af -- An early blog update; writing standards

Hi Bloggers:

Well, here we are in our first full week of summer.  Feels good, doesn't it?

I want to give a big "thumbs up" to both Kirsten and Elizabeth for leaping into the blog and commenting on Thomas' early Brave New World question, and writing two posts of their own.  If you are unsure of what to do, study what they did.  They are "doing it right."   They are engaged with the text and with one another, and their word counts are in the correct range -- which is not to say you couldn't write more.  I've seen some full scale treatises on the blog in former years.  Go nuts.  Use your best thinking.

Please notice that I put my initials in front of my subject line...as the blog fills up, you may want the ability to scan the blog subject lines over there on the right hand side of the screen, and find me quickly.  If I am writing something that I need you to read, I will say so in the subject line.

A comment about correctness:  a student asked me whether contractions were acceptable.  I am going to take that question as an opportunity to speak to you about my expectations.

Like most writing teachers, I prefer the natural voice in writing.  Most writing teachers want to "hear" the authentic voice of their student, coming alive on the page;  I love to see a human being grappling with big ideas.   So I do not mind colloquialisms, contractions, and the hundreds of small informalities and liberties we take with the English language.

BUT having said that, I need to see that you are in control of the process.  Sloppy and incorrect writing, bad grammar, crazy spelling, confused thinking, disrespectful and inappropriate language will be noted and when necessary, censured.  This is a writing class.  And although it is considered "a lower order" concern, bad spelling makes me especially angry these days because of the little wiggley red line that accompanies every nonstandard spelling.  For example, the word "wiggley" is underlined in red on my screen right now.  I know that the computer wants me to remove the "e," but I don't want to remove it.  I prefer to see the "e" in the word "wiggley," and so I am leaving it there because I am the writer, and not a slave to the technology.  But when a stduent lets a mistake go by, like "student" back there, and I KNOW good and well that the little wiggley red line was there, and the writer hit the PUBLISH button anyway...well, it is a sign of obliviousness, and that always disturbs me.

Do not feel like you have to adopt an unnatural voice to participate here.  Do not feel like you suddenly have to prove that you are a genius.  Do not adopt a didactic tone, or feel pressure to "teach" the rest of us something.  Do not reach for language that you are not in control of.  Do not write with a thesaurus open, choosing a fancy word that you think sounds better than the ordinary word.  It is almost impossible to correctly use a word that you have not seen and used in speaking and writing at least 20 times before.  There are likely connotations that you may be unaware of.   When you are using words you do not know, keep in mind that somebody DOES know (me, probably), and if you use it incorrectly, it's going to be obvious.  I may not say anything to you, because if I commented on every single error I encountered, well, I'd have to clone myself for sure, and we're not in the Brave New World...YET.

Error creeps into our writing.  It just does.  I am pretty rigorous about checking for my own errors, and I go after them before I publish, and I go back and edit them out. (I do this in text messaging, on Facebook, everywhere.)  Frequent error means one of two things:  you don't know any better, or you don't care -- neither of these are good news to a writing teacher.   I want you to be a rigorous editor of your own work.  Do not leave errors sprinkled throughout your prose, like dirty socks on the living room floor.  Pick them up yourself.  I will help you "see" your errors, of course, when it becomes clear to me that you don't know you are making an error, but a writing teacher is much more useful to you as a reader of your ideas, who can comment on your thinking and your clarity and your organization and your redundancies.  And I will tell you where the commas go, because many inexperienced writers still struggle with commas, and with fragments, and with run-ons.   These errors are ordinary, and I see them everywhere.  But once I teach you how to fix an error, I want you to be the one to find and fix it in the future.  Don't ask me to be your writing maid, picking up your dirty socks that you've left laying around everywhere.

The usage errors work themselves out with time and experience, or you merely resign yourself to always looking them up, as I just did for the last sentence of the preceding paragraph:  lay-lie, effect-affect, leapt-leaped, apart-a part, and hundreds of other details of correct English usage.

That's it for today.  Enjoy your first Sunday of your summer vacation.