In the home stretch

As the end of the semester fast approaches and deadlines loom, stress and the sense of being overwhelmed by work can send your focus and motivation out the window.

via Cyanide and Happiness. 

All joking aside, you are in the home stretch now, and in less than three weeks, the semester will be behind you. Hopefully you are all looking forward to a warm and restful winter break, and will finish out the semester feeling satisfied with the work you have done.

A reminder

I'm sure none of you are in such dire straits as Patrick here.

Your friendly neighborhood writing consultant remains available to help you with end-of-semester assignments, including both MALS and elective coursework. Even if you have never worked with me before, I encourage you to contact me if you have any questions, could use a second pair of eyes on a paper or other writing in progress, or if you simply need to vent about the stress and challenges of graduate school. Email any time at malswritingconsultant@gmail.com, and feel free to open a chat if you see me online. 

I know how difficult it is to complete work far enough in advance to allow time for feedback, but keep in mind that you do not have to have a finished draft in hand in order to seek consultation! If you have a couple of pages roughed out, or even a couple of paragraphs, feel free to send them my way. Be sure to indicate the goals of the assignment  (it doesn't hurt to send the original guidelines along with your work), specify any particular concerns you may have, and let me know the due date so that I can prioritize appropriately.

DON'T BE THIS GUY.

via ETSU Memes.

Thinking ahead

Although this is a very busy time of year, this is an ideal time to start thinking about steps you can take to make your life and your schoolwork easier next spring. Specifically, consider the power of teamwork, and think about joining a peer writing group. I'll talk more about this later, but for now, check out some FAQ's about writing groups on the MALS Writing Center website, as well as the information under "content" on the Writing Center D2L page. If you are at all interested in working with a writing group, please email me and/or post on the D2L page so we can get the ball rolling!

In a different approach to teamwork and community support, MALS is preparing to launch a new peer mentorship program. Details are coming to you via email. This spring semester, everyone enrolled in the MALS program will be eligible to participate, either as a mentor (students in their third semester and beyond) or a mentee (newly enrolled MALS students and those entering their second semester). Please look over the email and think very hard about getting involved in this program.

Take five

Don't be this guy, either. via Shoebox Blog.

In the midst of all this hustle and bustle, try to make a little time in your busy schedule to unwind. You can often focus better and work more productively after stepping away from work and schoolwork for a few minutes or a few hours. This is particularly helpful if, like me, you tend to get stuck in a cycle of non-productive time wasting instead of getting your work done.

Here are a few local and on-campus happenings over the next few weeks (click the links for more information):

• ART 

If you are on campus this Wednesday or Thursday, November 28-29, swing by the Culp Center's ballroom for ETSU's Student Ceramic Association sale. Students will be selling one-of-a-kind, handmade pottery and ceramic items.

Walk through Slocumb Galleries in Ball Hall this week to see graduating students' BFA and MFA shows.

Beginning December 3rd, visit the same space for the annual postcard art show and silent auction fundraiser. The first weekend of December also brings First Friday and the annual Christmas Parade to downtown Johnson City.

• MUSIC

At 7:30pm this Thursday, November 29th, ETSU's Ending Fall Bands Concert will play in the Culp Center. The concert is free and open to the public.

ETSU Chorale's annual Christmas Concert takes place this Friday and Saturday in downtown Johnson City. Appalachian Studies professor Jane MacMorran, whom some of you may know, is featured on the violin.

Check out the Down Home and the Acoustic Coffeehouse for additional live music close to campus, including several upcoming performances by ETSU affiliates.

• THEATRE

Glasgow Theatre Company's production of David Sedaris' hilarious "Santaland Diaries" plays this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, November 29-December 1, at Nelson Fine Art in downtown Johnson City.

Johnson City Community Theatre's holiday comedy, "Nuncrackers," opens this Friday, November 30th, and runs for three weekends.*

For non-holiday-themed fare, Theatre Bristol presents "Peter Pan the Avenger" the first two weekends in December.

• DANCE 

ETSU's Student Dance Workshop performs on Thursday, December 6th, at 7:30pm in the Mini-Dome Dance Studio (room 104). Free admission.

• GET MOVING

As ETSU students, you all have full access at no additional charge to the campus Center for Physical Activity. The CPA is a fully equipped gym with a pool and fitness classes. Drop by to blow off steam, work up a sweat, or even study while using a treadmill or stationary bike. The CPA is open through December 7th, and operates on a limited schedule over winter break.


*Disclaimer: despite appearances, I am not generally a Christmas shill; the holiday tends to take over the area completely in December. If you are looking for a Christmas-free break, you can still see Halloween-themed movies or even "Brave" for $3 at the Real to Reel cinema. 

An actor's guide to writing; or, Don't flub your lines when there's an audience in the house

I love to perform in local community theatre productions. It can be a lot of work -- one director referred to community theatre as "a part-time job that costs you money," and that sums it up rather well -- but I find it to be energizing as well as an outlet. Theatre is good for giving my brain something fun and non-scholarly to do, a nice break from school and work.

But recently, of course, I managed to make a connection between acting and interdisciplinary writing. Isn't the interdisciplinary mind a wondrous thing? It so often finds the overlap, the interplay, the synchronicity between seemingly disparate fields -- whether you want it to or not.

Don't flub your lines!

The striking commonality between acting and writing lies in the importance of getting your lines right -- that is, of saying exactly what you mean, at exactly the right time. The tricky part is noticing when you have failed to do this and taking steps to correct the error. Your job, and mine, is to say exactly what we mean to say, clearly and unambiguously, so that everyone in the audience can understand it.

If I skip lines in performance, I may be leaving out information critical to understanding the play. This is a Very Bad Thing to do, since I cannot assume that everyone (or even anyone) in my audience is already familiar with the story. The same applies to academic writing: you cannot assume that all of your readers will be familiar with the background information that feeds into your paper.

via the wonderful Wondermark 

This holds true even for disciplinary writing, although to a lesser extent. The strongest academic writing in all fields is that which can stand alone, and remains comprehensible to readers from outside the discipline.

Words, words, words

In a similar vein, use of the wrong word may change the entire meaning of a sentence, a scene, the whole play. This past October, during a performance of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, I asked another character, "Is it so wrong to kill the person who has taken everything you had in the world from you?" The other character, a canon (or English clergyman), is meant to reply "Yes!" In one particular performance, he instead bellowed "NO!" In other words, with one tiny slip of the tongue, a priest gave me permission to commit murder. While that defense may not hold up in court, it put an interesting spin on the story. He didn't even realize he had gotten it backward until I teased him about it later. After all, he knew what he intended to say.


This is a common problem for writers in the age of spellcheckers and autocorrection. If you make a typo, your computer's autocorrect function may correct it for you -- but it may not "correct" it to the word you intended to use. If you make a typo that is still a word, but not the word you intended, or if you make an incorrect word choice, your computer will not catch it for you. In all likelihood, when you read back over what you've written, you will read not what is actually on the page, but what you meant to put on the page.

This is where writing benefits from either a second set of eyes, or from resting for a while before you proofread. If your deadline is looming and you can't manage either of these techniques, be sure to proofread as slowly and carefully as you possibly can, and to look up any and all words you're not absolutely certain you are using correctly. This will go a very long way toward ensuring that you have, in fact, said what you meant to say, and not given someone the thumbs up on murder. . . or adultery, as in one famous Biblical misprint. (Click through the link for some excellent advice on avoiding similarly embarrassing typos.)

Also check for spelling.
via Mandatory.

Keep an eye out for missing words, too.
Assuming you still have eyes,.

It's all in the delivery: punctuation and logical stops

Always consider the impact of punctuation on meaning as well as on style and flow. Punctuation was, in fact, initially invented as a means of indicating when orators (and, later, actors) should pause for breath. When actors ignore the supplied punctuation, it makes a mess of meaning. This is a common problem among students and new actors first encountering William Shakespeare's iambic pentameter verse: many people inherently feel that they should pause at the end of each line, regardless of punctation, or lack thereof.

via Motifake

My current play, a comedy called "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)," contains a joke about that very issue. One of the actors, reading biographical notes on the author, pauses between pages at an amusingly awkward point, describing Shakespeare's mother as "Mary Arden, daughter of a Roman. (next card) Catholic member of the landed gentry."

Thankfully, this particular comma fail was a hoax.
via Museum of Hoaxes.

Punctuation is even more powerful in writing. A missing or misplaced comma can change the meaning of an entire sentence.

The best way to check your own work for appropriate punctuation is to read it aloud. Where you naturally pause, there should be appropriate punctuation (usually a comma or period) to indicate the pause. If you don't naturally pause while reading the sentence aloud, you don't need a comma.

Don't skip the rehearsal process

No theatrical production goes public without an extensive rehearsal process, which generally includes a good bit of revision and adjustment. The final rehearsal, when we have everything just about right, is a preview performance. The audience for this show is comprised of family and friends, who serve as a sounding board of sorts -- the actors' version of proofreaders. They can offer feedback on the performance, pointing out any serious problems we may have overlooked. I strongly recommend that writers seek out a preview audience for their work before submitting it as well. For MALS students, please do consider making use of your friendly neighborhood writing consultant. I also strongly encourage the formation of writing groups, which can be a great resource for peer review.

And if writing groups fail you, look into acting groups. What was that I said about "energizing"? 

I hope these reminders serve you well as you head into the home stretch of the semester. Did I commit the very sins of which I speak in this post? If so, do point them out to me, and mock at will. And if you need a break and a good, hearty laugh this weekend, come on out to the theatre!

Cheers,
Emily

Strong writing, in which passive voice will not be used (by zombies)

I have spent a completely unreasonable amount of time writing this post -- or, rather, trying to write it.

Even if you are not a shameless procrastinator like me, you've probably struggled with a similar problem at some juncture. I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about, but every time I tried to set the words down, they came out wrong: stiff and formal, and nothing like my usual writing style. This problem is not new to me; I regularly struggled with it while working on class papers and assignments. Many of us, when writing scholarly papers, tend to strive for a formality far removed from our ordinary style or voice. Unfortunately, that effort often leads instead to stilted, awkward, unclear writing. (As an ironic case-in-point, I spent a ridiculous amount of time writing, revising, and rewriting this paragraph because it sounded terribly artificial. It's still a little stiff for a blog, but it will have to do.)

Pie is delicious. Via zoomdoggle.

I set out to talk about passive voice -- a phrase which I will wager most of you have seen written in the margins of your papers at least once. When writing in past or present tense, passive constructions are rarely a good choice, because they approach the subject in an unnecessarily roundabout manner. We rarely use passive voice in everyday speech unless we lack complete information or are specifically trying to avoid clarity. You would never say "The entire pie was eaten by me." You might say "The entire pie was eaten," but only if you wish to avoid admitting that you ate the entire pie.

Similarly, you would not say "An 'A' was earned in that class." If you accomplish that feat, you'll take credit for it directly, by saying "I earned an 'A' in that class" rather than "An 'A' was earned by me in that class."

by Dan Savage, via savagechickens.com

These are, of course, oversimplified examples. Passive voice will often creep into papers in subtler forms. For example, one might claim "It has been said that pumpkin pie is delicious." That's all well and good, but who said it? If you know, say so; if you don't know, you will need to find out before you put it in your paper.

Passive construction with attribution isn't significantly better. It sounds pretty silly to write "It has been said by Emily that pumpkin pie is delicious." Why not simply, directly state that "Emily says that pumpkin pie is delicious"? It is. I said it. I'm not ashamed. You can quote me on it.

Passive voice isn't always so easy to spot, but culture and ethics professor Rebecca Johnson has a solution for that:

Discovered via the wonderful Grammarly page on Facebook

This is sheer brilliance. It works. Try it out:
"The results were published" vs. "He published the results" vs. "The results were interesting."
"The class was taken" vs. "The class was delicious."
"He used his brains" vs. "His brains were used."

Now, I'll grant that academic papers may be far more interesting once you throw a few zombies into the mix, but keep in mind that zombies are dangerous creatures. You're far better off closing any zombie-ready gaps you find. This is pretty easy to remember: zombies are pretty passive. Passive voice attracts zombies. Use your brains, stay active, and avoid the zombies.

Is passive voice always wrong? No; it does have its uses. Specifically, you may appropriately use passive voice when discussing future events or unknown information: "I suspect the entire pie will be eaten today," for example, or "We don't know when the pie was eaten." Additionally, passive voice is generally recommended for certain forms of science writing, where the writer wishes to convey objectivity. (See Grammar Girl's post on passive voice for more information.) When dealing with known information in past or present tense, however, it's rarely the best choice.*

If you write directly and assign credit where it's due, you shouldn't be troubled by passive voice. Zombies are a different matter. I'll just have to wish you luck there. Have a happy and safe Halloween, and I hope that none of you will be eaten.**

Cheers,
Emily

*Unless you are Yoda.*** In that case, however, you have some larger syntax issues to deal with first.
**By zombies.
***Pro tip: you are not Yoda.

Ninja Proofreading

Understandably, you're probably sick of your final paper(s) by now. But I urge you to resist the temptation to rush through the proofreading process.

Proofreading is tedious but essential to completing a great paper. After all, why would you want to let a a string of misspellings, incorrect words, and punctuation errors obscure a carefully constructed argument that you've worked on for months?

So, instead of glancing your paper over in an attempt to rid yourself of it once in for all, adopt a new attitude towards proofreading. Be methodical, unconventional, and stealthy. Proofread like a ninja! Here's a few tips to help you do that:

Ninja Proofreading Rule #1: Outsmart the enemy. Print your paper out to proofread it. Like it or not, we are conditioned to proofread according to squiggly red and green lines. You might swear that you're not - that you don't trust those menacing lines, and since Clippy bit the dust, you are free from the tethers of the word-processor's built-in know-it-all-ness. But trust me, you rely on them to some degree. Printing out a copy to proofread allows you to release your paper from the crutches of spellchecker, and allows you to highlight, circle, and mark out errors and rewrites in a much more satisfying, tactile manner.

Ninja Proofreading Rule #2: Don't let your paper see it coming. Read from the bottom up. I don't mean literally read backwards (I'm not trying to kill you here - you're already half-dead at this point in your writing). Start at the end of your paper and work your way up, reading (forward) one paragraph at a time. Doing so will allow you to focus on structure, spelling, and punctuation because you'll be breaking up your reading into small, disordered chunks. That's what you want right now.

Ninja Proofreading Rule #3: Do it with style. Read the paper aloud, standing up, in a confident tone.. It really doesn't matter if you have an audience for this one, because only the act of reading aloud, word for word, will help you recognize the sneakiest errors, for example, where you accidentally wrote "form" when you meant "from." Purposely using an authoritative, even smug tone will not only prevent you from lapsing into a harried murmur (causing you to say "yada yada yada" and miss errors), but it will in fact highlight your errors by making you sound like a bit of an idiot.

Ninja Proofreading Rule #4: Attack when your paper least expects it. Don't proofread immediately after you've finished writing. I can almost guarantee that you will miss half of the mistakes existing in your paper if you try and proofread after spending 5 hours trying to perfect your conclusion. You need to give your eyes and your brain a break. Ideally, you can let it rest a day. At the very least, take an hour to leave the room and do something completely unrelated to your paper before returning to proofread. (Working on another paper does NOT count as something completely unrelated to your paper.)

Ninja Proofreading Rule #5: Make it like you weren't even there. Schedule an hour or two exclusively for proofreading. Disappear mysteriously (preferably in a ninja-like manner), and during this time, shun the outside world and proofread only.

Ninja Proofreading Rule #6: Allow no distraction. Do not rely on proofreading "as you go." Also, don't revise the copy of your paper on your computer as you proofread your printed-out copy. I don't care if you think it's more efficient, because it's not, really. All you'll end up doing is not really proofreading and not really revising. No matter how diligently you try to be when you do either of these things, chances are you've left some obvious mistakes in your paper. You might even add in new mistakes while you swap between reading and correcting two copies of your work.

Ninja Proofreading Rule #7: Respect that which is simple in appearance. My last piece of advice for ninja proofreading is this: don't leave revising your bibliography until the last minute. I promise you it will take about 4 times longer to proofread, edit, and perfect the formatting, punctuation, and styling of a bibliography than you think it will.

I'll leave you with some links about the proofreading process that I think you might find helpful. First, here's a link to UNC-Chapel Hill's proofreading handout. This covers all the bases in a non-ninja fashion, but is helpful nonetheless. Second, remember that just because something's grammatically correct doesn't mean it's actually correct. This rather amusing blog highlights this fact. Additionally, here's a video titled, "The the Impotence of Proofreading." This poem, if written, would entirely check out if one were to rely on a word processing spellchecker, but, as you will hear, you would NOT want to commit any of these errors in your paper. Warning: this video contains profanity. And finally, because I've always wanted to include a cat in this blog, here's a ninja kitty (who might want to proofread): 
see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Good luck finishing up the Spring 2012 semester, and have a great break!