 How
to Improve Your Writing
SESSION 12
This
free Online Course
Developed by: Melissa Fry, M.Ed. English. To obtain college level instructional support
for this course contact
Melissa Fry melissa.fry@kctcs.edu.
Content:
Journal
Throughout this course
you will be asked to generate journal entries.
The purpose of these entries is to get your brain warmed up
and your creative juices flowing. You
may or may not end up using your journal for writing later in the course;
however, the main focus on this exercise is to get you writing.
Journal entries should be ½ to 1 page in length.
You should not worry about proofreading at this point.
Simply let your words flow. A
journal topic will be posted daily; however, if you do not like the topic simply
free-write on your own topic of choice.
Journal # 11 Someone once said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you
stronger.” Write about what in
your life makes you strong.
Editing and Proofreading
Editing and proofreading is your next to last step in the writing
process. Obviously you have put a
great deal of time and effort into pre-writing, drafting, and revision. Don’t let all your hard work be for nothing by turning in a
paper that is riddled with errors. Use
all the homework assignments you have completed to make sure that piece of
writing you are turning in is error free. To
do otherwise is to risk having your words not get the credit and/or the grade
they deserve. You owe it to
yourself as a writer to carefully proofread your work.
To just review what you should be looking for print out and correct the
following exercise:
The Ten Commandments of Grammar
(Thou shall not commit the sins below
when writing!)
1.
Subject-verb agreement are problematic.
2.
Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
3.
Comma splices are likewise troublesome, however, they can be corrected
easily.
4.
Just like sentence fragments.
5.
Being bad grammar, a writer should not use dangling modifiers.
6.
Make it so all your pronouns have reference.
7.
If your verb tenses agreed, you are writing a good sentence.
8.
To mix metaphors is to tread lightly on dangerous waters.
Also, avoid cliches like the plague.
9.
Eschew obfuscation.
10.
Proofreading is important to spot misspellings, and to ensure that did
not leave any out.
Computer spell-check are a great
resource but should not be relied on to catch all you errors as the following handout from the Cincinnati State
College Composition Program indicates:
COMPUTER SPELL CHECKERS
Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My checker tolled me sew.
As a writer you should definitely run your writing through spell check
but don’t stop there. Print out
your paper and go line by line until you are satisfied that your writing is
error free. Make sure also that you
catch any printing errors. If you
paragraph is all over the page due to a printing error, go back and make
corrections before printing out the final copy.
To test your proof-reading skills, print out this essay by Brent Staples
and correct any errors you find. If
you can correct this essay, you will be a whiz at correcting your own.
Once you are finished, check the corrected copy in your textbook on pages
165-168 to see how well you did.
Black men and Public Spac
My first victim is a women a - white.
Well dressed, probably in her early 20's.
I came upon her late won evening on a deseted streets in Hyde park a
relaitively affluent neighborhood in a otherwise, mean impoverished section of
chicago? As I swung onto the avenue
behind her. There seemed to be an
discreet uninflammatory distance between us.
Not so. Cast back a worried
glance. To her, this youngish black
man - a brod six feet tw
o inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hnads shoved
into the pockets of it's milatary jacket - seemed menacingly close.
After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her face and was soon ran
in earnest. Within seconds, she
disappeared into a cross street.
That was more than a decade ago. I
was 22, an Graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago.
It is in the echo of that terrified woman's
footsteps that I first began to know unwieldy inheritance I'd come into - the
ability to alter public space in ugly ways.
It was clear she thought thmeself the
quarry of a mugger a rapist or worse.
Suffering form a bout of insomnia however, all I is stalking is sleep,
not defenseless wayfayers. As a
softy who is scarly able to take a knife to raw chicken, much less to some ones
throat, I was surprised embarrassed and dismayed all at once.
Her flight made I feel like a accomplice in tyranny.
It also made cleer that I was indistinguishable from the mugger who
occasionally seeped in to the area from the surrounding ghetto that first
encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay
between night time pedestrian - particularly women - and myself.
I soon gather that being consider dangerous was a hazzard in itself's. I only needed to turn a corner inot a dicey situation. Or crowd some frightened armed person in a foyer somewhere
or make some wrong move after been pulled over by a police to be in jepordy
myself. Where fear and weapons met
- and they often do in urban America - there is always the posibility of death.
In my first year, away from my home town, I was to become familiar with
the language of fear. At dark
shadowy intersections I could cross in fron t of an car stipped at a traffic
light and elict the thunk thunk thunk thunk of the driver -black,
white,male,or female - hammering down their door locks.
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