Hello everyone:

One issue that my beloved students face, even at the graduate level, is whether something is plural or possessive. Hang on till the end of this blog posting and I’ll tell you a joke to reward your patience.

Do you have more than one? It is plural. Do you have something? It is possessive. Let me explain further.

There are fifteen girls standing on a boat. I haven’t said that they own the boat, just that they are standing there. Since they’re just hanging out, they don’t need a possessive apostrophe (but they do need an “s.”).

Now there are fifteen girls standing on a boat but one of them owns it. The sentence now becomes as follows:

Fourteen girls are standing on Sandy’s boat. Sandy owns the boat, but the other fourteen girls do not. The fourteen girls are plural but Sandy is the possessor of the boat.

Or you might write the following:

Fourteen girls are standing on one girl’s boat. Notice where the possessive apostrophe goes if only one girl is the owner. I hope it’s a big boat, with that many girls on it.

Now let’s say that they all won the lottery and all bought a boat together. The sentence might look like this:

The girls’ boat was a nice place for the girls to stand.

More than one girl owns the boat, hence the location of the possessive apostrophe. At the end of the sentence, we are merely talking about more than one girl, so no apostrophe is needed.

Got it? Okay, here’s the joke I promised:

A gal was telling her friends that she never wanted to have twins because she didn’t want to be pregnant for 18 months.

A pregnant pause ensues.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

 

Hello everyone:

I have posted on these wonderful commas in the past. You can find the explanations of why to use them in other blog postings, but this is the Readers’ Digest condensed version for those of you in a hurry.

Oxford commas are used to connect the second-to-the-last item in a list of things. For example, here is a sentence without an Oxford comma:

“I love my parents, Daisy Duck and Daffy Duck.”  What? Your parents are ducks???? Let’s use an Oxford comma to clear up the sentence:

“I love my parents, Daisy Duck, and Daffy Duck.” Okay, now you love three different individuals. That’s what you were going for. Well done!

Parenthetical expression commas are used when you, for whatever reason, want to dump something extra into the middle of your sentence. (Like I just did.) If you want use one parenthetical comma, you must use two.  One goes in front of the parenthetical expression, to be clear, and one goes after the expression. (Like I just did, again.) You can’t use just one, like you cannot eat just one Lays potato chip.

Introductory phrases should have commas. These are the little comments you make at the beginning of a sentence. If you use too many, your writing will become dull. (There was one in the previous sentence.) I have another blog posting that goes into detail on how to get rid of them. Some of my students will use introductory phrases in 4 out of 5 sentences. That is dreadful.

I hope this helps!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hi everyone:

Today I want to talk about something you may have never heard of: conditional phrases. Let’s keep it short and sweet. These are also known as if-then phrases.

If you study, then it is more likely you will get a good grade.

If you smoke, then there will be a negative effect on your health.

If you do something, what do you think will happen to you? This is a simple way to explain how to phrase a conditional phrase. You use a simple present tense and add a simple future tense. You do this today and then this will happen later on.

Hope this helps your writing!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

 

Hello everyone:

There’s a good way to finish the term …and a really stupid one.

Let’s say you are in an 8-week or 16-week course. You have turned in all of your assignments, for better or for worse. You know that your grade hinges on that very last assignment. So what do you do?

Instead of giving it your all, being all-in on this class, or just doing your level best to complete the assignment, you decide to purchase your final document.  Poor choice, bad idea, what are you, stupid or something?

You have worked so hard all semester long and now you are going to blow it in one fell swoop???? You are going to trash your academic reputation? You are willing to have “plagiarism” follow you around for the rest of your academic career? Come on, people. Don’t do it.

In the first place, your instructor was not born yesterday. Yes, we really do notice if your writing suddenly improves by a 200% leap. If a student has trouble writing simple sentences all semester long, do you really think we are going to believe that you wrote : “I have included an in-depth contract with information attached that explicates all relevant esoteric sources?” (Please note that I have re-worded this sentence only slightly, so that the student can’t get me for plagiarism, but the three biggest words really were used in the paper.)

In the second place, most online documents do not fit into the required components for a given assignment. This means that you will look foolish at trying to shoehorn a document you have “borrowed without attribution” into the requirements of an assignment.

Finally, we are wiling to work with you to make sure that you have the right document written. I give students two rough drafts on the final big-deal assignment, just to make sure they get it right. Other than writing it for you, what more could we do?

Here’s the bottom line: be honest in your dealings or you will have a lot of explaining to do about the “failure due to plagiarism” note on your transcript. You probably won’t be able to explain your way out of that one, so the bottom line is: DON’T CHEAT!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

Sometimes students write essays that contain a lot more words than they need. Some examples include the following:

I thought that I would write my essay for COM1010 about the following really interesting topic: the communication  aspects seen and heard and visualized in House, M.D.  The aspects of communication that I will discuss in this essay for COM1010 will cover include indirect communication, nonverbal communication, and verbal communication.

Please, I’m bored already. It’s your essay and you are writing it. Therefore, it goes without saying that you have thought about writing it before you actually did. Get to the point. One thing: if your professor likes five-sentence paragraphs, you need to make sure that you have written a five-sentence introductory paragraph without boring anyone to death.

I would re-write this paragraph as follows:

House, M.D. contains many aspects of communication that we have covered this semester in COM1010. This essay will discuss indirect, nonverbal, and verbal communication as seen in the episode Autopsy from season two. My focus will be on the first differential diagnosis scene between Doctors Cameron, Chase, Foreman, and House. I will argue that camera angles, lighting, and proximity all contribute to the audience’s understanding of this episode.  I will take each of these aspects in turn.

Now your essay is launched and I can’t wait to read it. You sound like a college student who knows what he or she is talking about, not someone straight out of high school who has too much blank paper and not enough legitimate things to say.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

One of the greatest offenses in the world of writing is to have a sentence that doesn’t quite make it. Something is missing, like the rest of your thought.

Your sentence gets going really well and then…it suddenly isn’t  there.  Perhaps you got sidetracked or put a period where a comma belonged. Your computer automatically thought you were starting a new sentence, so the first word that should have followed the comma is now facing a period and is capitalized.  Don’t blame your computer. Instead, blame yourself for not proofreading the document.

If you are an undergraduate, take heart. You have company. They are called graduate students. Yes, even in graduate school, fragments can be a part of an essay. They shouldn’t be, mind you, but they are.

If this is your problem, the thing to do is to proofread everything. Read it out loud, if you please.  Have a friend look over your writing, if you are so sick and tired of that paper than you simply can’t look at it again.

Fragments are not good things, unless you are doing creative writing.  Even then, a few fragments go a long way.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

Do you know the easiest way to catch errors? Read your document OUT LOUD before you submit it for grading. I recently read my novel’s manuscript (90,003 words) out loud and was amazed at what I caught.

The thing is, some students ignore that advice and post some really awkward sentences. They apparently also ignore the spell check and grammar check on their computers, as well. Please, if you value your grade, do not post some of the following sentences:

Weather or knot he goes, I will bee their.

The birds our flying overhead.

Makes the thing I do easy when I can just stop by and grab something knowing for  a fact its going to bee in the same spot ready to go (note the lack of punctuation in this wanna be sentence.)

Just a good vibe to sea when you walk in the building (again, no punctuation is just one of the problems here. Add in slang and a misspelled word and a sentence fragment and you have a combination worthy of a poor grade.)

IT Jones making to chief and start ordering people to get qualification when she did not have any as a IT.

Due to IT nickel accent from his culture it create miscommunication because his worker could not understand his instructions.

The first two I made up, but they have their basis in a freshman writing course I taught. The rest came from junior/senior level writing papers in the past two weeks.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

I got an email today from a student who was very upset about the feedback I gave her on a document she had written. She called me a variety of things, none of which were very flattering. At all.

The interesting thing was that the document she had written was worth a low C. If she takes the advice I gave her, she might pull an A on the document.

So what’s the hassle? Does she object to an A? I would have thought she would be grateful. I told her exactly what was wrong and why and I told her how to fix it. She seemed to have a specific problem with subject/verb agreement, putting single nouns with plural pronouns, and using the possessive “‘s” when she meant plural.

I suggested that she visit this blog for an in-depth discussion of these issues. She was mad because I did not take the time to explain them to her personally, but that I asked her to visit this site.  There were 15 other students with similar problems today, and I suggested they all come here. That way, I told her, I did not have to repeat myself.

She thinks I am lazy and was very put out at the whole feedback idea. Folks, I do not get paid anything for this blog. In fact, it costs me time and money to maintain it. I do this twice a week, and have done so for the past two years (this August) because I sincerely care about helping my students. Even ones like her.

I hope you enjoy my blog postings, and hope you get a lot of help out of our time together.

Best,

Dr. Sheri