In the distant future, Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds is a renegade former brown-coat Sargent now turned smuggler/rogue who is the commander of a small spacecraft with a loyal hand-picked crew made up of first mate Zoe Warren; pilot Hoban ‘Wash’ Washburn; gung-ho grunt Jayne Cobb; engineer Kaylee Frye; fugitives Doctor Simon Tam and his psychic sister River, where they travel the far reaches of space in search of food, money, and anything to live off on.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
My Comp II teacher had a rule: for every three comma errors, you lose a letter grade. I hated that class. I made at least 7 comma errors on every paper for 8 or 9 weeks. I just couldn’t get it. I’m pretty sure I got a C, but I’ve blocked it out, so I can’t be sure. What I can be sure of is the careful attention I pay to commas in my writing now.
That class was a ridiculously painful—and annoying—experience, but one that I desperately needed if I was going to be successful in the writing I hoped to do. I think many students, even at the graduate level, could benefit from something similar. The two most common comma errors I see are:
- Fear of the run-on: Some people seem to have been so traumatized by their primary school teacher’s overemphasis on run-on sentences that they start getting uncomfortable when a sentence gets long. After a certain number of words or lines commas will start to randomly appear.
- A mark for a pause: Writing isn’t exactly like speaking, but we think like we talk and write as we think. Some people have been taught that, as a rule-of-thumb, if you’d pause in speech you should add a comma. But commas don’t mark pauses; they are structural markers.
These errors are easy to deal with.
We’ve all become accustomed to statements like, “Her style is very unique,” or, “this book has a somewhat unique perspective…” The usage just rubs me the wrong way. The word unique is meant to mean “one of a kind”; how could a thing be very one of a kind?
The word falls into a category of absolutes, similar to “complete”, “equal”, and “perfect”, and isn’t meant to be modified. Each of these words closes out all variablity by definition. There are no degrees of perfect, no approximation in equal, and no real comparison between complete and “nearly complete”. And something that is merely uncommon is not of the same type as something that is actually unique. There are important qualitative differences between these absolutes and their approximations.
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My exegesis prof had us buy a book called The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. To us and many other modern students, it was known as “Strunk and White”, but on the campus of Cornell in the early 20th, it was simply “the little book”. It was self published by Strunk, and was a requirement for his classes.
In the late 50′s White, one of his former students, was asked to edit it for publishing, after two revisions, the “little book” I have here on my desk is the result of that work.
The book is a simple and straightforward discussion of grammar and writing. It’s not so much as stylebook, like the APA or MLA, but a primer on the elements of good writing: Rules of usage, principles of composition, matters of form, commonly misused words and phrases. Here’s an example:
Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning “combustible” is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means “not combustible.” For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosive are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children an illiterates, use inflammable.
I think that if we put a grammar text this simple and straightforward in every classroom in America, and had children learn these simple rules before we foisted actual stylebooks on them, writing skill and attention to detail might see a marked increase.
This book is totally worth the read for anyone who uses the written word.
When Larry Summers was still at Harvard, he made a comment during a lecture citing “innate differences” between men and women as a possible reason for the lack of gender parity in the sciences. As I’ve written before, it should be pretty obvious to everyone that men and women are different. And when people let their guards down, they’ll admit as much.
Larry Summers, darling of feminists everywhere.
They’ll let slip that men are more agressive, and women have more natural empathy; they’ll admit that men and women think and reason differently, or that men have better spacial awareness, while women have a better command of language, or other such things. Just make sure you don’t try to attach those points to anything relating to real life.
If you read GetReligion.org, you’ll come across their disdain for the terms “many” and “some”. They are occasionally effective, but they are rarely descriptive enough for the context. One oft turned phrase is that “many” evangelicals are moving away from pro-life and anti-same-sex marriage activism. But “many” could mean 4% or 40%. There’s no telling.
Look at this quote from an article in Science Daily:
Contrary to the myth that females lack the intrinsic aptitude needed to excel in mathematics at the highest level, an idea proffered most famously by former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, many girls exist with truly exceptional talent for mathematics.
Taking this at face value, you’d expect that they measured high math aptitude in large percenteges of girls; maybe in the 35-40% range of all children identified with high aptitude. But if you look lower, the actual numbers are 11-24%, in good environments. Of course, in the context of the above statement, it fits. But there’s another problem.
The first sentence misstates the premise of most people, particularly Summers. The point of what Summers said was that because of natural gender differences, fewer women would achieve in math and science. He didn’t say, or imply, “that females lack the intrinsic aptitude needed to excel in mathematics at the highest level.” He was saying that there are more men with math aptitude than women.
And the article supports this, by saying that the high estimate of proportion is 1-in-4 children identified with math aptitude are girls. That’s a 3:1 ratio in favor of boys. Maybe some things are as simple as they seem.
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The Writer
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I'm a web developer at a digital advertising agency in Dallas. I'm on hiatus from a masters program in Educational Administration, and still considering my options.
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