Mike’s blog: Make a smooth transition

Posted on August 8, 2014 at 4:47 am by 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”

photo-4-225x300

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 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 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 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 with

dr. abel scribe

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: Simple rules for fixing run-on sentences

Posted on October 19, 2013 at 5:09 pm by 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!

Copyright 2013  In Writing, LLC  All Rights Reserved

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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 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.

 

Copyright © 2013 In Writing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Katie’s blog: ADHD and fatigue, part 1: when you can’t get your homework done

Posted on March 1, 2013 at 12:53 am by with

Recently a freshman undergrad with inattentive attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) asked, “How do I stay awake when I try to write my papers? I fell asleep again with my assignment last night, and now I’m running behind. This keeps happening to me.”

People with various types and degrees of ADHD find the condition makes it difficult to predict how they will function on a given day. The extremes of the spectrum range from “on” (functioning optimally) to “partially on” (functioning enough to do what is necessary in daily life) to “off” (barely functioning). The unevenness of symptoms can be terribly frustrating and makes it difficult to plan and carry out basic daily life activities.

Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, a child and adult psychiatrist in Sudbury, Massachusetts and founder of The Hallowell Center (a counseling and diagnostic center for people with ADHD and other conditions that affect concentration, attention, learning, and memory) and Dr. John J. Ratey, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, co-authored the 1994 groundbreaking ADHD canon Driven to Distraction. Eleven years later, in Hallowell and Ratey’s Delivered from Distraction, the authors bluntly describe the unevenness of symptoms in their checklist of “disadvantageous characteristics” of ADHD:

Inconsistent performance despite great effort. People with ADHD do great one hour and lousy the next, and great one day and lousy the next, regardless of the effort and time in preparation. They go from the penthouse to the outhouse in no time!

Some with ADHD hesitate to make plans when they are on. They worry that when it comes time to follow through, they will feel too off to deliver. If only symptoms came as predictably as a 9-5 Monday through Friday schedule.

Part of the unpredictability is the many variables that can affect the severity of symptoms that go with neurobiological conditions like ADHD.

ADHD risk management: Ounces of prevention
Below is a series of questions to ask yourself if fatigue is getting in the way of completing your assignments:

How interesting to me is my writing topic?
This question might sound dumb to you and painfully obvious, but people with ADHD tend to have special interests that captivate their attention, sometimes to the point of overfocusing on their special interests–and away from the task at hand. When people with ADHD must write about a topic they perceive as less interesting or uninteresting, writing can seem impossible. Most people find it more difficult to write about topics of lesser interest, of course, but with ADHD, the problem intensifies.

How much sleep did I get last night?
At least 7-8 hours per night is the recommended amount for adults, although for teens it is actually closer to 9 hours per night.

What did I eat today? Did I eat today? When did I last eat? How much protein did I eat today?
Blood sugar fluctuations can have a significant impact on ADHD symptoms. People with self-regulation disorders often “forget” to eat when they get involved in certain activities—especially enjoyable ones. When you start the day, a high-protein breakfast is best. Eat what some people might consider “dinner” foods when you first wake up. For example, reheat a chicken breast from last night’s dinner. The worst things to eat are bagels, cereals, and muffins (“muffin” is a euphemism for “cake”). Eating refined carbohydrates is the equivalent of taking a sleeping pill, suggests ADHD expert Daniel Amen. You will likely nod off.

How much water am I drinking?
Mayo Clinic recommends eight 8-ounce servings of water per day.

Have I been under more stress in school/work/my personal life lately?
Stress tends to make most chronic conditions worse.

Are my hormones fluctuating?
Hormone fluctuations can worsen any chronic conditions women already have. Some research has claimed that premenstrual syndrome can include approximately 150 different symptoms. I don’t doubt it.

Am I exercising?
When you exercise, you tend to sleep better. With good sleep, your overall functioning tends to stabilize. The worst part? Getting the motivation to start exercising. For people with ADHD, transitioning from one activity to another can be difficult and even disabling on some days. That’s why many people with ADHD cannot multitask (I should qualify:  Cannot multitask and get things right).

Do I have small “bursts” of energy within a day where I am calm, focused and clear minded?
If possible, do small parts of your project/write notes about ideas when you feel those bursts of energy. You may not remember your ideas later, so write them down when they come to you.

Am I eating foods that cause inflammation?
People with ADHD are prone to coexisting allergies and food sensitivities. Eating foods that cause inflammation can also inflame behavior. Our next post will outline specific anti-inflammatory foods that are recommended for people with ADHD (and other conditions that affect self-regulation).

Please visit our site for part 2 of ADHD and fatigue, when we follow up with more information and other concrete suggestions to help you manage symptoms of fatigue.

Copyright 2013  In Writing, LLC  All Rights Reserved

 

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