Thursday, May 10, 2012
A Helpful Guide 4 Righting Goodly
Here are. Some notes on writing. All sentences. Have subjects and verbs. Punctuation, shouldn't. Be; completely random. For example sentences should be divided by periods you can't just stick them together that doesn't work.
Always strive to utilize the simplest linguistic forms to ensure your exposition is intelligible.
Just because a word sounds like another word doesn't mean they have the same meaning. Avoiding errors of this kind should be your highest adjective because they make your paper extremity hard to read.
Spell chek cann somtimes bea ur freind, but sum thymes spill chick is knot you're friend.
Now, back to grading!
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Love it! This reminds me of this Taylor Mali bit on proofreading, too.
ReplyDeletezOMG! ROTFL! Wow!
ReplyDelete4 all intensive purposes; your write!!!
ReplyDeleteI just read a paper that had a sane thesis and a decent argument but was made practically unreadable due to insane word choice, like someone just discovered the thesaurus, or used Google Translate to put it into Chinese and back. Words and phrases that were 75% matches to what the student meant, and enough to be like 'WTF'.
ReplyDeleteRight-click Thesaurus syndrome?
DeleteI won't try to reproduce, or parody, some of the "paragraphs" I've (tried to) read lately, but suffice it to say that it's a good idea to use the "enter" key once or twice in the space of a double-spaced page. I'm not sure why this phenomenon has emerged in the last year or two, but my guess is they're reading everything that they do read on screens so small that they have no idea what a paragraph actually looks like.
ReplyDeleteMy students finished their finals today. You have just given me a preview of coming attractions.
ReplyDeleteCC -- Yeah, the lack of paragraphs annoys the dog out of me, too. How hard can it be? Students so frequently engage in all sorts of lame tricks to make their papers longer. Using paragraph breaks is actually a legitimate one -- and so many of them don't do it.
ReplyDeleteI've been receiving papers this year with paragraphs, but with each one floating in a sea of white space like a series of prose poems. I have had to count up the number of missing lines of text and subtract the total from the supposed page length, grading down accordingly. What gives? Do they think we are morons?
ReplyDeleteAlso, yes: vocabulary. The combination of a student who does not read much and an online thesaurus is deadly.
MS Word's default setting is "Add space after paragraph" and "Add space before paragraph". I have to show my students how to turn this off, because it is NOT acceptable format for college papers. And once I've shown them, if they still do it, I dock grades because the papers always end up at least half a page short of the mark when I "add" up all the blank space.
DeleteOh! This is helpful! How do you turn it off? Mine came pre-turned-off, I think. I feel bad docking them, but the white space thing is ridiculous.
DeleteWhen students question my advice to avoide using a thesarus, I use George W. Bush as an example.
ReplyDeleteHe got a thesarus as a going-away present when he left Texas to attend an East coast prep school. In a personal experience narrative about the death of his older sister, Bush wrote "The lacerates were running down my cheeks."
Your post doesn't make any since.
ReplyDeleteThat'd be "you're post."
DeleteThe little fucking morons should be sent down to the frigging Writing Center.
ReplyDeleteOr drafted.