One of the biggest challenges with written language is communicating our ideas effectively to a reader who is not present. When the message is accurately transmitted, written language is amazing. But when the message is inaccurately transmitted, fury encourages us to blame the other person, writer or reader, for the mistake.
Read MoreThe sign below is posted at a pool at a campground. Can you find at least one error?
Read MoreIt's been a long summer filled with family, friends, and travel, but very little writing. The best writing moment of the whole summer appeared in a facebook post from someone in my newsfeed:
Read MoreRecently, I've started keep track of some of the real world mistakes that I encounter. I thought I would share a few.
Read MoreMy students are just starting to work on a big project. To begin, they have to choose a topic. One of the groups had chosen the very broad topic of literacy and technology. Narrowing it down, they talked about how computers could be used to increase reading comprehension, they talked about developing apps to teach people how to read more effectively or faster or offering speed reading classes to high schoolers, they noted how people are reading a lot of short things but not very much long stuff.
Read MoreApparently, Americans are the most overly polite people in the world. At least, that's what my European friends have always said. I do think we are particularly trained to say our please and thank yous, but at some point, I might agree with the Europeans that we overdo it a bit.
Read MoreI've been teaching writing for almost 10 years. I've had a lot of students. The ones who succeed feel challenged and work to surpass that challenge. They recognize that writing requires practice, and they work at it.
Read MoreIt's almost the holidays and I've been too overwhelmed with final grades (and students begging for better grades) to think of something to write. But a few years ago while at a poetry reading that was taking place in an awkward industrial space that forced the reader to stand in a corner lit primarily by the familiar white and red "Fire Escape" sign, I thought of this mini lesson on grammar.
Read MoreMiddle school used to be called grammar school. Did the name change lead to the reduced emphasis on grammar or did we stop teaching grammar and therefore change the name? Chicken? Egg?
Read MoreIntensive pronouns. I was aware that reflexive pronouns are the ones that use "self" (that's the reflexive part), but I had never heard of an intensive pronoun before. Apparently, an intensive pronoun is when a reflexive pronoun is used to emphasize the subject and his/her accomplishment, as demonstrated by the title of this post.
Read MoreYoung writers seem to think that everything is better when it doesn't say anything at all. They like poems that could be anyone, anywhere, feeling anything:
Read MoreWe have become an informal culture. CEOs wear hoodies to work. We text, chat, facebook, and use all sorts of other intimate communications with strangers. The constraints and conventions of society have changed.
For most of us.
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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreEvery 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.
Read MoreA lot of people want to know how one becomes a "good writer." People ask me all the time: What should I study? How can I practice grammar? Where can I learn to improve my writing? The truth is one becomes a better writer by reading.
Read MoreRecently, 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!
Read MoreMost 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.
Read MoreSometimes 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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