Sunday, January 10, 2016

Learning to write effectively involves an understanding of your experiences as a writer and a knowledge of the forms of writing. Remember, writing is a medium of communication. Writing represents language and emotion. It represents these things through the inscription and recording of sound through phonemes, morphemes, and symbols. How does writing actually take place in the world? How does it circulate in contemporary society? Writing is not a language but a form of technology. This technology developed as tools for communication. Within a language system, writing relies on the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar, and semantics. Explore the design and structure of texts. Writing is a part of communication.

How do authors use writing to participate in social life? Authors use their writing to inscribe their presence in the written record and give voice to our needs and aspirations. How do students link their identiies to writing? Exploring literacy events and practices, drawn from your own and your classmates' experiences, is meant to survey a broad range of wriitng occasions--to generate data, evidence, and subject matter for writing about the role of writing in people's lives. We need to locate ourselves as writers in the context of our times.

Let's talk about grammar! In linguistics, grammar is a set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases and words in any given natural language. The term also refers to the study of grammar rules.

Surface errors, grammar, punctuation, word choice, and other small-scale issues don't usually bother everyday readers. Academic writing is about research and essays. All writers want to be considered competent and careful. Your readers will judge you by the errors you make. What are the most common errors that students make? The most common error is using the wrong word. We call that easily confused words. many English words are commonly misused. The words "a lot" and "allot" are often confused. I have a lot of writing pens. Allot means to designate or assign by task or portion. When we designate something, we point it out. Sometimes, we just need to go back and correct these common errors. Missing commas after an introductory element is also commonly misused as is using sentence fragments. Writers need to look at these mistakes that pose special problems.

Let's talk about using the wrong word. After all, it is the number one student error. Do you mean prescience, which means foresight? or, do you mean precedence, which means priority? Do you confuse allergy with allegory? Wrong word usage errors can involve using a word with the wrong shade of meaning, using a word with the completely wrong meaning, or using the wrong preposition or another wrong word in an idiom. Selecting a word from a thesaurus without knowing its meaning or allowing spell checker to correct spelling automatically can lead to wrong word errors. if you have trouble with prepositions and idioms, learn the standard rules. What is a prepositional phrase? A prepositional phrase includes a preposition, a noun, or a pronoun called the object of the preposition and any modifiers of that oject. I rowed down the Amazon. They rowed by themselves.

 Missing commas after an introductory element is the second most common mistake that students make. Determined to get the job done, we worked all weekend. Although the study was flawed, the results may still be useful. Readers usually need a small pause--signaled by a comma--between an introductory word, phrase, or clause and the main part of the sentence. use a comma after every introductory element. When the introductory element is very short, you don't always need a comma. But including one is never wrong. Vague pronoun reference is another mistake that students make. Transmitting radio signals by satellite is a way of overcoming the problem of scarce airwaves and limiting how the airwaves are used.

 The company prohibited smoking, a policy which many employees resented. A pronoun should refer clearly to the word or words it replaces. That word is called the antecedent. Elsewhere in the sentence or text, you should be able to find the antecedent. If more than one word is the antecedent, the writer should edit to make it clear. Ronald Reagan won the election in a landslide. Everywhere we went, we saw crowds of tourists. Spelling, including homonyms, continues ot be a problem for students. The most common misspellings today are those that spell checker cannot identify. The categories that spell checkers are most likely to miss are homonyms, compound words, proper nouns, particularly names. After you run the spell checker, proofread carefully for these types of errors. Another common error is using quotations incorrectly. This is a type of mechanical error. Commas should be placed in quotation marks.

"I grew up the victim of a disconcerting confusion," Jim said. Follow conventions when using quotation marks with commas, colons, and other punctuation. Always use quotation marks in pairs, and follow the gidelines of your documentation style for block quotations. Use quotation marks for titiles of short works, but use italics for titles of long works. Don't use unnecessary commas. Don't use them before conjunctions in compound constructions that are not compound sentences. This conclusion applies to the United States and to the rest of the world. No comma is needed before and because it is joining two phrases that modify the same verb, applies. Don't use unnecessary commas with restrictive elements. Many parents of gifted children do not want them to skip a grade. No comma is needed to set off the restrictive phrase of gifted children.