Welcome back! Fall 2013 Edition

jjpacres / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Welcome back students (or just welcome, if you're a new MALS or ASGC student)! Now that you've survived your first week of classes, perhaps you've had time to look through those course syllabi and start getting an idea of all the different types of writing you'll be doing this semester. Once your head has stopped spinning at the thought of all that reading and writing (you can do it!!), check out the following links to help you get your semester of academic writing off to a great start.

MALS Online Writing Assistance
The MALS Writing Center has lots of online assistance available to help you with the writing process. Besides calling on your trusty writing consultant, don't forget to check out www.malswritingcenter.info for information on specific types of graduate-level writing, to Turabian style tips, to what to make of your professor's comments on your papers.

Writing Strategies
These posts from the blog Explorations of Style feature the author's "five key strategies for improving academic writing," which I think are a great to place to start, or just review, your academic writing habits: Reverse Outlines, Paragraphs, Transitions, Verbs, and Subjects.

Make Yourself Clear
Clear writing can be difficult to achieve, especially if you're new to graduate-level writing and all the concepts and ideas you'll need to communicate in your papers. Learn how to be concise in this handout from UNC's Writing Center, and read my thoughts on the topic in this previous blog post on sentence clarity.

Writing tips: Sentence clarity

Make your writing clear as a bell!

cogdogblog / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

In my work as your MALS Writing Consultant, I have come across a few writing errors that almost all writers seem to make at some point. I'd like to tackle those on the blog occasionally, and give you some tips about how to avoid them. Here, I bring you two errors that are major culprits in the muddling of otherwise good writing, and sure to get your papers marked "CLARIFY!"

• The dreaded "this"—The word "this" certainly has its place in the English language, but 

often its use leads to ambiguity in graduate level writing. Think about how you use "this" in speech. For example, at a restaurant you might say, "I'll have this sandwich," while pointing at a menu item so the waiter can see which sandwich you're talking about. If he can't see where you're pointing, "this" is a meaningless indicator. The same is true in writing. 

When you refer to an idea from a previous sentence with the word "this," you must tell your reader what "this" is. It's especially important to do so in graduate-level, interdisciplinary writing, because the concepts presented in the sentence to which "this" refers may be quite complex and encompass several ideas. 

If you write a sentence that says, "This is important because . . ." I may have no idea what is important. So, saying something as simple as "This area of interdisciplinary study is important because. . ." can help your reader say, "Oh yeah, she was just talking about a certain area of interdisciplinary study, and this sentence is going to tell me more about it." 

• Beware long, convoluted sentences—For interdisciplinary writers who are consulting multiple types of sources from multiple disciplines to come to new conclusions, it can be hard be brief. Sure, many of your sentences are going to be long and complex—complex sentences linking multiple concepts are a mark of advanced writing—but they must be coherent. 

Read sections of your paper aloud to help you identify overly complicated sentences (they'll usually sound that way when you hear them). Remember that it’s your job as a writer to distill the information from sources and your own conclusions into something your reader can understand. Sometimes you can fix really long sentences by simply breaking them into multiple sentences, but sometimes a long, confusing sentence is the result of really not understanding your source material. Check in with yourself to make sure you understand the concept, then try writing the simplest sentence possible ("Interdisciplinarity involves multiple disciplines."), and elaborate from there.

Your trusty writing consultant can help you identify these writing problems and give you more feedback on solving them—just contact me for a consultation!

Happy writing,

~Lahla

First things first

Greetings, MALS friends, from your shiny new Writing Consultant! My name is Emily Carmichael. A few of you already know me from classes we shared during the past two years; I hope to meet the rest of you face to face sometime soon.

I graduated from MALS in May 2012. My area of study was the relationship between text and culture, with specific emphasis on folklore and fairy tales. Because text and culture are both broad fields, I built my program of study from a relatively wide variety of disciplines, including literature, art, history, and anthropology. For my Capstone, I chose to do a creative project focused on Grimms' fairy tales and the ongoing process of revising and retelling those stories, both visually and verbally, with an emphasis on the mutual interplay between retellings and the cultures in which they are produced. 

Grimms' Girls: part of a larger series
which made up part of my Capstone.
Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 2012.

My undergraduate work is in fine art and literature. I also have a background in librarianship (I have worked in public and school libraries, and earned my Master of Education with a concentration in school library media simultaneously with my MALS degree), which means I'm happy to help with research problems. I will certainly post about research here as well.

I came to MALS, interdisciplinarity, and writing quite naturally; I am addicted to learning, my scholarly background is varied, and I have always had a tendency to think and write interdisciplinarily (although I didn't know there was a name for it). Even so, I found the work I did in the MALS program to be the most challenging of my life, in no small part because MALS students are held to an extremely high standard. As intimidating as that standard is, and as frustrating as I found it at times, it has shaped me into a far better writer than I was prior to entering the program. 

Swan Song. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2012.

Additionally, I struggled with many assignments because I am highly subject to the major pitfalls that trip up many students: procrastination, a short attention span, and a vocal inner critic. While I still don't know how to fully conquer these problems, I have learned to devise personal strategies to circumvent them, a little at a time, in order to get the necessary work done. At a later date I'll talk some about those strategies as well.

On a personal note, I live here in Johnson City, so I am happy to make face-to-face appointments if those suit your working style better than online conversations. At present I live with four cats, but only two are permanent (the other two are foster kittens), so I have not quite reached cat lady status yet. I spend much of my free time reading, cooking, and performing in local theatre productions.

Since it is now my responsibility to craft a blog worth the time it will take for you to read, I will do my best to keep things fun as well as informative. I'll also try to do the same with the MALS Writing Center Facebook page. I look forward to meeting, getting to know, and working with all of you. 

Cheers,

Emily

p.s. Despite my background in literature, I still find theory challenging! If it's easy for you, please let me know, because I want to shake your hand.