Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Here is something that my students struggle with all the time: possessive apostrophes and where in the world should they close a quotation mark. Let’s take them one at a time. Possessive apostrophes are used to show someone or something owns something. They are not used when you want to show more than one of something. Here is a case in point (or...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: i just wanted to clarify something. It has to do with the use of vocative commas. Vocative commas are used when you are separating a person’s name from the rest of the sentence, such as the following: John, it’s good to see you. You would use the vocative comma instead of writing: John it’s good to see you. You also need to use...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Oxford commas are great at preventing misunderstanding. One of my students sent me a news report on a court case filed on behalf of some workers who thought they deserved overtime. The issue? The lack of an Oxford comma. So, what is one, you might ask? An Oxford comma is used between the last item in a list of things and the second-to-the-last...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Today, let’s visit the world of parenthetic expressions. This is, when you are writing, a brief pause in the middle of a sentence to add some additional information. It also applies to speaking, but I wanted to give you an example of what I was talking about right up front. Sometimes it is hard to decide if you need the commas, but, if...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Let me share with you a couple of very common mistakes I see when grading students’ essays: the use of a single noun with a plural pronoun and the use of possessive apostrophes when they only mean to use a plural noun. Folks, where were you when your teachers told you about this in writing class? Here’s the politically incorrect idea here: If...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Today’s blog is about sentence fragments. They can be the bane of your existence, if you let them. Here are some examples from papers I received on both the undergraduate and graduate levels just this past week: Input, process and output One being having little to no human interaction Also, somewhat unfair if others with the same pay don’t have to work such...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Today’s blog is a refresher course on the use of semi-colons. Please use them when you are connecting two independent clauses. That is, two complete sentences that are related in some way but which are fully competent to stand on their own. My students have frequently utilized them at the most inopportune time. For example, they would have used one in this sentence....
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: When you are writing a scholarly essay, article, or book, sometimes you will need to cite a document that has more than one author. It can get pretty tiresome to say repeatedly that an article was written by “Smith, Jones, Thomas, George, and Johns.” It doesn’t exactly make your report sing, if you know what I mean. To alleviate this problem, scholars came...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Sometimes it can be difficult to determine who to quote in your writing, since the author’s name may be buried somewhere in the article you are reading, but here’s a hint: his or her name is not Mr. or Ms. Ibid. Ever. When you see the word “ibid” as a reference, what that means in layman’s terms is “I am quoting the same...
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Writing & Grammar
Hello everyone: Have you ever submitted a document for grading, only to have the instructor ask you what in the world you are saying? That probably means that you did not proofread the assignment before you turned it in. For example, today I read a discussion board posting by one of my graduate students where the individual spelled Friedrich Nietzsche’s name as “Frederick Niche.” Nope,...
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