St Olaf Writing Help: The Blog

One for the guys

2012-01-27T22:06:00.000-08:00

Nonah Merah on on a girl you should date.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Happy break, everyone!

Oxford Commas! And strippers!

2012-01-20T00:48:00.000-08:00

For all five of you who haven't seen this before.

But seriously, the Oxford comma has its place.

The Hitchens Method?

2011-12-18T16:55:00.000-08:00

Some of you probably know that Christopher Hitchens is dead. I didn't always agree with Hitchens, despite being turned onto philosophical atheism by his arguments at a young age. Increasingly, I've found that his particular brand of anti-theism wasn't quite consonant with my own atheism, and so I decided to disagree with him on this, his most talked-about subject.

That said, he remained a favorite public figure of mine. Eloquent, unkempt, utterly irreverent and frequently disrespectful, he maintained both a phenomenal literary output and a truly staggering alcohol intake, and was wont to credit the latter as the cause of the former. While the scientific world responds with a monumental shrug of the shoulders, Hitchens wrote in a 2003 article for Vanity Fair that some of the finest writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind." While I am no Hemingway or Charles Bukowski, I at least am not about to tell a man who wrote a massive pile of books and a ream of articles during a sadly truncated life that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

What's the possible value of drinking while you write? Apart from the bragging rights ("I wrote this term paper while I was wasted, man!") the theory seems to be that it lowers your inhibitions, a fact which we all remember from the various Wellness Center posters we've seen around. But the thing is, inhibitions don't just prevent you from dancing with that cute girl (or guy) over there, they also prevent you from taking an argumentative risk, or using a particular kind of phrasing as you write. It seems to me that if drinking were to have any affect on writing (except an increase in typos) it would be in encouraging you to vary your sentence structure and use more vivid imagery and language.

Whether informed by drinking or not, varied sentence structure, interesting word choice, and lifelike imagery are all good things. They give your writing a sense of being alive and individualistic. Each author writes differently, and the differences come in the words that those authors use, the way that they combine them. It's what's called "style," and while you certainly don't need to be drunk to do it, the removal of some of your inhibitions can definitely help in making your writing better.

So my advice? Drink if it helps, I guess, but above all look to ignore the editor in your head telling you that your writing is bad, or that your idea doesn't make sense. Especially in the drafting stage, there really aren't bad ideas, there are just ideas that don't make it into the final draft. So go ahead and throw them on the page.

Am I advocating that you, my (possibly nonexistent) readers, get drunk when you sit down to write? No, of course I'm not. St. Olaf is a dry campus and breaking that rule would be very, very naughty indeed, and several eminent researchers have noted that there's no correlation between good writing and drinking. I'm not advocating that you do it.

Christopher Hitchens is.

Procrastination

2011-12-01T19:09:00.001-08:00

If you pay attention to the timestamps on my posts at all (or have a passing familiarity with my schedule, as my unfortunate podmates now do) you will realize that I am a notorious procrastinator. I write my essays the night before, if not the day that the assignment is due.

Now, really, I'm okay with this. My professors aren't, usually, but I am.

Procrastination can be good, especially for writing. The time that I spend slacking off is useful to me, I think, because I spend time thinking unconsciously about the topic of my paper. Most of my ideas come to me in the oddest places--the shower, on the way to class, staring at the dregs of a pint at the Cow.

My papers get written pretty much at the last minute, but the time that I spend not writing (or researching, really) means that by the time I do start banging away on my keyboard, I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I want to say. The actual process of writing, while it certainly takes a while, is something I do generally in one or two long sprints rather than little chunks, because I don't have to keep stopping and thinking about what I want to say next.

Now, obviously, this doesn't work for everyone. But for some people, it can be really effective. It depends on what kind of writer you are, and so my point is essentially this: if you find yourself procrastinating a lot, you don't necessarily have to beat yourself up over it. Sometimes, that time you're not writing is still time well spent.

Stories in Science Writing

2011-11-13T16:42:00.001-08:00

Remember my post about telling stories in your writing? If not, I'll link it again because I'm a self-promoting jerk. Well, time and again I've heard that stories don't belong in scientific writing, any more than argument or personal opinion. Fine, I've said, I don't know anything about writing a science paper, so I'm willing to leave aside my personal opinions in favor of what I'm told by those who do.

Except turns out, a new paper by two people at the Perelman School of Medicine at U Penn contends that though we should continue to base scientific findings on solid, extensive research, they don't think we should be quite so quick to dismiss stories. Money quote:

“Stories are an essential part of how individuals understand and use evidence... Each time, those who espouse only evidence—without narratives about real people—struggle to control the debate. Typically, they lose.”

Now, I'm not saying you should change how you write science papers, St. Olaf. But I'm saying that someone else is saying that you should change how you write science papers. As usual, listen to your profs, they're the ones grading you. But still, food for thought.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

Academic Voice is Silly

2011-10-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

Lots of people, when they first start writing for college, like to worry about writing in "academic voice," whatever that is. Often, students think this means that they need to use complex grammar, pretentious vocabulary, and generally sound like an eighty year old professor who likes to wear tweed and smoke a pipe during his office hours.

Don't do this.

I'm not saying you should try to sound intentionally casual. Avoid contractions, slang, and sloppy or imprecise language. But there's no reason to go overboard with it; you don't need a thesaurus in front of you to write a good college paper. In fact, that probably won't help at all. You're much better off using simple vocabulary and clear speech, really, than you are trying to make yourself sound fancier than necessary.

The best college writing is intelligent, but not pretentious. It uses short, simple words that everyone knows. It cares more about the ideas than the "style" and more about sounding like an actual human being than it does like sounding like a textbook. There's a reason nobody likes reading textbooks, it's that they're boring. Please don't write like them.

One of the things that I like to tell people is to be themselves when they write. What do you care about? What is interesting to you, and what do you think of a given issue? Just like a good paper should tell me a story, a good paper should give me a sense of who the writer is and what kinds of things she finds compelling. Nothing about academic voice says that you should hide your opinions, all that is asked of you in academic writing is that you find support for your opinions before you introduce them in a paper.

As a last note, I encourage you to be funny. Some of my favorite history papers have included little digs at historical figures; at Napoleon's ego, or George McClellan's self-importance. I'll include slightly biting comments when I think my sources are being stupid, or humorous criticisms of popular culture. I don't make my papers a comedy act, but a little humor makes them fun to read and is appreciated by my professors.

"Academic voice" doesn't mean "boring writing." It means avoiding contractions, adhering to certain rules (cite your sources according to a given format, make an argument, etc.) and basing your arguments on sources. Don't be afraid to have a strong, engaging voice in your papers. You'll do better if you do.

Semicolons!

2011-10-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to another exciting grammar explanation!!!!!
Today's discussion is semi-colons. These are tricky little creatures, and most writers I know avoid them. They aren't taught in a lot of schools and most people find them pretty confusing. So I'm here to try to dispel some of that confusion so that you will have another punctuation mark to add to your arsenal.
The most basic use of the semicolon is when you want to connect two very closely related independent clauses together. These clauses could stand on their own as separate sentences, e.g. "I went to the store" "My ex-boyfriend was there". If you want to make these two ideas into one sentence, you put them together with a semicolon: "I went to the store; my ex-boyfriend was there". However if you put a conjunction between the two clauses, you want to use a comma instead of a semicolon: "I went to the store, and my ex-boyfriend was there".

There are a few other ways to use semicolons so I'm going to list resources you can use to understand semicolons more fully, but this is the most common and most commonly confused way of using a semicolon.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Semicolons.html

Write like Obama

2011-10-13T18:04:00.000-07:00

Hey, anonymous blog reader. I'm John, this is my second post, and as you know if you've ever suffered through an editing session with me in the writing place, I don't know the first thing about the formal rules of grammar.

Given that, I'd like to talk about something that doesn't get a lot of play in discussions about improving an essay, but which more than anything, I think, affects it's quality. I am talking, of course, about "style", that nebulous little thing that you see on Writing 111 rubrics but which stubbornly resists definition. By way of beginning, I pose to you a question:

Why do I read so many boring essays?

I'm serious. I read a lot of good essays working at the writing place. They're full of clever ideas, and usually all that I need to do is tease them out a little, or suggest a new structure within which they can sit comfortably and flow together. Generally I find that Oles are good writers, because we've been trained well by the college to state our ideas clearly and support them with extensive sources. We've all taken GE 111 (or 107, or 110), and our professors have made sure that we know we're expected to take interesting stances in our writing.

All that said, I don't read that many "great" papers. I'm not really sure why. A great paper ought to contain all of the things a "good" paper should: clear ideas, extensive citation, provocative theses, the whole deal. And yet, I find that the "great" paper is a rarity amongst the ones I read, and probably amongst the ones I write, as well.

So, what differentiates a great paper from a good one?

To me, what it comes down to is that a great paper–one that makes me really interested to see where the author is going–contains a narrative. A narrative is essentially a story, a framework within which an argument both makes sense and is for some reason compelling to the reader on an emotional level. By creating a narrative, an author makes her reader become invested in the "story" of the essay, and interested in its outcome to an extent that just wouldn't be possible if she didn't include a narrative.

Of course, that's all great to say, but it doesn't mean much. For any argument (and make no mistake, I'm making an argument to you right now), you need sources and examples to help you make your case, so I'll give you one. Read Barack Obama's speech "A More Perfect Union", also called his "race speech" given in 2008. I know it's long, but give it a read. Or if you do nothing else, read the first three paragraphs, a random five somewhere around the middle, and the last eight.

Notice what he does. Obama begins by telling us a familiar story: that of the founding of the United States. We all learn this story as small children; it feels familiar and safe. We know that men, many of whom wore wigs, wrote a couple of longish documents that changed the world. But then, in the third paragraph, Obama surprises us by introducing one of his central ideas: that the project of the American union isn't complete. He writes, "The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished", a startling change of direction from the familiar story in which the Constitutional Convention produced a perfect document that set out the boundary marks of American liberty.

Obama is, in effect, leading us around by the nose. He has a very clear argument, which though complex is not hard to follow if you read his whole speech (which I encourage you to do!). It's not always an argument that white Americans want to hear, though:

Understanding [the reality of American race relations] requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

To make that argument, Obama tells us stories. Those stories all fall into an overarching larger story which serves to communicate his point, but for our purposes the particulars aren't that important. What matters is that Obama tells us a story which we can relate to just enough to accept a point which we would otherwise find uncomfortable.

Obama isn't coy about what he's doing. The reason I suggested that you read the last eight paragraphs of his speech is that it contains its own small story, about a young woman named Ashley Baia, and Obama explicitly identifies it as a story which he wants to tell his audience. The story is a nice one, and I happen to find it persuasive, but that's not why it's important.

When he says things like:

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother gotcancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go andlost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s whenAshley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and soAshley convinced her mother that what she really liked and reallywanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relishsandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

what he's saying is "in many jobs worked by lower-income Americans, missing days of work because you have a serious illness can lead to you being fired, which means that you lose your healthcare and also your livelihood." But the way he says it is a lot more effective, because it gives us the simultaneously adorable and rather sad image of a nine year old girl eating a mustard and relish sandwich to save her mom a few dollars.

Is that disingenuous? I don't think so. Presumably, it and things like it really happened--and continue to happen--and the image is highly effective in getting across Obama's ideas. Imagine instead if he'd quoted a mess of statistics: "sixty percent of Americans rely upon health insurance provided by their workplace. Twenty-five percent of that sixty percent have employment contracts subject to termination if they miss more than seven days of work per month, regardless of illness, blah-blah-blah". I stopped paying attention.

And yet, that's how a lot of academic writing ends up looking, not least because we're encouraged to base our arguments off of "the sources", to quote "the experts" and to write "academically." Of course, not all of those are bad things; academic writing can be interesting and informative at the same time. But too many students think that to use "the sources", you have to write like them, and not enough of us realize that our sources often don't write very well. They overload you with jargon, pile on statistics, drown you in obscurantist language. Often, it's a way to mask the fact that they're not certain their argument holds weight.

Don't do that. Instead, write like Obama. Tell me a story. Use your sources, but don't feel like you need to reproduce whole sentences or paragraphs unless you can't find a way to rephrase them in your own language. Tell me why to care about the argument you're making; illustrate it with general and specific points. Use simple, direct language instead of "academic voice", whatever that is. Avoid contractions, but also avoid sounding like you swallowed a thesaurus.

Above all, read good arguments. The great political speeches are a good place to start, and a lot of them can be found at the History Place. Don't like history? What kinds of good arguments can you think of? Give me links!

(Also, if you're reading this blog, please comment. We writing tutors are desperate for your approval and want to know if we have any readers. Think we suck? Tell us that too!)

Outdated Rules

2011-10-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

Many of us have heard stylistic grammar rules from our teachers and profs: don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split an infinite, the aforementioned never use the passive voice, and other similar rules. We've learned that these things are appropriate if we want to sound educated and if we want to get good grades on our papers and writing.

But who decides that these rules are proper and why is breaking them improper? What most people do not know is that there is absolutely no grammatical reason to follow most of these rules. Some of them, like ending with a preposition or splitting an infinitive, actually come from a deep regard that many linguists have had for Latin. When the field of linguistics was first developing, some of the people within it made these rules because they wanted English to function more like Latin, and in Latin both of these constructions are impossible. What this means for you as a writer is that these rules are completely arbitrary. While they have conventional force, there is no reason for you to follow them (unless of course your professor tells you to and you would like to get a good grade).

Similarly, the passive voice is a perfectly legitimate construction. The problem arises when it is overused and when it obscures who is performing actions. Generally, the passive voice is a little bit more laborious to read. It involves more words and less clarity. However in instances where you do not want your reader to know who is doing what, the passive voice is perfect (see: political speech writers who enjoy obscuring agency).

The basic point here is that "rules" of writing are not always the end all and be all of what you should be doing. Just like we need to think critically about every other piece of information we get, we need to think critically about writing rules. Why are we told to do certain things? What is the overall aim of our writing? How do these rules help us to achieve our aims? If the rules do not match with our aims, there is no good reason to follow them.

In Which the Passive Voice is Defended

2011-10-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Pullum writes that the passive voice really isn't all that bad. This is something I've sort of instinctively felt for a while, helped by the fact that on a good day, I can only identify the passive voice about three quarters of the time when asked.

The author raises a good point: sometimes, it makes sense to use the passive voice to get a certain point across (he provides excellent examples, so I won't try). That said, if your professor tells you not to use the passive voice, don't use the passive voice. That would be a pretty silly way to lose points on an essay.

(Found through Andrew Sullivan's blog.)

Expanding Your Vocabulary

2011-10-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

Why hello lovely readers, and welcome to Friday!

Seeing as it is Friday I figured we would have a little bit more fun and a little bit less serious on the blog today. And one of my favorite fun activities is learning new, odd and interesting words. English is a crazy language. It has roots from Latin, German, French, Celtic, Sanskrit and many other languages, which means that we have LOTS of words and lots of different kinds of words. In the spirit of the amalgamation that is English, here are some links to weird and unusual words, as well as a couple of my favorites pulled out for your enjoyment. Expand your vocabulary and wow your friends with a word they didn't know existed!
Links:
http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm
http://listverse.com/2007/09/22/20-weird-english-words/
http://www.worldwidewords.org/ (this is one of my personal favorites. You can sign up for an email list that sends you cool words every couple of weeks)
http://voxy.com/blog/2011/03/weird-english-words-from-a-to-z/

And now for some of my favorites:
Spoony-silly or foolishly in love
Petrichor-the smell after rain
Droogish – Relating to the nature or attitudes of a member of a street gang
Balderdash-senseless talk or writing

A Funny Forward

2011-10-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Here is one of those chain emails I was forwarded recently - it was actually funny and relevant for once! My mom commented that with all this considered, you really have to admire ELL students. Here it is - and feel free to pass it on!

"You think English is easy?

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig..

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick' ?

You lovers of the English language might enjoy this ..

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP.'

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?

Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends.

And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.

We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning.

People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.

In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.

It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.

When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP."

Articles!

2011-10-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

As I was working with a student today on the grammatical issue of articles, I realized that I could not explain to my tutee when to use an article. For non-native speakers, this seems to be a pretty confusing issue, and even native speakers can always use a brush up (or at the very least can learn why they use articles the way they do).So I decided to compile some resources about articles and see what I could do to explain the basic points.

First of all, here are some links to pages that explain articles:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/grammar/useartic.html
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/resources/handouts-demos/citation/articles

And finally a short quiz to see how much you've learned:
http://www.english-test.net/esl/learn/english/grammar/ei008/esl-test.php

But you want a summary of all that info don't you? You don't want to have to wade through Purdue's webpage. So here's my test: a short summary of how articles work. I'm going to focus on when you should or should not use articles.

First, count and noncount nouns. A noncount noun is a noun that does not have a plural form: this would be something like weather or homework. Count nouns are the opposite, things that do have plurals (things that you can count). A noncount noun can take a definite article if you're talking about something specific (the weather), or you can leave off an article altogether if you're not talking about a specific example. Count nouns always need an article though.

Geography is also a context where articles can be tricky. Generally if you're talking about names of places, use the. The exceptions to this rule are rivers, oceans, seas, points on the globe, geographical areas, peninsulas, deserts, forests and gulfs. This may seem like a lot to remember, but it doesn't come up a lot so it shouldn't be a point of too much stress.

Finally, names of nationalities, sports and academic subjects never take articles.

Welcome to the Olaf Writing Tutors' Blog!

2011-09-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hello Olaf students! We here at the writing place are dedicated to making your writing lives easier and better. In order to facilitate this goal, we've set up this little blog. We'll be posting at least twice a week, so check back for new updates.
"But what on earth will this blog contain?" I hear you all asking. A fair question my fellow students. While the scope of this blog may change over the course of the year, our aim right now is to give you tools to understand English (grammar, vocabulary, syntax and anything else that you can think of) better so that your writing will improve. That means there will be posts with new and interesting vocab words (have you ever wanted to know what spoony means?), posts that explain particularly nitpicky grammar points (count verbs!) and miscellaneous other posts about idiosyncrasies of the English language.
Enjoy :)