1. Brainstorm

            Take some time to think about all the things you could be writing about (or how many different ways you could approach a specific topic if one has been assigned).  Jot all your thoughts down on paper—don’t bother about grammar, spelling, or any of the other conventions of standard English writing.  Just let your ideas flow freely.  Brainstorming, by the way, is a good way for several people to begin working on a group project.

2. Freewrite

            This means sitting down and writing—but as with brainstorming, don’t pay attention to spelling, grammar, or other elements of English.  You don’t even need to write complete sentences, as long as you get something down on paper.  It’s a beginning, and as you begin to actually write something you’ll find that the words start to come more easily.

3. Do some research

            Many of the writing assignments in college require some research, and starting to do this research (finding and reading the material) can provide some direction and ideas for your writing.

4. Relax.

            Before you begin to panic about not being able to write, take a few minutes to engage in some meditative deep breathing—close your eyes, let your body relax, and focus on your breath.  This is a calming activity, and it’s important because writer’s block can cause us to become anxious and afraid.  First get calm, then re-approach the writing assignment.

5. Visit the ASK office

            ASK counselors and tutors are trained to help you write effectively, and they are happy to do so.  Don’t hesitate to come in to ASK without anything written: sometimes you just need a little assistance and guidance from an academic counselor to get going.

There are other ways to help unblock our writing, but these are some of the best—and best of all, they actually work!  Give them a try the next time you feel blocked and see if one or all of them work for you.  They should assist you in getting started with your writing.

The ASK office provides counseling and help for students with all stages of writing, from brainstorming for ideas to reviewing a final draft of a paper.  Come see us and see why they say, “the smart people are already going to ASK.”

Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skills Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

It’s (contraction for it is)

Its (possessive form of the pronoun it)

Who’s (contraction of who is)

Whose (possessive form of who)

They’re (contraction of they are)

There (in that place)

Their (possessive form of they)

Than (in comparison with; besides)

Then (at that time; next; therefore)

Lay (place or put something somewhere; needs a direct object)

Lie (recline; does not need a direct object)

Lie (to tell an untruth)

Affect (influence; a verb)

Effect (result; a noun)

Principal (foremost; head of school)

Principle (moral conviction; basic truth)

You’re (contraction of you are)

Your (possessive form of you)

Cite (point out; document)

Sight (vision)

Site (a place)

Accept (receive)

Except (with the exclusion of)

All ready (fully prepared)

Already (by this time)

Learning the difference among these homonyms will improve any student’s writing.

Do you want to learn about how to use words correctly?  Could you use some assistance with your writing generally?  Then come see us at ASK, where we can help with writing, time management, and general study skills.  Call us at 279-5636 or just drop by Hegeman 301 to schedule an appointment.  We can’t wait to see you!

Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skills Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

British English really began as a mixed-tongue language, being gradually built up from Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Norman French, Latin, and native British languages.  We can see this combination through, for example, the word beef (boeuf) from the Norman and the word cattle from the British/Germanic—the animal itself was known by its British/Germanic name; when it appeared at the Norman nobles’ table it changed to the Norman French word.  Thus the British peasants raised cattle; the Norman aristocrats ate beef.

Likewise, the British empire was known for exploring and colonizing throughout the world from the 15^th century on.  Along the way, the British appropriated not only raw materials and natural resources but also words from the areas they visited or conquered.  Many of these words were incorporated into British English and then into American English.  Boomerang and succotash are two such words, taken from Australian aborigines and Native Americans, respectively.  There are thousands of other ‘borrowed’ words in English: an Internet search can easily find great multitudes of them.

Printing, too, had a tremendous impact on English spelling.  Until the advent of the printing press, writers spelled words as they chose, since there was no written guide for how to spell.  But once books and, later, dictionaries began to be printed, there was a model for how to spell words—and their various spellings gradually became ‘fixed’ or standardized.  However, a dissonance began to occur as spoken pronunciation of words changed while spelling of them did not: so that, for instance, the word knight (originally pronounced like it was spelled—knickt, pronouncing both hard k’s) came to be pronounced nite, even though the original spelling remained the same.  Many of our spelling difficulties today result from archaic spellings of words being vastly different from how we currently pronounce them—and we also tend to spell words the way they sound when spoken: hence the mistaken spelling could of instead of the correct could have.

Does all this mean that we should just throw up our hands and give up on ever hoping to spell words correctly?  Of course not.  What it means is that there is generally a (fairly) good reason why many English words are spelled oddly—and that we really, truly need to read a lot and learn to use a dictionary efficiently if we want to be good spellers.

But wait!  What about that all-purpose rescuer, the automatic spellchecker built into our word-processing programs?  Isn’t that enough to insure that we are not misspelling words? 

Well, the short answer is ‘no’.  Spellchecker is fine for some uses, and it generally has a vocabulary large enough to encompass most words we regularly use, even in college writing.  There are two significant problems with spellchecker, however.  First, it doesn’t recognize a good many words, especially specialized vernacular, leaving us to either take our best guess or turn to a specialized dictionary.  Second, spellchecker doesn’t consider the context in which a word is used—all it cares about is that the word is in its dictionary.   So, for example, if we meant to write ‘the knight rode off to battle’ but actually wrote ‘the night road off to battle’, spellchecker won’t find anything wrong with the second sentence; the words are spelled correctly, even though they are not the words we meant to use.  This alone should be sufficient reason not to place all our faith in a spellchecker.

In the end, we could expend lots of time writing about spelling, but we seem to have made our point already: we need to read as much as possible and use a dictionary to become good spellers.  And we need to remember, too, that spelling errors are among the most-noticed mistakes made in writing—most people will recognize a misspelled word, and will interpret it as a lack of competence or interest in the writer.  We certainly don’t want our writing dismissed as thoughtless, do we?  So learning to spell correctly becomes one of the most important aspects of learning to write effectively, despite its occasional troublesome difficulty.

And with that, to all our readers, a good knight!

Do you want to learn to spell better?  Are you finding writing for your college courses to be a greater challenge than you expected?  Then come make an appointment at the Academic Success at Keuka (ASK) office with either a professional counselor or a peer tutor.  You can make an appointment by calling 279-5636 or by dropping by the office at 301 Hegeman Hall.  We look forward to working with you!

Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skills Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

Always, spoken language leads the way in change; written words, because they’re written, put down into dictionaries, and regarded as “formal language” tend to change much more slowly than “street language,” which is constantly evolving to meet the needs of its users.  We need only consider the abbreviations commonly used in texting today to see that this is true.

We can see some of the changes that occur in language, however, if we pay attention to how words, grammar, and even punctuation are used.  For example, when this writer was growing up in the 1960s, we were taught to use far more commas than students are told to use today—this difference over time often results in confusion or even red-pencil marks on student papers.  A good grammar manual can help with this, but we need to be careful about when its last edition was published—if it’s more than 30 years old it may not indicate contemporary usage.

It’s also possible, by visiting several grammar sites online or by perusing various dictionaries, to find somewhat contradictory rules for some grammar and word usage: for example, if we look up the difference between farther and further in a few reference works we’ll find that some indicate discrete differences between the two (one is used for physical distance, the other for metaphorical distance); some use them interchangeably; and British usage barely even mentions farther, preferring further for almost all purposes. 

And we were probably all taught not to end a sentence with a preposition; however, because common usage changes even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary grudgingly permits this in its current edition.  So, do we blithely go forth and ask “where’s the library at?”  Probably not, if we want to be known as educated people, but even in 1940s England Winston Churchill could mock this dictum by commenting that it was something “up with which we will not put”—just to show how silly an inflexible language rule could be.

Does this mean that we can ignore the rules of language usage completely?  Not a bit of it!  This is likewise no excuse for our not learning and using the rules of standard English in our writing and (when appropriate and necessary) our speaking.  It means only that it’s sometimes difficult to find exact agreement as to what correct usage is (it also means that effective language use is still in large part an art form, not an exact science).  When that happens, we can only do our best to choose our words wisely, based on the most reliable and up-to-date information we can discover—and maybe bring the word or words in question to our English class for what will doubtless be a lively language discussion.

Do you want to use words, grammar, and punctuation more correctly?  Are you passionate about making your writing (and speaking) as effective as possible?  Then come visit us at ASK, the Academic Success at Keuka office, where we delight in working with the language to make it work well for you.  Call us at 279-5636 or stop by our office at 301 Hegeman Hall to make an appointment with a professional counselor or peer tutor.

Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skills Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

Effective writing doesn’t just happen—it is the end result of a series of steps that lead to the creation of clear, correct, and concise prose.  Chief among these steps is being able to read and understand the texts that are almost invariably a part of the writing experience.  In short, effective reading precedes effective writing, so today we’ll take a look at how to read for college-level comprehension.

Understanding what we read is a complicated and sophisticated process: first we have to recognize and be able to define the words we’re reading, then we have to put these words together to form a coherent and correct interpretation of the meaning of the written material.  There are many different models for how to read for meaning; we’re going to look at one of the better-known ones, known as SQ4R.

SQ4R stands for ‘Survey, Question, Read, Record, Recite, and Reflect’.  It’s a way of apprehending what we read through interrogating the text from several perspectives.  Here’s how the Questa College (San Luis Obispo County Community College District) Academic Support website presents this reading structure:

SURVEY

• Title & Introductory material or First Sentence
• Subheadings & First Sentence of each subsection
• Last paragraph or Summary
• Boldface print or italics
• Charts, maps, pictures, graphs

QUESTION

• Turn subheadings into questions
• Use questions in introduction or at the end

READ

• Read to answer the above questions
• Read to discover information not pre-questioned

RECORD

• Make marginal notes of reactions, ideas, details, numbering, question- marks, etc. as you read.

RECITE

• Answer the questions either orally or write a summary of the chapter or discuss the material.
• Use your own words as much as possible.
• Check your answers with the text. Revise.

REFLECT

• Compare the new ideas with what you already know. Ask, “Upon what are these new ideas and information based?” and “How can I use this?”

This method of reading sounds like a lot of work, but in fact it is, to one degree or another, very much what many of us do unconsciously when we read anyway—this simply breaks the reading process down into its individual components.  And it’s important to remember that reading effectively—especially doing so with complex college material—is a lot of work.  Discovering the meaning(s) of a text can be very difficult, but this method helps to streamline the situation considerably, making it easier to understand what we read so that we can write about it correctly and effectively.

Here is some additional information (again, from Questa College) concerning reading college texts purposefully:

PLAN: Pre-Reading Strategies

Establish a good physical environment
Relax and set a positive attitude
Review instructions
Review lecture notes
Set your purpose
Preview the assignment
Organize your thoughts
Determine what you want to know when you finish reading   

DO: Reading Strategies

Be actively involved
Check your comprehension as you read
Restate ideas in your own words
Form mental pictures
Compare what you are reading to what you know
Answer the questions you developed during pre-reading
Fix-up your comprehension when needed
Define unfamiliar words
Keep problem on hold and hope it will clarify itself
Re-read a portion of the text
Compare information with notes or another source
Ask someone for help

REVIEW: Post-Reading Strategies

Consolidate and integrate information
Answer questions
Test yourself
Participate in a study group
Space review over time
Decide what else you need to know

As we mentioned above, these are just a couple of the many methods for developing reading comprehension, but SQ4R is particularly well-known and respected.  Using the SQ4R style of approaching a text, along with the reading strategies, will definitely help in mastering  texts and other reading materials.

Do college texts mystify and/or overwhelm you?  Do you want to learn how to read with better comprehension so that you can analyze texts and respond to them meaningfully?  Then contact us here at the Academic Success at Keuka (ASK) office—we’ll be pleased to assist you, and our services are always free of charge.

Just stop by our office at 301 Hegeman Hall, or call us at 279-5636, to make an appointment with a professional Academic Skills Counselor or a student (peer) tutor.

Remember—the smart students are already using ASK; come join us!

Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Support Counsler, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

We’re talking about ‘pet peeves’ in writing: those little (or sometimes not so little) errors that students habitually make and that drive professors crazy.  Listed below are a few of these:

• Noun/pronoun agreement
• The student finished the essay, only to discover that their printer did not work.
• Amount/number
• He had a great number of courage because he had a large amount of soldiers.
• Less/fewer
• Express lane 10 items or less.
• Then/than
• He had a greater number of dollars then I did.
• Effect/affect
• That loud music is beginning to effect me.
• It’s/its
• Its true that it’s color is blue.
• There/their/they’re
• Their going to move there business over they’re.
• Should of/could of
• I should of gone to class (should be ‘should have’)
• Whether/weather
• I was watching the Whether Channel this morning.
• Dangling modifiers
• Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling to Baltimore on the back of an envelope.
• General sloppiness/poor editing & proofreading
• The English department cares to much about grammer and speling.
• Who/that
• Many people that ride the train feel the cost is too great.
• Sentence fragments (incomplete sentences)
• While he was at the movies.
• Run-on sentences
• While he was at the movies he saw three different pictures King Kong Safe House and Pretty Woman all of which he liked a lot and he wants to go back to the movies next week too.
• Comma splice sentence
• John walked his dog, they walked around the block.

There are doubtless lots more pet peeves out there—these are but a few of the most notable.  And since we can’t ever tell which of these may particularly annoy one professor or another, we’d be better off learning how to correct these errors now, before the annoyance takes place.

Do you have questions about some of the items in the list above?  Are you uncertain about whether you’re using English correctly when you write?  Then stop by the ASK office (301 Hegeman Hall) and make an appointment with one of our professional counselors or student writing tutors.  Just drop by the office, or call our office manager, Ms. Webber, at 279-5636, or email her at pwebber@keuka.edu.

Remember: the smart students are already going to ASK!

 Submitted by: Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skills Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK Office

“Process” is one of those words that we hear and use all the time to denote lots of different things.  There’s “due process” and “process industry” and “processed hair” and “word processing.”  It’s even a verb: with the accent on the “pro,” we march to Mr. Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance.”

In general, though, the word is always about doing things in an order, Step 2 following Step 1, and so forth.  But it’s more than that:  in a “process”, Step 2 not only follows, but also depends on Step 1.

So it is with what we call The Writing Process.  And that goes something like this:

–Gather Information

–Outline

–Draft

–Rewrite/Edit

–Format

–Proofread

Step 1 of the Writing Process, Information Gathering, can be a multi-year research project or a 3-second quick thought.  But we can’t write without something to write about.

In Step 2, we put our thoughts into some kind of order using an Outline.   This doesn’t need to be a formal document with I., A., 1., II., B, 2, etc.  A quick list of topics will do nicely-just enough to remind us of what we need to cover and in what order.  (NOTE:  I know some superb writers who don’t use outlines.  They say that an outline feels confining to them.  They know where they want to start and where they want to end up.  Whatever works.)

Writing the Draft is Step 3.  And the point of the Draft is to give us something to work on.  Only when words and sentences get out of our heads and become objects on a screen or piece of paper can we move them around, find better ones, and make sure they say what we want them to say, in just the way we want them to say it.

Once we have a Draft on which to work, we get to the most important step:  Step 4-Rewriting and Editing.  This can mean several trips through the document, fixing, changing, rearranging, adding, and deleting.  And this is the step that makes the difference between adequate and terrific.

When we are happy with the writing of the document, it’s time for Step 5, the Format.   In all ASAP courses, that means APA.  (Find out all about APA here.)  But in general, it just makes sense to consider the impression your document will make, and to format it thoughtfully.

We’ve talked a lot in previous Wordworks about the importance of the final step, Proofreading.  So we’ll just note that all the work we put into the first five steps can be wasted if it looks like we didn’t take the time and trouble to proofread.

Punctuation, as we have likely all discovered at one time or another, can be pretty darned mysterious.  Heavily rule bound, yet extraordinarily flexible at times (consider the comma), punctuation serves a variety of valuable purposes in writing—from indicating a brief pause to creating a turning point in the entire meaning of a sentence—yet how we actually learn it, and whence it derives, is open to question.

Dr. Nancy Mann, in “Point Counterpoint: Teaching Punctuation As Information Management” (2003), suggests that there is good reason for this mystery—the system of punctuation that we use might very well derive not from conscious thought and cultural design—as does written language—but from an unconscious source.  Perhaps punctuation might hail from the same sort of unconscious mental module (or maybe the same module) as that from which spoken language emerges.  The implications are intriguing.  Mann observes, for example, that “the abstract logic of the punctuation system reeks of design, yet we know that nobody designed it. We simply evolved it—collectively, and yet unconsciously” (361). (A classic Jungian would certainly embrace this concept as yet another example of the collective unconscious.)

Punctuation to Mann, therefore, bridges the gap between “conscious and unconscious processes,” blurring the line that separates “individual cognition and social communication” (361).  Perhaps punctuation even provides a sort of seamless continuity between the elements of written language and the constructions of spoken language—it does, after all, perform many of the same functions as the tones, inflections, pauses, and emphases of speech.

Functionally, punctuation serves to segment  and arrange information in the sentence in one or more of several ways, indicating relationships among parts of the text in such a fashion as to make the overall meaning clear to us.  On the simplest level, for example, the use of a period shows that a unit of thought is complete, that it is ready for our consumption on an integrated, multi-word level.  Therefore, punctuation serves to determine (perhaps to overdetermine, considering its emphasis on strict interpretation) how the reader understands the written text.  Thus, Mann notes (citing Geoffrey Nunberg in “The Linguistics of Punctuation, 1990) that “punctuation is a norm system for remote-controlling reader interpretation” (363).  Hence Mann’s call for it to be taught as a variety of information management, since that is arguably its foundational purpose. 

Mann’s primary point is to suggest that we teach punctuation as a series of algorithms—utilizing information technology as the model.  Her most intriguing notion in this article is not related to teaching, exactly, though, but to how punctuation functions, how it sets the copestone of the arch between conscious and unconscious minds in terms of written language use.  Its absolute necessity as final arbiter of meaning in written communication indicates that it derives, as Mann suggests, from a powerful and deep source—not from a simple (or even complicated) set of consciously evolved rules. 

And the further suggestion (courtesy of Nunberg again) that there is only really one universal punctuation system lends credence to the notion that the system is unconsciously rather than consciously produced.  Written language grows, changes, adapts itself to particular regional or cultural situations; punctuation, these authors imply, remains the constant and (at least relatively) unalterable bedrock–the foundation upon which written language can cavort with ease and flexibility, confident that even its most complex meanings will not be lost in the motility of the dance that is human language.

Works Cited

Mann, Nancy.  Point Counterpoint: Teaching Punctuation As Information Management.   

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 54, No. 3, February 2003. 359-393.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. The Linguistics of Punctuation. Stanford, CA: Center for the

Study of Linguistic Information, 1990.

Do you want to learn how to use punctuation effectively and correctly?  Would you like to make your writing more punctuationally interesting?  Or do you need help with other aspects of your writing?

Then come see us at Academic Success at Keuka (ASK).  We can be reached at 279-5636 or at pwebber@keuka.edu–or just stop by the office M-F 8:00-5:00 to make an appointment to see a professional counselor.  We’re here all summer, too.

submitted by; Jeffrey Carter, Academic Skill Counselor, Writing Tutor, ASK office

When you are preparing to sell your house, get ready for the realtor to walk through and point out all the stuff that you might want to fix up a bit or remove altogether.  And she’ll be right, but-seeing them every day-you got used to them; they’re part of your everyday reality.

The same phenomenon occurs with word usage:  we get so used to hearing words used incorrectly that they start to sound OK.

Here are a few of those.

Historical/Historic

A battlefield, document, or mansion, because they are important bits of history, are “historic” not “historical”.  The interest that an historian has in those things is “historical”.

Factoid

Adding the suffix “oid” to a noun indicates that the thing being described looks like, but is not the same as, the original.  So a “humanoid” in sci-fi looks like a human, but isn’t.  And a “factoid” is not a “little fact”; it’s something masquerading as a fact.

Anxious/Eager

“Anxious,” as its root would imply, means “worried,” “filled with anxiety.”   Unless something is terribly wrong, you’re “eager”–not “anxious”–to get home.

Verbiage/Verbage

“Verbiage” does not mean “wording.”  It’s a disparaging word used to describe lots of unnecessary words.  (It would be an insult to have your writing referred to as “verbiage.”)

There is no such word as “verbage.”

Expensive/Cheap

This one is pretty straightforward:  it would not make sense to say that the price of something is expensive.  The price is high or low; the thing is expensive or cheap.

If you wrote something like this . . .

“The manger has two no weather or knot too invest in professional development and four witch employees it mite be appropriate.”

You might argue that your reader will know what you meant to say, despite the errors (none of which get flagged by spell check-see below).  And you’re right; I probably can figure out what you mean, but that’s not all there is to communication.

Indeed, when somebody reads what you have written, consciously or not they draw conclusions about you.  They have an image of you.

Part of that image is defined by the care you have taken in the presentation of your writing.

But it goes beyond image.  A sentence like the one above tells your reader that what you are writing about is not that important to you, that it’s not worth the time or trouble it might take to proofread.

Worse yet, it tells your reader that he or she is not very important to you-not really the message you wish to send, especially to your instructor.

Proofreading tips:

Experiment with different proofreading methods.

Some people can very successfully read their work, find errors, and fix them right on the computer screen.  Others of us have more success making corrections on paper.  Find out which one works best for you.

 Read your work out loud.

Proofreading is not easy, especially proofreading your own work.  You know what you meant to say, and often that’s what you will read-even if that’s not what you wrote.  Reading aloud will help you to hear what’s actually there.  Getting someone you trust to read to you is even more effective.   If something sounds “not quite right” to you, it probably means you have some editing to do.

 The most likely place for a typo is in a heading or title.

Our tendency is to read the “small print” (references, citations, etc.) much more closely than we read headings.  So make sure you give them an extra look before you hit “send” or “print”.

 Get as much distance as you can.

When you are confident you have finished proofreading and everything is perfect, put your work away for awhile (an hour, a day, a couple of days-the longer, the better).  Then come back and proofread again.  You certainly will find something that needs fixing.

Do not rely on Spell Check.

As we saw above, Spell Check cannot be counted on to find incorrect words-unless they are misspelled.  This little poem says it all:

Spell Czech

 Eye halve a spelling chequer. It came with my pea sea.

It plainly marques four my revue miss steaks eye kin

knot sea.

 Eye I strike a key and type a word and weight four it

two say

Weather eye wrong oar write. It shows me strait a

weigh.

 Ass soon as a mist ache is maid, it nose bee fore two

long

And eye can put the error rite. Its rarely ever wrong. 

Eye have  run this poem threw it, I am shore your

pleased two no.

Its letter perfect in it’s weight. My chequer tolled

me sew.

Anon.