Fall 2022 Post 12: No bad sentences

This post continues the previous post about shouting, because nothing shouts louder than poor, hard to understand sentences. Poor sentences shout, "Hey! I don't know how to write, and I don't care enough about my reader to fix my poor sentences." Poor sentences shout a profound lack of respect for the topic, the language, and, mostly, the reader. It's like showing up for a first date dressed in a tee-shirt, cut-off sweatpants, and flip-flops. You are signaling to your date that you really don't care enough about them to dress up. You probably won't get a second date.

In his post "No bad sentences," Josh Bernoff notes that even the best of writers write poor sentences from time to time, but no one gets to read them because great writers edit, edit, edit before they publish. You, too, should edit before you publish your essay to your teacher. If you have a good friend who can write well, then share your essays with them. Better yet, take your essay to the Writing Center or the Student Success Center. These centers will help you both in person and online. Use them.

There is no shame in writing poor sentences, but there is great shame in not fixing them, especially since you don't have to fix them by yourself.

Fall 2022 Post 11: Shouting

We are nearing the end of the term where I find it appropriate to talk about cleaning up your academic essays to make them more readable, more acceptable to an academic audience. As is often the case in this blog, I'm prompted by a post from Josh Bernoff entitled "Cheer down: How to create drama in your prose without shouting," in which Bernoff discusses the bad writing habit of shouting, or shouting, DAMN IT!!!!

I just shouted by using italics, bold, underlining, colored font, background highlighting, all caps, profanity, and exclamation points in a post that should be more academically toned. As Bernoff notes in his post, this kind of shouting is really poor form, especially in academic writing, and is a sure sign of a novice writer. This kind of shouting undermines your credibility as a writer, which is the worst thing that can happen to an academic writer. If your readers lose faith in you — especially your teachers — then your relationship with your readers and your grades will suffer. Bad news.

Shouting in writing is not always a sign of poor form. Advertisers shout all the time to get your attention quickly and focus it on some product or service that someone wants you to buy. As it happens, sex and money are the top two attention getters, so a company such as Burger King will use sex to focus your attention on their burgers. The exact relationship between eating Burger King hamburgers and hot sex is never quite explained, but apparently gullible men will buy their burgers anyway and hope.

But this is not the kind of writing that we do in college, and most of you will never write ads for a company. Unfortunately, almost all of you text, and people who text are very fond of shouting — mostly through unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling — LOL!!!

All of you know what LOL means because you've seen it in your own texts or the texts you read. You use it daily. That's fine in your text messages to your besties and beasties, but it is just awful in ur academic writing. See? And did I mean your or you're. I'm not quite sure, and neither are you. Bad form.

In his post, Bernoff is not writing to an academic audience, so he does not mention the number one form of shouting in academic essays: non-standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Most students regularly turn in essays with grammar, punctuation, and spelling that shouts to the teacher: "Hey! I'm a novice writer who can't do any better." When you submit an essay with unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling, then you are telling your teacher one of two things:

1. You're incompetent. You can't spell, and you don't even know that you can't spel. See?
2. You don't care. You know that you can't spel, but you don't care enough to run spell check to correct the errors.

This is similar to when I used to schedule in-person conferences to discuss my students' work with them. If a student showed up to my office poorly or barely dressed and smelling like last night's party, then I assumed that either they didn't know any better or they didn't care. Neither message builds trust between that student and me, nor does it encourage me to work with them and spend any more time with them than is absolutely necessary. This almost never works in the student's favor.

So what's wrong with shouting? Just as with someone shouting at you on the sidewalk, shouting in your essays draws the reader's attention away from what you are saying to how you are saying it. This almost never works for you in an academic essay. So don't do it. Rather, keep your reader's attention focused on what you are trying to say rather than on how you are saying it.

Fall 2022 Post 10: The Local Maximum Paradox in Writing

Mountains Beyond Mountains

I've just learned another lesson from my favorite blogger Josh Bernoff. In a recent post entitled "The local maximum paradox: why you often must go backwards to find fulfillment," Bernoff claims that the popular advice to always be pushing forward is not always so productive. In this post, he's giving a life lesson rather than a writing lesson, and he uses the mathematical concept of the local maximum, which is a maximum point of measurement (could be height, weight, or anything else) "within some neighborhood that need not be (but may be) a global maximum" (Wolfram MathWorld). Early in life, Bernoff was a mathematical prodigy, so he likes mathematical examples, even in writing. So what's his point, and how does it apply to writing?

Bernoff says that in our life pursuits we often aim for some high goal such as becoming a nurse, a computer programmer, or a business owner. We often make this choice when we are at some low point professionally: such as a recent high school graduate. We push and push to become a nurse, for instance, and when we attain that high status, we have a new viewpoint from which to view life, and we see that there are other, higher ambitions that we couldn't see before, but that we now want to achieve. The problem is that to get to those higher peaks, we often have to travel downward from the peak we've worked so hard to achieve. This can feel like going backwards, but it's the only way to start climbing the other peaks.

Some of you in this class are facing this same paradox. You have climbed a peak in your current profession attaining some status and position through hard work and effort, but now you see a higher peak, or at least a more attractive peak, that you want to achieve. To get there, you have to return to college, starting at the bottom in a freshman English class, and start climbing again. This can be a most daunting task, but it is about the only way to climb the other peak: walk down from your current peak.

Writers often face this local maximum paradox, as I did about six months ago with a children's novel that I wanted to write for my five-year-old grandaughter. I'm writing a 40 thousand word fantasy novel for pre-teens (she'll be about that old before I can finish it and find a publisher, if at all). It's about a girl, of course, who is on an adventure with two companions: a boy sasquatch and an older male rabbit. They start in Georgia, bound for northern Ontario, Canada, and I got them as far as a mountain in North Carolina. I have written the beginning and the ending of the novel, but I'm stuck midway in North Carolina. I can't figure out how to get from that mountaintop to the Blue Mountains near the Georgian Bay. So I've stopped writing for six months, and now I'm beginning to think that there ain't no good path from here to there. I may have to go backwards and start over again.

As you can imagine, I don't want to do that. I've written some pretty good stuff to get to North Carolina, and I don't want to delete thousands of words, but I'm beginning to accept that I can't go forward from here. I'll have to turn around, backtrack, and forge a new path, losing all those fine words I wrote. Of course, it breaks my heart and discourages me, but if I want to continue writing this story, then I'll have to do it.

My students often find themselves in the same paradox with their academic writing. As they near completion of a writing assignment, they realize that they've made a mistake. Perhaps they misunderstood the assignment, and now they see that they are about to turn in the wrong essay. Or perhaps they read an authoritative essay that changes how they interpret their topic, and what they thought was one way is now another way. For whatever reason, they realize they are about to crest the wrong peak with the wrong essay, and they can see a better peak in the distance, but the only way to get there is to climb down the peak they are currently on.

The problem is: they are almost finished. They have 900 words of a 1000 word essay. They really don't want to abandon all that writing. They know that what they have is not their best writing, but at least it's almost done. So what do they do?

You may be surprised that I say this, but in some cases students should settle for poorer writing and probably a poorer grade. If students are facing this dilemma the night before the paper is due, then they have little option but to turn in something, even if it isn't their best. Turning in something is almost always better than turning in nothing.

However, if they are writing a few days prior, then they can notify their professor, explain their situation, and ask for an extra day or two so that they can submit a better essay. I will certainly give them more time, as will many professors. Remember, all professors prefer to read better essays than poorer essays. Promise us better, and we'll probably give you the time. However, don't promise us the day after the essay was due. We are already suspicious of you by then and in little mood to be gracious. Communicate up front.

Fall 2022 Post 09: Tone in Academic Writing

Sometimes Josh Bernoff writes a string of posts that all speak to me. His September 30, 2022, post entitled "Tone matters. Yours should be authoritative, but not boring" addresses an important issue for my writing classes: tone. Tone is a problem for many of my students who have mastered the casual familiarity of texting but not the authoritative tone of academic writing. Bernoff has some enlightening points to make about tone in nonfiction writing, and I explore his comments in this post, applying them specifically to academic writing.

Tone Is Always Important

First, Bernoff defines tone in terms of the reader/writer relationship, which is very important to the way I teach academic writing. He says, "Tone is the way in which an author’s prose choices communicate the author’s relationship with the reader." This relationship is tricky for many students because academic documents are written mostly for people we don't know very well, if at all, and thus, we are often unsure about the relationship we should have with them.

Compare this to texting where we usually are writing to people with whom we have a clear relationship: friend, sibling, parent, boss, lover, colleague, or whatever. We already understand the relationship, and most of us are adept at using a tone that fits that relationship. Moreover, when we use a tone that doesn't fit the relationship — like telling our friends to clean-up their rooms — then our friends are usually quick to let us know that they don't like our tone and that we'd best change it.

But much academic writing is written for people we don't know well and may never know, so our relationships with them can be obscure. Moreover, most academic writing is supposed to be written from a position of relative authority. By relative authority, I mean that the writer is supposed to know more about the topic than the reader. Readers usually read nonfiction to gain expanded or new knowledge about something that interests them, and they will quit reading if they come to suspect that the writer doesn't have any new, useful information to share. But college reverses this usual reader/writer relationship forcing students to write to a teacher who usually knows more about the topic than the student does (there are exceptions, often with humorous results — at least, humorous for the students if not the teacher). When we are forced to write for someone who knows more than we do about the given topic, then we know that we are not writing for the purpose of helping someone learn more about some topic in which we have valuable expertise or experience; rather, we are writing for the purpose of being judged by a teacher who knows more about the topic than we do. No one likes being judged, so most students don't like writing for their teachers. That's one reason why I always give my students a different audience: so that they can write from a position of relative authority. You don't have to know everything about a given topic — your academic major, for instance — but you do have to know more than your audience.

So what is an appropriate tone with an academic audience? Bernoff says that we must be authoritative but not boring. The correct tone in an academic essay says, "These are the things that I know. I discovered them through research, experience, and expertise [which I document for you]. I am sharing them because I want you to benefit." This authoritative tone implies that the writer is worth reading because the writer is knowledgeable and wants to enrich the reader's life with some useful information.

Note that the first and most important job of the authoritative tone is to convince the reader that you, the writer, know what you are writing about. Losing the confidence of your reader is a disaster for an academic writer: academic readers will stop reading you and teachers will give you poor grades. So the first principle of solid academic writing is to learn something relevant and useful to your reader and to back it up with documentation. Basically, you say something like: I believe X and so does Albert Einstein, as he says here: "blah blah blah" (204).

The second job of the authoritative tone is to focus on the content, not the writer. If you use personal experience to make your point, keep the focus on the point and not on yourself. Remember: your reader is trying to learn about which major they should choose and how. They are not so interested in learning about your anguish and angst in choosing your major, so don't dwell on it. Mention your personal experiences if necessary, and then move on to how your experience is useful to the reader.

And how should you not be boring? Bernoff has some fine suggestions based on his years of writing nonfiction, so look them over.

I'll close by again comparing and contrasting the texting that you do daily with the academic writing that I'm asking you to do. Texting means that you are already a writer; however, you are not likely texting to academic readers and academic issues; thus, your tone in texting is not appropriate for your academic essays. This means that most of you will have to write and then rewrite several times your essays to find the correct tone that captures an authoritative yet engaging relationship with your academic readers, including your teachers.

Leave a comment about your own approach to tone in your academic essays and how it contrasts with your texting tone.