Punctuation

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Today, maybe it's the overcast sky or the numerous requests I've had recently for proofreading, but I find myself thinking about punctuation. We don't use punctuation when we talk--most of the time--and we still manage to understand each other, so in some ways punctuation may seem extraneous or cumbersome. However, when we use written communication, we don't have access to all the signals we have for spoken conversation.

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Pre-packaged multiple choice test tools rant

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I have never used multiple choice tests or quizzes in my teaching. As a student, I found multiple choice to be excessively easy. I didn't learn anything from doing it; it was a simple identification, or maybe a very brief treasure hunt. In any event, multiple choice seems lazy to me as a teacher and a student and not a very good indicator of anything at all.

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Audience: Who are you writing for?

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Every time we sit down to write something, anything, we are writing to someone. Often, our writing is simply for ourselves: shopping lists, errands, books we'd like to read, or calendar entries. When we write for ourselves, we know our audience intimately, and so we don't have to put much thought into it: we need enough words to jog our own memory and clear enough handwriting to read what we wrote.

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Context

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Recently, my students have been struggling to participate in our online discussions about our assigned readings. Each week, I assign several short articles and a person to be the discussion leader in charge of each reading. That person posts a summary of the article and five questions for discussion. The questions have been really interesting, but tend toward personal reflection and experience rather than conversation about the article. I want students to connect their own experiences with the reading, so these questions are positive approaches to integrating the material with each student's life, but I've been asking them to make sure they connect their personal experience to specific moments in the text. They are having trouble doing this and keep insisting that the discussion leader has already posted a summary so anything they say about the text will be redundant. Redundant!

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Carelessness and its humorous effects

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Most of us write everyday. We consider ourselves accurate and fast communicators. We send hundreds of emails to family, friends, and business acquaintances. We send text messages that use specific vocabularies, abbreviations, and emoticons. We are adept at changing our vocabulary and grammar to account for all our different audiences. However, most of us are not as careful as we ought to be, particularly when writing to people we have never met or people with whom we have business relationships.

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Writer's Block

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Sometimes it's hard to get started writing. I read all kinds of essays where the first paragraph is almost nonsense. Words, sentence fragments, just ideas that only barely relate to what a person really wants to write about. It takes almost a full page to get to the good stuff. We worry so much about that first word. What is it going to be? Where will it lead us? Is it going to be a good word, the right word? But the first word doesn't matter at all. We can always delete whatever it is. We can replace it with something else. The important thing is to start writing, whatever that writing is.

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The importance of spelling

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I know we all have spellcheck and we've read those little poems that people write explaining how spellcheck doesn't solve all your spelling mistakes. Now we even have those forwards about text messages gone wrong. People love to  revel in the surprising language that emerges from some of the smallest spelling mistakes.

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To email a stranger

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Advancing technology has altered our perceptions of generic conventions in interesting ways. What exactly is the difference between a text message and an email? Do we expect them to have different kinds of writing in them? To address different people in our lives? Do we accept different responses as "timely"?

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First Post!

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Welcome to Appendance's blog: Appendances! (If you say it funny, it almost sounds like a British "Happenstances"). Here we will provide writing tips, writing-related anecdotes, and various other tidbits having to do with writing, editing, copyediting, development, any and all aspects of the writing and revising process. We hope to answer your questions about writing and editing while entertaining you a little!