thoroughly cleansed of all meaning.

Metaphor: an insight into thinking

That brings us to the most important role metaphors play in your writing: they are your reader’s best insight into how you think. The highest goal of metaphorical language not only is to inform the object of the metaphor, but the thought process that created the comparison itself. It will reveal the author as irreverent, acerbic, brooding, melancholy, or any other possible adjective. The worst it could reveal an author to be is staid or unoriginal. Excise the tumors of static thought.

I briefly mentioned mixed metaphors in my last blog post (link back to preventable errors). Broken clichés are the easiest of these to identify:

He drinks like a chimney and smokes like a fish.

Metaphors require tact

Mixed metaphors draw a false or confused comparison, undermining the intended point and halting readers in confusion.

Like any powerful tool, metaphor is best used with tact. It’s the highlight touch on the important details: the parallel arc that examines the theme in another way. But an over-reliance on metaphorical language will frustrate your reader until they are screaming at you through the page to just spit it out already.

Obvious metaphors will similarly displease your readers. They come across as pedantic and insulting, as though you think the audience too dim to take your meaning. It is not always the easiest balance to strike, as particular audiences will have a different tolerance for them than others–a children’s novel, for example, will have more room for obvious metaphors than literary work aimed at the academic crowd.

For some more reading on the subject, author Chris Wendig has compiled a helpful, and (WARNING to parents) heartily profane, list of 25 things he feels writers should know about metaphors. He expands on many of the issues described here and discusses more key elements of how and why authors use them.

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Mike’s blog: Your argument is invalid: simple mistakes that torpedo the best writing

Posted on July 22, 2014 at 1:16 am by Katie Anton with

Thanks to social media, we’re all writing a lot more. Every day, untold amounts of information are posted to the internet .

Given the quality of the common tweet or Facebook post, the cynics among us might use this data to dispute the commonly accepted wisdom that writers get better at writing chiefly through the act of writing.

Even the best intentioned among us have our lapses. Sometimes the dreaded autocarrot is the culprit, but whatever the cause, it’s a lazy inner editor that lets us hit “Post” without double-checking our content.

The same issues can leak into the rest of our writing as well. Nothing subverts a well-crafted argument more mercilessly than a careless error. We’ve covered run-on sentences and misused words before, but here are a few other common errors to keep in mind for any type of writing.

Mind your apostrophes

You’re vs. Your: countless faces have met palm at the misuse of this basic contraction. It’s not the only word whose apostrophe use is commonly mistaken. They’re out there.

Writers use apostrophes in two ways:

1. to mash a pair of words together into a contraction.

2. to denote possession.

There are only four possessive pronouns that don’t use apostrophes: their, your, its and whose. Commit these to memory.

Every time you write “it’s” “or who’s” read it aloud with the contraction taken out:

“It’s [it is] a bad idea to take the dog way from its [possessive] food bowl.”

“Whose [possessive] dog is it anyway? And more importantly, who’s [who has] got bandages?”

Know the word you’re trying to use

Bookmark Dictionary.com now. Use it often, even when you’re certain you don’t need to. Typos happen, they can slip through the cracks when you’re drafting, but there isn’t as much forgiveness when you use an entirely wrong word. You may be a tremendous wit with a flair for narrative, but no anecdote in the world is going to neutralize the snake venom.

Mixed metaphors and incorrect idioms

Before his team was thoroughly trounced in the decisive game 5 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James told the assembled media that “history is made to be broken.” All respect to revisionist historians and Dr. Emmett Brown, but few things are as irreversible as history.

LeBron mixed his metaphors. “Records are meant to be broken” is the common sports cliché, typically referring to things like Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game or Brett Favre’s streak of consecutive starts.

LeBron wanted to dismiss the fact no team had ever come back from a 3 games to none deficit to win the NBA Finals. Speaking off the cuff, he instead mistakenly made a claim that, until we discover how to break the laws of thermodynamics, is entirely impossible.

Idiomatic language is closely related. While idioms and colloquialisms can provide color and uniqueness to the voice of your work, they should be used with caution even under the best circumstances.

To a non-native speaker, for example, “beating someone to the punch” could just mean you’re very thirsty at a party. Describing someone’s effort as “swinging for the fences” wouldn’t mean anything to someone who doesn’t know baseball.

Write in a clear, direct voice

In a previous blog, I discussed George Orwell’s famous essay on political writing. Three of his six rules to fix the bad writing of his day (and, sadly, ours still) directly involved writing clear, direct sentences. The University of Wisconsin Writing Center lists “sentence sprawl” as the second-most common error in student writing.

To paraphrase Orwell:

Never use a long word when you can use a short one.

If you can remove a word, do so.

Don’t use foreign words, scientific words or technical jargon when an equivalent exists in everyday English.

These are not always the simplest rules to follow, particularly among the perspicacious among us, and when considering that it is still de rigeur of celebrated authors to bombard us in haughty French and Latin phrases.

If you want to see how to write clearly and directly while still garnering praise as the most talented writer of your generation look no further than Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.

If you really want to break the rules, write dialogue

Writers of fiction and creative nonfiction know the benefits and necessity of including dialogue in their texts. It breaks apart the monotony of description and exposition and lets the advancement of plot happen in conjunction with characterization.

The biggest mistake a writer can make in dialogue, though, is writing it perfectly. No one, not even the Queen Mother speaks in perfect English all of the time. So if you really want to cut your language loose and break some of the rules, write a story with some dialogue (or a blog with a conversational voice). But just be sure to know the rules before you decide you need to break them.

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Mike’s blog: The wayward subject: an object lesson in passive voice

Posted on June 28, 2014 at 8:53 pm by Katie Anton with

We are delighted to welcome Michael P. Bischoff, radio news reporter at 620 WTMJ, who will be blogging with us this summer.

Michael, who studied film production at UWM, is also a founding member and one of the principal writers and actors in Milwaukee Comedy’s Variety Hour Happy Hour, a sketch comedy show.

In the past, Michael has written articles for Third Coast Digest (now Urban Milwaukee Dial) and was a featured blogger for Milwaukee Magazine. His short story, A Room In New York. 1932., was published in Skive Magazine (Australia) in 2009. A lifelong Wisconsinite, Michael resides in Bay View.

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching heads explode (and really, who isn’t?), next time you’re hanging out with a composition instructor or a high school English teacher, utter these two words, grab a bowl of popcorn and take a seat: passive voice.

Their dander shall remit itself to the upright, locked position.

After a few semesters of reading limp, lifeless essays and prose, chances are you’d learn to sympathize.

Passive Versus Active

The passive voice is the writing equivalent of the Monday morning commute. Writing in the active voice, by comparison, makes an essay/paper/story read like it’s leaving work early ahead of a four-day weekend.

Think of a sportscast. The immediacy of action dictates the immediacy of voice. A listener might very well hear the following during a baseball game:

Carpenter with the pitch. It’s just a bit outside, and that’s ball four. He couldn’t hit the corner with the fastball.

Nothing out of the ordinary there, the subjects and verbs in time with the action and paint a clear portrait of the action.

Now, while the pitching coach comes out to discuss that walk, let’s read the same thing, but in the passive voice:

The pitch is thrown by Carpenter, and the ball is caught, but outside, and ball four is called by the umpire. The corner could not be hit by his fastball.

Yikes, we may have to go to the bullpen.

So what exactly is the problem with the second sentence?

It isn’t technically wrong, and it conveys the identical information as the first, active-voiced sentence. But it does so in a wayward, meandering manner.

That’s the problem with passive sentences: they are also lazy sentences. They know there’s an object and a subject, but they aren’t terribly concerned about which is which.

It’s all about clarity

Let’s compare the first sentences of each example (with a slight modification, just to avoid that preposition moonlighting as a verb):

Carpenter throws the pitch.

Pretty clear, right? Our subject, “Carpenter,” leads the way, letting us know whom we’re talking about. He “throws,” to let us know what he’s doing, and because we’re completists “the pitch” lets us know what object has been thrown.

The pitch is thrown by Carpenter.

This sentence wants to trick us. It has introduced “the pitch” as the actor. The listener has to backtrack and rearrange the sequence once it’s revealed “Carpenter” is the one actually directing the action. Let’s change it slightly:

The pitch is thrown.

You can’t always depend on the green squiggly line to tell you when your sentences are passive.

The above is less a sentence and more an independent clause, but your grammar checker will see a perfectly fine sentence, incorrectly assuming “thrown” is an adjective to describe the pitch.

If a sentence doesn’t answer the question “By whom?” it is a passive sentence.

The writing center at UNC-Chapel Hill has a couple of handy guidelines for identifying and correcting passive sentences. In short, any sentence that uses form of “to be” (is, are, was, will be, etc.) combined directly with a past participle is taking a one-way trip to passive town.

But wait! Aren’t there any situations where the passive voice is the better option?

Indeed, there are limited instances where writing passively is acceptable, or even preferable, but it depends upon context.

Consider the following two sentences:

Active:

The Packers defense intercepted Jay Cutler four times.

Passive:

Jay Cutler was intercepted four times [by the Packers defense].

Either sentence could lead a paragraph describing Jay Cutler’s interceptions, but the correct choice depends on the context of the discussion.

The active-voiced sentence tells us we’re going to be talking about the Packers defense. That Jay Cutler was the individual throwing the interceptions is incidental to the fact the defense intercepted them.

However, if our aim is to question Jay Cutler’s shortcomings as a quarterback, the Packers defense is less important, even though it is what perpetrated the intercepting. That paragraph might look something like this:

Jay Cutler was intercepted four times Sunday night. He showed a lack of patience as the game wore on, forcing passes into coverage and taking unnecessary risks…

The rest of the paragraph immediately reverts to the active voice after establishing Jay Cutler as the topic of discussion. Point being, while sparing and deliberate use of the passive voice is forgivable, it’s the writer’s job to add clarity.

In most circumstances, we can faithfully adhere to Orwell’s fourth rule of political writing: the active voice is preferable to the passive voice wherever possible. The devil is in developing the critical eye to recognize it, hiding in plain sight within the body of a text. It takes a little bit of work and patience, but your writing (not to mention your TA/English teacher/composition instructor) will be better off for the effort.

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Robin’s blog: Concrete tips for writing abstracts

Posted on April 30, 2014 at 5:36 am by Katie Anton with

It’s an information-laden world, there’s no doubt. Thank heavens someone invented abstracts!

An abstract saves you from having to read or skim through pages and pages of an academic paper. Soon you learn what the writer has done, what they’ve thought, what and how they’ve studied, and what they’ve concluded. Simple, eh? Not every student faced with writing an abstract would agree.

Some guides recommend writing the abstract last. That might be the last thing on a weary writer’s mind after writing the paper itself. But if you can’t write the abstract with some ease, you may need to revisit the thought process you used in writing the paper. In other words, after developing your study, doing the research and drawing the conclusions, you should be able to summarize what has happened in 200 words or less. But “should” is not always easy. Here are some hints, tips, and formatting how-to’s.

What’s in an abstract?

The abstract has four parts: 1. Question: What research question did you ask? 2. Methodology: How did you explore your question? 3. Results: What did you find out? 4. Discussion: What might be the significance of your findings? Don’t write anything in your 200 words that isn’t in the paper itself. Edit ruthlessly. Include a sentence or two exploring the possible implications of your conclusions. Indicate any future research that could or should be done. (Write about those more completely in the discussion section of your paper.)

How do I say it?

To write the abstract, imagine writing home about what you’ve been up to – that is, if your siblings, parents, friends, etc. are interested in what you’ve been thinking (on a scholarly level, that is)! 1. Take a deep breath. 2. Re-read your paper; then put it aside so you don’t just copy from it. 3. Ask yourself, “What’s my research all about?” 4. Have compassion for your weary, information-flooded reader. 5. What did you wonder about? What did you discover? Why does it matter? Explain. In 200 words. Or less. Do that, and you truly grasp your paper as a whole. You may have even learned something creating it.

How do I format an abstract?

Writing an abstract poses two challenges:

1. You have to figure out what to say. Fortunately that’s probably the harder part.

2. You have to follow the formatting dictated by your professor or the publication (it could happen) that may publish your work. Often this is the American Psychological Association’s style (APA), and we’re now into the 6th edition of same. Rejoice! Sources for APA style information abound on the web. Of course, you might be someone who cannot abide the tedium of “underline?…comma, period, semicolon…?” In that case, let the editors at In Writing come to your aid. We thrive on that. Bibliographies and footnotes? Get ready to tear out your hair style-wise.

Abstract style: a quick guide

First, the Abstract page is always page 2. Include a “running head” on it (a condensed, 50 character or less version of the title on the left, the page number on the right). Next, center the word “Abstract” (minus the quote marks!) just below. Then, type your abstract in one paragraph, block style (no indents).

What about keywords?

You may want to include a keywords section. This isn’t required by APA style per se, but it might be required by your professor. And it seems like a good skill to practice. Select your keywords thoughtfully; they’re an even more condensed version of your paper.

How to format a keywords section per APA style:

Make a paragraph just below the abstract. Indent it. Type the word Keywords, in italics, followed by a colon, then type your keywords separated by commas. Don’t capitalize the first word after the colon (unless it would be capitalized anyway). There’s no period at the end of the list. Your abstract and the keywords section – should take only half a page. Leave the rest blank. Start your paper at the top of page 3.

Don’ts when writing abstracts

1. Don’t define terminology or phrases; do that in the body of your paper. (Clearly if your paper is ABOUT varying definitions, that rule isn’t relevant).

2. Don’t cite or quote outside sources. The abstract is about YOUR thought and research. (An obvious exception would be if a particular bit of existing research forms the basis for your paper’s investigation.)

3. Don’t use future tense, like “this paper will show.” Use present tense and past tense.

4. Don’t use “I,” “we,” “my,” “our,” etc. Stick to third person (he, she, it, they, etc.)

5. Try, as in most good writing, to avoid what’s called “passive voice.” You can recognize passive voice if the sentence leads to the question “by whom?” For instance – “It was determined that…” invites you to ask, “By whom?” A better sentence answers that question right away, that is, it’s what’s called “active voice.” The above in active voice: “These findings suggest….”

Do’s

A final “do” would be this: Think carefully about what you’ve accomplished. Envision a world full of people who want or need to read your conclusions. Then give yourself 200 words, give or take, to tell them what they can learn from your work!<

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Robin’s blog: Plagiarism–Fruit of temptation

Posted on February 8, 2014 at 10:39 pm by Katie Anton with

“Lead us not unto temptation” is a phrase from a prayer many of us know, and I’m probably not the only one who calls it to mind almost daily. Temptation is everywhere, from too many Christmas cookies to snapping at a difficult family member.

If you’re a writer, from a student to a world-renowned journalist, you’ve also probably faced temptation in the form of that confusing little devil called plagiarism..

I got to thinking about plagiarism in this modern age when I faced it head-on writing these blogs, especially those about the rules of grammar.

Because I’m a careful person and not always right when on that (or any other) topic, it’s my habit to do some online research as I write. I want to make sure I’m not spreading error, and sometimes I am trying to rethink it through for myself – now when is it that you start a quote with a capital? And other such fascinating topics.

How temptation begins

The temptation comes the minute I start reading what’s on the internet. It turns out perhaps thousands of well-educated people have written on those arcane topics, and I’m often startled at how well they explain things, with explanations of grammar’s nuances that are crystal clear and even beautifully written (well, perhaps only “beautiful” if you have a “thing” for grammar).

I’m safe as long as I cut, paste, and change wording…

stop sign

it’s still plagiarism if the idea belongs to someone else and you don’t attribute

So of course I do what any sane person trying to educate herself would do: I cut and paste the best phrases and paragraphs into my notes, sometimes even right into what I’m writing.

Then, of course, I go through and change the words to make it mine. But already I’m wondering, is this plagiarism? (It never was much of an issue when I was a student, when “cut and paste” meant literally that, and left a nasty hole in a book or magazine from which the cut was made).

So I rework the ideas into my own, but if it’s original or unique in any way – or maybe as I rewrite I realize the actual words the other person used were perfect – well, then I have to face up to it and attribute. That of course means, if you’re a student, hauling out the relevant style manual and doing it right.

Sometimes it’s actually more worthwhile just to start with words and ideas that are your own, and this is, indeed, one argument against laxity regarding plagiarism:

…if you put into your own words what you’ve read and studied, you pretty much have to understand it first.

The nuances of plagiarism

The whole question of course is more of a challenge to today’s student sitting at the computer. The temptations and the prevalence of various kinds of plagiarism are much increased. Much discussed too are the nuances of plagiarism, what is and what isn’t.

“Word-for-word” plagiarism is the one people usually think of, and the easiest to discern. When you get to ownership of ideas and matters like that, you’re on trickier ground, but I learned in my research that plagiarism is still considered, as it has been for probably millennia, a major intellectual “sin.”

And I realized the definition is really pretty clear. If you plagiarize, you are pretending that you thought and wrote something which actually someone else thought and wrote. It’s deception, to be blunt… or, in other words, lying.

What we do at In Writing

This is perhaps a good place to mention In Writing and the perspectives of its founder, Katie Anton. Katie tells me it’s crucial to her to make it clear that we are in no way a “paper-writing service,” to reassure both students and their teachers.

Even in our tutoring and editing, we’re careful to avoid suggesting to a student phrases or sentences to use. Rather than offer “did you mean to word it this way?” followed by a retelling in our words, we point out the places where you, the writer, need to give the point you’re making more thought.

Learning to put thoughts into words: a formidable task

The birthplace of clear writing is in clear thinking, and being able to think clearly about something goes hand in hand with learning and understanding it. And learning to put your thoughts into words is one of the most important aspects of any kind of education.

When you’re out in the professional world, it’s sometimes the case you can delegate that responsibility. But a student can’t, and I’d argue shouldn’t. You will learn the material better, and as a bonus you’ll learn the ins and outs of your own communication style, your abilities and pitfalls (we all have them!).

Who really owns ideas?

Issues like “ownership” of ideas and the ability to trace a line of argument through sources are also major reasons to stop and think the next time you cut and paste a good set of words.

Some suggest in a modern world, maybe no ideas are really the property of one person or company. But others note that given the world as it is, with patents and copyrights galore, the question of whether ideas should be owned or not isn’t very relevant. What is relevant is the possibility of watching one’s career crash and burn after plagiarism is discovered.

For students, of course, the immediate concerns would be academic probation, suspension and even expulsion, none of which exactly advance one’s career!

When in doubt, cite

I admit I find citing sources tedious. I’d love to just take the ideas and run with them! But I’ve realized the wiser course is to slow down and be careful.

First, I’ll write the idea or information in my own words. At that point, I can see pretty clearly whether I’m restating a common fact or stealing an original idea. If there’s any doubt, I’ll stop and cite. If I realize the original writer put it better than I ever could, I’ll go back and use the direct quotation too.

At In Writing, we make this easier by helping out with accurate citation style. The main thing you need to supply is the intent to stay honest. In our experience, the vast majority of students have that intention. Plagiarism is a complicated topic to be sure, but it rests on some principles of honesty we’ve all heard about since kindergarten, if not before.

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Robin’s blog: Quote me: a quotation mark cheat sheet

Posted on February 2, 2014 at 3:26 am by Katie Anton with

Quote marks are satisfying to me. Unlike the “who/whom” business for example – the rules on how to use quote marks make intuitive sense – to me, at least!

Most people know the first quote rule: if the words are exactly what someone said or wrote, put them in quotes. There are exceptions to this (is there a grammar rule without exceptions?), but it’s a start. The issue of plagiarism may come to mind, but that is a topic whose complexity merits its own blog.

Back to the simplicity of quote marks.

Double quotes

Use double quotes (these “) around short to medium-length quotations.

The man said, “Bring me an apple.”

One study participant noted, “I would not want to do this again.”

He said he would “never do that again.”

Block quotes

If you want to use a longer quote (APA style says 40+ words) you format it as a block quote.

With a block quote, you DO NOT use quote marks. Instead, you start the quote on a separate line (indented 1/2 inch from the left margin).

Each subsequent line of that quote lines up with the initial line.

The quote’s introductory line should end with a period or colon, not a comma.

This is perhaps most famous part of the speech Churchill made to Parliament on May 13, 1940:

I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.

Onward.

Introducing an ordinary (not block) quote: Comma or no comma?

If the preceding word is the sentence’s primary verb, put a comma after it.

Another way to think about this is whether the preceding words are the “attribution” of the quote, that is, the phrase that tells you who said (or hissed, or shouted, etc.) the quoted words:

She said, “I found the answer!”

I responded, “I don’t think you did.”

Quotes that “run in” to the sentence

If your introduction to a quote includes “that,” you’re not going to use the comma:

He said the statement was “simply not correct.”

She said that the boss was “a problem.”

Quote within a quote

Sometimes you’ll find what is called a “quote within a quote.”

Here, place single quotes (this ‘) on the inside.

Place exterior quotes (this “) on the outside.

He said that he “will not forego the opportunity to ‘offer…blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'”

The three dots in the example above are called an ellipsis, and are used to indicate words left out of the middle of the quote.

There we begin to enter the treacherous territory of actually using quotes, tricks such as when to use a four-point ellipsis, how to incorporate a comma with an ellipsis, and on and on.

In this short – and I hope simple – list of samples we’ll avoid those topics, too.

Punctuation: Inside or outside the quotes?

There is one final point, and it’s one of my favorites, partly because it’s done incorrectly so often.

Please, please put ending punctuation inside the quote marks. (If you want the exception to that, it’s the semicolon, but that occurrence is rarer than a clear grammar rule!)

“Man the fort,” he said. “We will prevail, or die trying!”

He quoted Churchill accurately, saying, “Man the fort; we have nothing to offer but ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'”

A final thought, occasioned by Churchill’s eloquence: punctuation and its companion grammar, as demonstrated above, can confuse and challenge the best of us. But we can look to Churchill’s words – not the punctuation surrounding them – to find what really matters.

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Katie’s blog: What a central auditory processing disorder is and what to do about it

Posted on October 19, 2013 at 10:38 pm by Katie Anton with

I was at Walgreen’s the other day when an overhead announcer requested a price check on papaya tablets. When I heard this, I had to pull over with my shopping cart and pause. What did they just say? Popeye’s tablets? Is that a euphemism for canned spinach? Oh, wait a minute… they are saying “papaya” tablets.

This kind of thing happens sometimes when you have a central auditory processing disorder (CAPD). It’s not a bad idea to laugh about it…or at least laugh about it after some time has passed if the distortion caused an embarrassment for you. After all, the distortions CAPD causes CAN be comical.

CAPD is neurological

What happened to me at Walgreen’s is a common occurrence for those of us who, for all the audiologists in the world, hear normally, but our brains distort what we hear. CAPD is actually a neurological condition. You may then ask, “Well, doesn’t everyone sometimes misunderstand what they hear?” Of course they do; the difference is in proportion. How frequently do you misunderstand what you hear? Do you often miss important information that most everyone else seems able to process? Has your processing style significantly impaired you/interfered with your life? Has your processing style adversely affected you socially and occupationally? Are your grades at school slipping because you “miss” important points in lectures?

When sounds hurt

Having CAPD can feel a bit like old age setting in…about 75 years or so ahead of schedule. People tend to think I am hearing impaired when in reality I sometimes can’t accurately process what I’m hearing the first time; subsequently I may “miss” things. Yet and still, I test normally on hearing screens. Airports, shopping malls, the Fourth of July parades and fireworks—these are harmless places for most people; for those of us with CAPD, these places at one point or another in life may have created serious stress since we can hear and experience them so differently from people whose brains normally process what they hear. As a very young child, I could not tolerate the sound of fireworks and would cover my ears and scream. The sounds were painful. Imagine what you hear amplified by a factor of 10.

Processing speeds will vary

As a teen, I forced myself exposure to novel and often noisy situations to desensitize my “quirky” wiring. Still, I used to think I was slow on the uptake and was sometimes labeled “ditsy” because of my differences in auditory processing, which can come across to others as being “slow.” Of course, there is a grain of truth to the “slowness” part, but it does not reflect a person’s intelligence; rather, it reflects a slower auditory processing speed since CAPD brains simply take longer to process what’s heard. I used to often ask people to repeat themselves, of course, and I even had a rule about it: If after asking someone to repeat themselves a third time I still did not understand what they were saying (as I could sense they were getting impatient with me), I would just go ahead and PRETEND to hear them. Now, you can imagine just how distorted stories might get in the retelling in the world of someone with CAPD…kind of like an endless game of “telephone.” It’s no surprise that I disliked and avoided that game as a young child. Just use your ears and stop being so dopey, they would say. As if being dopey were a choice, I thought at the time. More important– I knew that I wasn’t “dim”–something else was going on. Little did I know at the time that my brain just worked differently in processing what I heard compared with other kids.

Closed captioning: Not just for the hearing impaired and the elderly

For a while, before I knew I had CAPD, I rationalized that all people just mumbled and talked too fast. To this day, I rarely ever understand the lyrics to songs on the first listening, much less the third. If I’m curious about song lyrics, I can usually find them if I search Google. I find places like bars or other places with lots of stimulation going on stressful and even confusing when I am expected to process conversations with others in those settings. I rely on closed captioning when I take in programs on television or the computer (I am so grateful for transcriptions-and I have to say You Tube is in dire need of better closed-captioned transcriptions). I find I must ask people with unfamiliar accents and those who speak quickly to repeat themselves; and I’m no longer afraid to ask people to repeat themselves more than three times. If there is background noise, the problem is compounded, and I must ask for patience and help and to perhaps relocate to a quieter spot.

An irony, or at least a “perceived” irony, in all of this is that I have been successfully employed in medical editing and transcription for many years. This type of work requires listening to medical providers dictate audio on patients and then editing what is heard. How is it I’m so proficient in this work living with CAPD? It’s essential to understand that the work itself takes place in a highly-controlled setting, wherein I can listen and relisten as many times as I need if I don’t understand what is said the first time. Because the voices are prerecorded and not live, it is not embarrassing to go back and listen again. There is no one there to ask, “Please say that again.” Plus, with repetition, I have become so familiar with providers’ voices (including accents, quirks, and nuances from all over the globe) that it is like a second language in which I have achieved fluency.

As for my teaching, all in-person tutoring sessions happen one to one in settings that tend to be quieter and more controlled, which is essential for students and tutors to succeed regardless of sensory processing differences that may exist.

Compensatory strategies

Figure out your strengths and find a way to pursue them. A central auditory processing disorder undiagnosed might feel limiting, but do not allow it to limit you. Easy to say, I know. You need to find ways to create a life that is less overwhelming. Learning compensatory strategies will allow you to thrive (and in places like noisy bars—survive) in a world where the majority processes information differently than you. You are in the minority, which is maybe not where you’d prefer to be if given a choice. However, as in other things you might encounter in life, here again you must accommodate to the majority way of doing things. Know that you CAN adapt to the culture with practice and patience. Most important–don’t ever allow anyone to put you down for it. It would be like putting someone down for having diabetes or cerebral palsy. Of course, there are settings that are obviously a setup for you to do worse and even fail (you might reconsider your idea of supplementing your income by becoming a bartender– unless you want to say you’ve REALLY overcome an obstacle; I cannot fathom a more disastrous career choice for someone with CAPD). You need to also learn about where you perform your best and work to your strengths. It’s not unlike the experience you may have had in high school where you tried to change your personality to fit into a group when really you needed to find the group that fit you.

Explain to people how you process information. There is nothing wrong with disclosing your CAPD; the condition is more common than you might think. The other thing is people need to learn about it. And the average person does not know what CAPD is. I tell most people about it in some way. I may simply tell them I process things a bit differently through hearing and leave it at that. I do this straight away if we’re working closely together. In my experience, people are usually respectful about it. There will always be those rare few who may dismiss your condition as a “café syndrome” and who might be mean or impatient about it. I say, do you really want such people in your life anyway? If these are chosen relationships (e.g. they are NOT your bosses, co-workers, clients), stay away from them if you can.

Pursue work in settings that aren’t overstimulating to you or at least in settings that you can tolerate. Most people who know me well put information in writing for me. Our virtual society in which emails and texts are the new norm is a godsend and an empowerment to people with CAPD–or really to anyone who communicates better in writing than speaking. I gravitate toward quieter, structured, more predictable and controlled settings, which helps me better process what I hear. That might be a good workaround for you, too. I take solace in written communication and have always preferred it, although I have learned to become proficient in auditory processing on the phone and in face-to-face interactions. I do very well one on one in live tutoring sessions. Add two or three people to the situation, and it becomes more complicated to auditorily process all that is going on, although I have worked long and hard to adapt to it and can do it well.

Ask people for what you need. What’s the worst that can happen? It is important that you learn compensatory tricks, just as people with hearing impairments adapt to the world around them; otherwise you’ll end up shortchanging yourself and the world around you. It is tempting to want to become a hermit when you’re met with misunderstandings and impatient reactions all of the time, but try not to isolate yourself. Remember–this is not your fault. It is your neurology. Do not blame yourself for it. You will find that processing the world around you does get easier with practice and exposure.

Do ask people to please slow down their pace of speech. Do ask them to repeat themselves or to speak louder (especially when there is background noise). Don’t pretend to understand what you can’t process (even if you feel stupid asking, ask–and you might even educate people about your condition if it’s fitting). Do limit your time in places where you feel overloaded (if you are like me, you’ll avoid or limit your time in noisy places like bars). If you feel that you don’t want to disclose your CAPD, you don’t need to. You can always just tell people that you have trouble hearing. Who isn’t empathic about that?

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Robin’s blog: My three favorite misused words

Posted on October 19, 2013 at 7:30 pm by Katie Anton with

Misused words can be charming in the right context. I have a friend who says “it’s not death-defying” when she means “it’s not earth shaking,” as in perhaps having picked up the wrong item at the store. It always makes me laugh.

Unfortunately teachers are usually less amused by these kinds of errors. Additionally they have the job to see that you know right from wrong in language. So for those reasons alone using the right word matters.

It can also matter – in school or out – when the error causes your communication to derail. You might think, “They knew what I meant,” but that little glitch can make readers have to stop and translate. It can slow readers down, be irritating, and sometimes even lead to complete breakdown, e.g. “I have no idea what the writer means here!” There’s not much point in writing if the writing doesn’t communicate.

Let’s look at a few of the words mostly commonly misused, based at least on what I’ve seen. I will list my three favorites and continue the list in future blogs.

If you know all these, congratulate yourself. But you can then search the web on this topic to challenge yourself, as some people have put together huge lists of words to watch out for.

A word to the wise (that you may already know): As you are writing, if you’re not sure of the word you want to use, just type it into Google and get the definition, with the proper spelling as a bonus. I’ve been amazed how wrong I can spell a word and Google still understands what I want! You can do the same thing with a phrase and, if you have it wrong, Google will tell you the more customary usage.

With no further ado, here are my top three for now, with the necessary notes:

1) Irregardless, regardless and irrespective. This is an oldie but goodie. Irregardless is not a word. I think it came about through confusion between regardless and irrespective, two words whose meaning is close. The ir prefix negates the word – so regardless and irrespective make sense, and irregardless doesn’t.

2) Moot and mute. A point not relevant to the matter at hand is called moot (said like a cow’s “moo” with a T on the end), meaning it needn’t be spoken of in the current discussion. Mute, of course, means unable to speak. Between the pronunciation question and the faint resemblance in meanings, you can see where the confusion arises.

3) In view of and in lieu of. In view of means taking into consideration, in lieu of means in place of. The latter is frequently seen in phrases like “In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate contributions to….” In view of actually means the opposite – “In view of the expense of flowers, I decided to donate the money to a college.” Lieu is the French word for place – that’s a major clue.

In general, if you want to remember these and not to have to look them up each time, but have trouble, the good old trick is to pick some little phrase, game, similarity, saying, etc. that for you hints at or makes entirely clear the differences.

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Robin’s blog: Simple rules for fixing run-on sentences

Posted on October 19, 2013 at 5:09 pm by Katie Anton with

“Run-on sentence!” The phrase conjures up images of teachers armed with red pens and frowns writing in the margins of my school papers. Sometimes they would simply write “run-on!” and that seemed even worse. In either case, though, what I most dreaded was having to fix them.

It was years before I realized that “run-on” didn’t mean the sentence was too long. It meant the sentence was not built right. The often accompanying phrase “comma splice” helped me see this more precisely. It turns out that a run-on sentence is two or more sentences melded incorrectly into one.

Over the years, like many others, I have learned to write acceptably while often not really knowing the rules, and that’s one way to proceed. But everyone approaches writing in their own way, and it often helps to understand the basics if you want to find and fix errors.

Doing some research now, I’m not surprised that run-ons confused me. There are actually two kinds of run-ons, one where the sentences are just mushed together with no punctuation, the other where they are joined by a comma. The latter is the infamous “comma splice” (and just to confuse things, there are a few rare cases where a comma splice is OK).

Is it a run-on? First find the subject and verb

I’m not big on mastering grammar skills just for the heck of it. But any time your writing isn’t communicating well enough, you may have to face learning some grammar. The subject and verb are the core of sentence structure – and usually should be meaning-wise as well.

For some people this skill needs no review, but for others it just never quite clicks, quite a bit like me and freshman algebra. Either way, though, it’s a skill that can be improved with practice (and if you learn to approach your writing analytically using this kind of tool, you might find yourself actually enjoying it).

So, to find subject and verb, two basic questions to ask when you confront a sentence:

1. What’s happening?

2. Who’s doing it?

Of course, just to keep it tricky, you have to include “is,” “was,” “are,” “were” and all the other forms of the verb “to be” in the category of “doing,” as often one of those forms of “to be” will be your primary verb.

And we must not forget the imperative verbs, as in the sentence “Go to the door.” There the verb (the only word there that’s an action) is “Go,” and the person “doing” the action is “you.” Another way to say it is “You! Go to the door!” See the implicit “you” as the subject in the three-word form?

Concentrate on finding the “center” of the sentence. Sometimes it won’t exactly match the “center” in terms of the sentence’s meaning. Remember you’re looking at the sentence’s structure: that is, how the words fit together and relate to one another.

First type of run-on: The mushed-together sentence

If your sentence has more than one subject-and-verb pair, you should stop to make sure it’s not a run-on. For example, “We saw him he ran out the door.” Because you have two subjects (we and he) and two verbs (saw and ran), you need to separate them somehow. Two ways to do this:

1. With punctuation

2. With more words that explain how the two are related

The easiest fix here: Separate this into two sentences, with a period after “him.” To convey a closer relationship between the parts, you can instead use a semicolon (;) between them. Semicolons can be tricky, though, and you won’t go wrong if you simply make two sentences.

Second type of run-on: The comma splice

To understand the comma splice, imagine the example above with its parts separated by nothing more than a comma after “him”:

“We saw him, he ran out the door.”

That’s a comma splice, and these are almost never OK (see below for exception). You’re trying to join two sentences with a weak little comma. It doesn’t sound really bad, but it’s not acceptable in most kinds of formal writing. You can fix this sentence as we did above by:

1. Making two sentences or

2. Using a semicolon between the two parts

Sometimes you can convey more meaning by linking the two parts with an additional word:

“We saw him but he ran out the door.” Or

“We saw him because he ran out the door.”

The first example uses but, a coordinating conjunction; the second uses because, a subordinating conjunction.

And yes, that’s jargon. But it’s worth understanding:

A coordinating conjunction is a word like “and” or “but” that is used to join two parts that could each stand alone.

A subordinating conjunction is a word like “because” or “when.” In joining the two parts, it makes one “subordinate” to the other, turning it into what’s called a dependent clause. You are making one part of your sentence dependent on the other part to make complete sentence.

The comma before a coordinating conjunction (“and,” “but,” etc.) is optional though it’s often useful, especially if the parts are long. With a subordinating conjunction (“because,” “when”) using a comma is wrong because the second part is dependent on the first. Using a comma signifies you could separate them to stand alone (and to carry this further, you can begin a new sentence with “And” or “But” if you really want to). But using a word like “because” creates a sentence where both parts are required to convey the sentence’s meaning, so no comma.

When the comma splice is OK: I came, I saw, I conquered

There are a few times in which a “comma splice” is appropriate. I always think of the example “I came, I saw, I conquered.” In each part “I” is the subject and the three verbs also are pretty obvious. The commas are OK essentially because the parts are short. It’s a nice construction, but there’s not much point in risking it unless you really want to. (The quote is from the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, whose desire to express himself that way not many would have questioned, as he had a way of acting well described in the phrase itself.)

Examples of run-ons and fixes:

WRONG: “We saw him he ran out the door.”

WRONG (99% of the time): “We saw him, he ran out the door.”

FIXES:

“We saw him. He ran out the door.”

“We saw him; he ran out the door.”

“We saw him but he ran out the door.”

“We saw him because he ran out the door.”

What could be easier? Surely not freshman algebra!

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Katie’s blog: ADHD and fatigue, part 2: when you can’t get your homework done

Posted on July 7, 2013 at 4:37 am by Katie Anton with

Do you lack the motivation and energy to complete tasks (especially “boring” ones)? This can be a frustrating no-end battle for people with ADHD and other self-regulation spectrum conditions (autism is a condition that can impair your ability to get things done, too; sometimes autism, also neurological, is found to be the real culprit and not ADHD; and sometimes a psychologist will assess you and diagnose you with both conditions). We’ll focus on ADHD for this blog.

If you live with a condition like ADHD, you know that you’re not dumb, lazy, or unwilling, even if other people might label you in this way. It might not take much physical/mental activity to exhaust you. ADHD is neurobiological, so you’re NOT imagining things. You feel lousy and have trouble keeping up with life’s demands because you have a real condition. Read Driven to Distraction and get educated on ADHD. If you have not sought a formal diagnosis, you might consider doing so now to get the help you need. Even if you’re 40 years old, it’s not too late. The right diagnosis will help you get the right accommodations at school and work.

So, what CAN you do to beat the fatigue and get yourself “unfrozen” to get things done?

Force yourself now to start AND keep a diary

Why a diary? You need to learn about yourself. What are your energy patterns over time? Recording how you feel each day in a diary should help you notice patterns in how your energy waxes and wanes over time. Each day, you would record in your diary the following data about yourself:

mood

energy

amount of sleep

diet

level of exercise/activity

life events/stressors on particular days

for women, monthly hormone fluctuations

Here’s how your diary might look:

July 1, 2013: Exhausted, irritable, low energy, 5 hours of sleep, ate too much leftover Mexican before bed, surfed the Internet until wee hours, sedentary day, boss yelled at me in front of co-workers, PMSing, my cat is throwing up and the vet is out of town

Now July 1 may be have been a washout from every angle—but at least when you look back on it in your diary, you will know why:

You slept just 5 hours as not only did you go to bed too late, but also your late night Internet surfing habit caused insomnia.
Your stressful day threw you into a feeding frenzy which took place too close to bedtime.
You have premenstrual syndrome and you would feel irritable even if your day had gone swimmingly.
You are worried about your sick cat.
You were humiliated by your petty, tyrannical and unpredictable boss.

Once you keep a daily record of these variables, you should begin to see some patterns after a few months. Your reward—you should be better able to predict when to “schedule” more cognitively demanding activities like writing papers.

I know: “scheduling” writing is not always practical and realistic for the day-to-day tasks, but for an ongoing project, such as writing a capstone, which can take months, knowing your rhythms and patterns can save your life.

For example, you anticipate you will be “off” around the week of September 20 and you have a paper due the week of October 20. Armed with that knowledge, you might then plan to take advantage of those higher energy times to do the bulk of your research and writing; thus, you opt to do so during the first week of October, a time you have determined your pattern to be higher energy.

This strategy doesn’t always work out right at first. Be patient. With time, the diary method (if you can stand to write in it every day) should help you recognize your patterns of higher energy times. The diary is not a panacea; it’s one more item to supplement you ADHD bag of tricks to help you cope with life’s demands.

During the lower-energy week of September 20, when possible, you might aim to UNDERSCHEDULE to avoid burnout. Mind your body’s natural rhythms.

Beware, psychological toxins

If under scheduling is just too unrealistic, make it a priority to at least eat properly (please see below), sleep sufficiently, exercise as much as you can stand, follow a structured routine, and if you know toxic people/situations/places that trigger stress for you, avoid or minimize exposure if possible.

Unfortunately we have reality. And most of us are stuck with at least some toxic elements as a fact of life, with overwork, co-workers, professors, and clients making demands of us, horrible bosses pulling fast ones, sudden stressful events thrust upon us, etc.

Why did I have such high energy on that particular day?

Document the dates when you had those bursts of energy. On what days did those witty insights, innovative ideas and eloquent words come to you so effortlessly? How were those days DIFFERENT from the days when NO ideas would come? Did you quit a job you hated? Fall in love? Write it down.

Some women find that about a week before menstruation, they have bursts of energy and get an enormous amount of work done, have crystal clear thoughts, and can brainstorm like no other time. Make a chart of such things and document as much as possible to measure all variables.

You are busy, but discovering your energy patterns will increase the chances that you will feel better. You know your body best, and no one else can do it but you.

Sleep: My friends are cheating, so why can’t I?

Regular sleep patterns with relatively little deviation over weekends are essential in managing your condition. You know what happens when you stay up until 3 a.m. on a weekend when you are accustomed to an 11 p.m. bedtime during the work/school week. Monday morning will be even more of an ordeal, and you’ll likely feel irritable and exhausted. You will then be tempted to turn to heavily caffeinated and/or sugared fixes for a temporary boost and subsequent crash.

Caffeine mimics estrogen and can cause a host of troubles for you, whether male (how does the idea of developing “man breasts” strike you?) or female (endometriosis, breast cancer, cervical cancer, so much cancer, too many women’s troubles to list). Your friends can cheat with little consequence, which is a depressing reality if you choose to see it that way–but it is one that you can manage.

Exercise: Take 20 minutes out of your day for movement

This is hardly news. Exercise as much as you can stand. Partner up, if you’re the social type.

Use your pet to motivate you to move. Most pet owners already know that pets are furry antidepressants–and when other strategies fail, pets can succeed in getting you out of your armchair.

You also might use psychology. Play a mind game with yourself and think of all the other things you do during your day that take only 20 minutes. Then try to move.

Do not underestimate the value of incorporating music into your workout. The right music might push even a hard-to-motivate crotchety grump to move at least a bit. According to the music therapy literature, music “organizes and energizes” and helps patients “reach therapeutic goals.”

Think I enjoy exercise? Not without a strong push. I use tricks to get off the couch. And sometimes they work. And, once I’m up and moving, I do as much as I can stand. Sometimes I feel worse. Most of the time, I tend to feel better and then get more done.

Under schedule your time

With ADHD and similar conditions, if you underestimate what you can do in a period of time, you will probably get it just right. Imagine that a task will take 3 times as long to finish, and you may be pleasantly surprised to find you have finished it sooner.

So sign up for 12 college credits instead of 18 (not exactly practical or realistic for everyone, but under scheduling may prevent you from failing courses, too). You will probably perform better with less credits as other responsibilities vie for your time and attention. Having ADHD and other self-regulation disorders can mean it might just take you longer to finish things than someone without these conditions.

Babysitting

This strategy has been legendary for keeping people (especially easily distracted people) on task. Why do bosses exist in most workplaces? In large part, bosses babysit. When you go home, you sometimes need a sitter there, too.

As you did with exercising, elicit the help of a friendly babysitter in the form of a friend, a sibling, your mother. Ask that person to sit with you when you have to do boring things. Writing papers is the perfect example for some people.

Make sure you are seated at a clean, clutter-free table. Maybe this babysitter has experienced similar struggles and would welcome a mutual babysitting session. Advise them to bring a big stack of bills to write out and a checkbook to balance along with any homework they may have.

The more dreadful and boring the task, the better. Make a game of it; maybe the person who finishes the boring work first gets some kind of predetermined reward. The point of babysitting is that it keeps you accountable to someone else.

Diet

If you have ADHD or a similar condition, you may be familiar with having multiple sensitivities, and gluten intolerances are not uncommon to people who complain about an inability to focus and complete tasks. A high complex carbohydrate, moderate protein, low simple carbohydrate, sugar free diet may be helpful.

William G. Crook, MD, states “The poor performance of the inattentive, overactive child is often caused by improper food (fuel): too much sugar and other junk food and insufficient amounts of nutrients, including carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals.”

You may get relief from symptoms if you avoid or eliminate:

Refined white sugar
Artificial sweeteners
Preservatives
Caffeine
Phosphates

Replace artificial sweeteners with natural sweeteners:

Pure juice/fruit juice concentrates
Honey
Brown rice sugar
Stevia

You may also benefit from the use of supplements (deficiencies in the following may cause ADHD behaviors):

B Vitamins
Folic Acid
Niacin
Pyridoxine
Thiamine
Iron
Magnesium
Calcium
Zinc
Taurine

The following product may be effective for some adults with ADHD:

Metagenics brand products for neurological health

Order this supplement through your local chiropractor. You may also order Metagenics products on Amazon.com or other Internet vendors.

Other supplements that may be helpful: Fish Oil

Remember when you were a little kid, and your parents or whoever nagged you to eat your fish because “fish is brain food”? Well, maybe your parents weren’t so dumb after all. Essential Fatty Acid DEFICIENCY has been proposed to cause ADHD symptoms. EPA (eidosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) have been shown to benefit adults with ADHD.

The following product may be effective for some adults with ADHD:

Metagenics brand EPA-DHA Omega-3 Fish Oil

Order this product through your local chiropractor, from Amazon.com or other Internet sources.

The Paleo diet

This is also known as the “caveman diet.” Ask yourself if our ancient ancestors suffered with ADHD, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune diseases, joint pains, arthritis, rashes, and other “modern” diseases.

Now ask yourself if our ancestors ate cereal for breakfast. The fact is, a protein called gluten which is found in grains causes inflammation. Inflammation causes disease. The “caveman” diet consists of foods that are whole, simple, and noninflammatory.

When you first learn about the Paleo diet, you will find it depressing as it seems there are few things you really CAN eat (at far as those foods that you may have been CONDITIONED to eat for much of your life because, at the time you were growing up, everyone harped about how “healthy” whole wheat bread was for you and that your bowels would be in DEEP TROUBLE without THAT kind of fiber–now you can tell those same people that wheat makes you feel crummy, fat and bloated).

The good news about Paleo: you should notice better alertness, more energy and you may also experience weight loss. Gradually, as you reduce your body’s inflammation, a process known as “deflaming,” you may be able to “cheat” occasionally and introduce other foods depending on how you feel and how much inflammation you decide you can live with.

What you CAN eat on the Paleo diet:

Not much:

Nuts and seeds
Fruits and vegetables
Meat, poultry and seafood

Foods that you SHOULD NOT EAT (they cause inflammation):

All grains and grain products (white and wheat bread, pasta, cereal, pretzels, crackers, any other product made with grains or flours from grains (most packaged foods)
Partially hydrogenated oils found in margarine, fried foods, most packaged foods
Corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil and foods made with these oils.
Soda, dairy, soy and sugar.
Meat and eggs from grain-fed animals. It is almost impossible to follow THIS one. Buy lean cuts of meat.

For a more detailed list of foods to avoid and non-gluten grains, go to www.csaceliacs.org.

For other nutritional information, read “Prescription for Nutritional Healing” by James Balch and Phyllis Balch.

Don’t sue me. I am not a medical practitioner and CANNOT guarantee results. The above is intended to be informational and helpful to you. It is not a substitute for the advice of a medical professional. Through experience and my own research, I have found the above strategies to be helpful.

All the best in completing your writing and beating your fatigue.

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