ANOTHER WAY TO USE A SEMICOLON ;

Last week, we talked about the first use of the semicolon. This week, we’ll talk about a second (and more common) use for a semicolon. A semicolon can create a legal run-on sentence. A run-on sentence is when you have more than one sentence punctuated as if it were one. Sometimes, though, you really do want that run-on, because you want to emphasize that the ideas in each sentence are closely related. In this case, the semicolon can come to your rescue. Here’s an example:

I sold my car last June; now I ride my bike everywhere.
He dropped the class the second week; I can see why.

In each of these instances, you have what could be two full sentences on either side of the semicolon. That’s exactly what you want. There is one catch with using a semicolon this way, though. The ideas in the two sentences that you’re joining must be closely related. If they’re not, you’ve misused the  semicolon.

One great trick about semicolons is that you can use them at the last minute too. If you’ve printed your paper and are just about ready to hand it in but notice a run-on sentence, you can often just create a semicolon with a black pen and fix it right then and there. Very handy.

TEACHER JOURNAL

I spent the weekend working on my own reading and writing. In the classroom, I’m often telling my students to read lots and write regularly. It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t do the same in my own life, would it?

Right now, I’m reading an amazing book about goats. I know. It’s a strange topic. The author, Brad Kessler, talks about his experiences moving from the city to the country to live a quieter life — with goats. Kessler is one of my all-time favorite authors, and his writing (even — or especially — about goats) is beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable. Here’s a link to information about the book, if you’re curious: Goat Song, by Brad Kessler.

I’m reading this book on my iPod, using the Amazon Kindle app. More and more books are available digitally this year — and it’s downright convenient to be able to carry Goat Song in my pocket or my purse. I can read while in line at the grocery store, while waiting for a bus, or while waiting for a meeting to begin.

How do you read? Let me know in the comments!

I hear the word “perfect” a lot in my line of work, and every time I hear it, a little rebellion happens inside me. Students want to learn perfect English and perfect grammar. Students want to get perfect grades, perfect scores on tests. Perfect, it seems, is where so many students set the bar for themselves. I think this is a dangerous practice.

A student once told me a story of taking her final secondary school test. She had perfect grades and was the most perfect student in her class. She was so frightened on test day, though, that she buckled, and she failed the test. Her life changed after that. Another student told me about her fear of tests, how students in her country who didn’t score well enough were not even allowed to attend university. She was terrified of not doing perfectly.

Stories like this are common — especially in countries with high stakes examinations before university. I know that, to some extent, this is the way the world works. We’re tested in school, and the goal is a perfect score. Still, the idea of perfect often paralyzes us. There’s no way to achieve perfection — especially when it comes to English and writing.

Striving for perfect writing assumes that there is one right way to write — and that all other ways of writing are somehow wrong. There are times in life when there is a definite right and wrong. There’s a right answer to that algebraic equation or the multiple choice question. Writing isn’t as clear-cut, though. Writing is basically putting our thoughts and ideas on the page — and there are many ways to do this. There are many ways to organize our thoughts, and there are many ways to write. Pretending that there is only one right way limits our choices, limits our critical thinking, and ultimately, limits our thinking.

Instead of thinking of writing a perfect paper, you might try to think about communicating your ideas clearly. Working to get your ideas across will help you avoid thoughts of perfection — and hopefully, make the writing at least a little less stressful.

ONE WAY TO USE A SEMICOLON ;

One of the most misused forms of punctuation is the semicolon (;). For some reason, students love to use the semicolon. They’re cute, and they seem so sophisticated. I think because so many students see semicolons as cool, they’re often misused. Students use them instead of commas, instead of colons, or at odd places in a sentence. Really, there are only two uses for semicolons. Below, I’ll describe the first. We’ll talk about the second use for a semicolon next week.

The only time that you absolutely must use a semicolon is when you have a list of things AND when the things in your list have commas within them. Usually, when we write a list, we separate items in the list with commas:

I went to the store and bought a flashlight, a bicycle helmet, fancy shoes, and a stick of gum.

What happens, though, when the things in your list have commas in them?

I have been to New York, New York, Chicago, Illinois, Madison, Wisconsin, Atlanta, Georgia, Seoul, Korea, and San Francisco, California.

It gets confusing, doesn’t it? The solution is the semicolon. Here’s how we’d fix that last sentence:

I have been to New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Madison, Wisconsin; Atlanta, Georgia; Seoul, Korea; and San Francisco, California.

Voila! The list is organized.

TEACHER JOURNAL

This week, I’m settling in to do some serious paper-grading. I made the mistake of having major papers due in each of my classes the same week (silly me!), so I have quite a stack of papers to get back to students. It’s no small thing, to comment on a student’s paper: to be fair and challenge each student to grow as a writer, while also being kind, respectful, and considerate of the student as a writer and a human being.

As I’m commenting on papers, I know that writing is a very personal thing. When you write for a class, you’re putting your ideas on the page and waiting for your teacher to grade what you come up with. That’s a risky endeavor, and many students have been discouraged enough by an English teacher’s critical comments to give up writing altogether. At the same time, it’s important to be challenged to grow as a writer (I never want to stop growing myself). It’s a weighty job, this commenting on papers. No matter how many times I do it, I feel a tremendous responsibility.  Here I go, diving into the stack…

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt (thank you!)

This Saturday is Halloween, when we dress in costume, eat more candy than we dare at any other time of the year, and dare to be frightened. If you’re new to Halloween, check out The basics of Halloween. In California, many people also celebrate  el Dia de los Muertos, as a way of remembering those who have died.

In this season of fright, my mind wanders to one of the most frightening parts of the school year for students: test time. As a teacher, I’m not a big fan of tests. Depending on how it’s written, a test may or may not be a good measure of how much you learn, and if you get particularly nervous when you take tests, a test could be downright unreliable in showing how much you’ve taken in from the class. Still, tests are part of student life, and having a strategy for studying and for taking tests is important to life as a student.

As a student, I had a system to study for tests. I gathered all my notes (concentrating on what the teacher  emphasized most in class) and took them with me on a walk around the neighborhood. As I walked, I looked at my notes, reading them over and over. During the test, I kept my pace slow and steady, to help keep calm. I never loved tests, but when I used my little system, I didn’t mind them so much.

As you get ready for midterm season, you’ll want to get your own system for studying and test-taking. Here are a few ideas:

“6 Ways to Ace Your Next Test,” by David Pierce of Hack College – This article includes some practical test prep and test taking tips, from getting enough sleep the night before the exam to studying by reading your notes out loud to yourself.

“How to Ace Essay Questions Using the Three Minute Rule,” by Study Hacks – This post is from the archives of Study Hacks, but I think it’s worth looking at even almost a year later. It focuses on essay exams, and, as someone who has read a lot of student essay exams, I love the advice Study Hacks gives on how to calm down, focus, and get the writing done in a stressful situation.

“How to Prepare for the TOEFL,” by University Language Services – The advice here is practical and may not be anything you haven’t heard already, but I think it’s still useful and worth repeating.

SPELLING

Spanish is my second language. I grew up in the middle of the country, and there weren’t many native speakers of Spanish, so as I learned Spanish, I learned from my American (English-speaking) teacher and from textbooks. I read in Spanish. I wrote in Spanish. I struggled in Spanish! Although we spoke and listened to Spanish in class, I never really heard Spanish. I learned mostly through reading and writing. The result is that while my grasp of Spanish grammar was okay, my ability to speak and listen to Spanish never really developed. If you learned English in similar circumstances, you might struggle with the courage to speak and understand spoken English.

Sometimes, though, language learners learn first by speaking and listening to English. Students who learn this way often speak and listen clearly and have a strong instinctive sense of grammar, like a native speaker would. If the speaking and listening isn’t combined with exposure to written, English, though, there can be challenges with spelling. Often, students who learn English only through speech will sound words out. This makes a lot of sense. The problem is that much of written English and spelling doesn’t make sense.

If spelling is a big challenge for you, the solution is to listen and read along as someone reads out loud. This way, you’ll be able to put together the sounds of the words with the spelling. Thankfully, there are tools that can help with this. You can get audiobooks (either downloaded from a website like Audible.com or through your local library, for free). Get an unabridged version of the audiobook — and also get a written copy. When you read, listen to the book at the same time. This will help train your eyes and ears to work together.

TEACHER JOURNAL

This week, I taught a little workshop at my school on study skills. I talked with students about keeping a calendar, staying organized, beating procrastination, and using strategies when reading tough material. Study skills are one of my favorite topics to talk about with students, because it deals with the phyical realities of everyday life. I love learning about where and how students study (with friends? in a library?), and I love hearing about how students keep information close at hand for classes. These details, I think, can have a pretty big effect on the workload you’re able to tackle, your stress levels, and the quality of your work.

If you land on a website or article while doing research, how do you know it’s a good source? In the ’90s, we might have been able to judge a website by how professional it looked (cool photos and nice fonts), but today, anyone can set up a website that looks at least decent. It also might seem that, if the writing on a site sounds official — or if it seems to have what you need, the information must be good, but this isn’t necessarily a good measure either. There are a few things you can look at, however, to know whether the source you’re using is reliable:

Step 1: Look at the author — Look for a person or organization taking responsibility for the article. If there is nobody taking responsibility for the information, be wary of it!

Step 2: Look to see what expertise the author has.  Look for degrees, titles, other past experience. If you’re on a website, you can click the “about us” link (if there is one). You can also Google the person’s name and see what pops up. A degree doesn’t automatically make a person a reliable source, but it can be an indicator.

Step 3: See if you can make a good guess about what motivations the author might have for writing the article. If the author is a politician up for re-election, his motives might be to get votes. If he’s selling vitamins, he might have written the article to get you to buy medicine. If he’s writing as an educator or in a journal, he might just be trying to educate. Think a little about the author’s possible motivations. If someone wants to sell something or get votes, this motivation could influence the information.

Step 4: Where is the article published? If you found the article on a friend’s MySpace page, you’ll probably look at it differently than if you found it on your library’s database.

Looking at these four things can help you weed out a surprising number of articles that are biased or may not be reliable sources of information. Try it, and see how it goes?

PROOFREADING

As I’m writing this, my desk is covered in eraser dust. A thick dictionary sits in front of the computer, and two red pens are somewhere  in here, probably under a stack of papers. I’ve been proofreading.

I worked a freelance proofreading job this weekend, helping to prepare a magazine for print. As a proofreader, I had to bust out the red pen (something I never use when commenting on student papers), read oh-so-carefully, and look for anything I could that was out of place. I had to be picky. I had to be tough with grammar. I had to catch all mistakes. Here’s how I handled the project:

• I worked in a quiet room, a place without any interruptions
• I worked at my own pace and gave myself plenty of time for breaks. When my eyes went a little buggy, when I got tired, or when I saw myself losing my concentration, I would take a rest for at least 15 minutes. Proofreading does not work well when you’re sleepy or unfocused.
• When I had a doubt about spelling, rules of formatting, or punctuation, I stopped and researched to find the answer. I kept a dictionary, a formatting guide, and the internet handy to look up anything I needed (no Facebook breaks were allowed!).
• I proofed each page 2-3 times. It’s amazing how your mind can focus on different things with each reading.

At the end of a weekend of careful reading, I have to say that it can be satisfying to check all the commas and to catch all the misplaced modifiers. It’s the same kind of feeling I get when I clean a closet, organize bookshelves, or tidy stacks of papers. Still, I know that proofreading is often one of the most frustrating parts of writing for students.

Here are a few ideas to help:

• Try reading your paper out loud. Reading out loud forces you to slow down, and you’ll often notice mistakes that you might otherwise miss.
• Have a friend read your paper out loud with you. If your friend stumbles on a sentence, there might be something that you want to edit.
• Look at each sentence separately. Sometimes, it helps to read the last sentence first, then the second-to-last sentence, and so on. This will help you focus on grammar, rather than the ideas you wrote about.
• Separate the processes of revision and proofreading. Revision is when you analyze your ideas and look for places to expand or clarify your thoughts. Proofreading is when you look at your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Do this separately from thinking about your ideas. You’ll do a better job at both revision and proofreading.

With a little less rushing and a few tips, proofreading isn’t so bad. I promise. It can even be a little fun.

TEACHER JOURNAL

It’s been a busy week. In addition to the proofreading, I visited the opening of an art show that featured portraits of people in Los Angeles who are car-free. The show, Without a Car in the World, opened on Saturday at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and photos were taken by photographer (and all-round amazing person) Diane Meyer. If you look at the photos carefully, you might find one of me in the mix. I was a little shy about the whole ordeal, but it’s pretty inspiring to see the stories of other people who live in a car-centric world without owning a car.

Once, when I assigned a research paper in class, one student said that he wanted to do his research paper on research papers. “I want to know if it’s possible to still have a social life while writing a research paper,” he said. It is possible, of course, but I think the trick is to be savvy about the way you approach your research. Last week, we talked about generating a keyword list. This week, I want to talk about where to find (or, more importantly, where not to find) your research.

When I suggest doing research, most students gravitate toward Google. We all know about Google. It’s familiar. It’s friendly. It has a cute logo that changes with the holidays — and it seems like the easiest way to get fast search results. When it comes to an academic research paper, though, Google is not necessarily your best ally.

When you type a keyword into Google, you’ll get any website that has that word mentioned. If you type in “international student,” for example, you’ll get sites with scholarship info, with cultural advice, travel information, medical insurance quotes, and people trying to sell student loans to international students. You’ll get information for American students who are studying around the globe and for students who are studying in the United States. You’ll get all sorts of stuff — because Google doesn’t discriminate. Google’s search engine searches for any website that has the keywords you type into the search box, and it searches all types of websites:

.com, .net, .biz - .com stands for commercial websites. Websites that end with .com, .net, or .biz are businesses. These sites often (but not always) exist to make money.

.edu – .edu stands for education websites. These are usually colleges or universities.

.gov – .gov stands for government websites. These are websites created by the US government.

.org – .org stands for organization websites. These are often non-profit organizations.

When you search in Google, you’ll get any of these websites in your search results. You could also get results from blogs, from twitter, and from people’s myspace pages. This means that, when you get 10,000 search results, you’ll have to wade through all the mess to find articles that qualify as academic research.

One alternative is Google Scholar — a search engine that Google created just for people doing academic research. Google Scholar is great. It weeds out all those .com  and .biz websites, so the results you get in your searches are solid websites with solid information. The downside of Google Scholar is that often, your search results will take you to a website that asks you to pay $2 or $5 to read the article. If you’re doing a couple of research papers, paying for all your research can get expensive. Plus, it’s likely that your school already has paid for access to this article, through your school’s library.

Most colleges and universities spend big bucks to give you access to databases that have all the articles that you could find on Google Scholar (and probably many more). It might take a little while to get used to using these databases, but once you do, it’s not all that different from using Google. You type in your words, and you look at your results. Unlike Google, though, you won’t have to go through all sorts of irrelevant sites when looking for your articles. You’ll be able to refine your search to get exactly what you want — and you’ll be able to know that your results will include articles that will make your teachers proud.

GRAMMAR: SYNTAX

Syntax is English-teacher lingo for sentence structure — how you put your sentences together. Each language has its own rules for syntax. In English, for example, we put the adjective before the noun. I might talk about a green bicycle. In Spanish, the adjective comes after the noun: bicicleta verde (bicycle green). Sometimes, differences that you’ll notice in syntax from your native language to English are relatively small (like the adjective-noun order above). Other times, using your native structure with English could prevent your listener from understanding what you’re trying to say. Sentence structure is important. You could argue that it structures the way we think, so sentences that follow an unfamiliar structure can be difficult to decode. If your native language has a syntax that’s very different from English, you’ll want to look carefully at the ways that English sentences are constructed.

As with any grammar challenge, I want to encourage you not to focus on memorizing the rules of English sentence structure — but to build these rules as habits. When it comes to sentence structure, this means reading and listening to English as much as possible. Our goal is not to get you to be able to recite the definition of a subordinate clause or participial phrase — but to use them naturally, without having to think too much about it. The way to do this is through lots of reading and listening.

If you’d like to understand the basic structure of English language first — or if you’re a particularly visual learner, you might take a look at how people diagram sentences. Basically, sentence diagramming is something English teachers used to teach in every American classroom thirty years ago (American kids don’t learn it in school anymore). When you want to see how a sentence is put together in English, looking at a diagram can help. You can find some very basic sentence diagrams here – and if you’re interested, you can see how people have diagrammed President Obama’s (much more complicated) sentences here.

TEACHER JOURNAL

Our fall quarter began this week, and the halls at my school were full of new students. I love the start of a new quarter. For teachers, this new beginning means preparing a syllabus and learning the names of new students.

I don’t blog much about it here, but over a year ago, I was inspired to make my life more environmentally friendly, and I sold my car in favor of a bicycle. I had a bicycle that was about as old as I am, and I dusted it off and began using it to commute around school. Over the past month, I’ve had a series of problems with it. I bent the frame. I got a flat tire. Despite the amazing bicycle repair place in my neighborhood, Bikerowave, I just couldn’t get the bike working well again. This week, I finally got a new bicycle, and I’ve been cycling to work in style with it.

Last week, we talked about using your school’s library — not just to get a quick snooze in between classes but to help get a jump start on your research papers. This week, I’d like to talk about one of the first steps in doing the research. Once you have a topic and are ready to begin, you’ll want to find some research.

Before you start using the library database or hopping online to find articles, it’s worth your time to start a keyword list. Keywords are the words you’ll use when searching for information, whether you’re searching with your library’s database or online. Often, I’ll see students start a search by typing in the first words that come to mind. This makes sense, right? The problem comes when no results appear, and we assume that there’s no information on the topic. “I think I have to change my topic,” a student will say. “There’s just nothing written about my topic.” Some students will change their topics three or even four times because of problems like this. There’s a much easier way!

When doing database research, it’s all about getting the right keywords. Library databases use keywords and subject terms to locate the articles. If you happen to use words that the database doesn’t use very often, your search will come up with limited information or even without any information — even if there are tons of articles on your topic.

The trick is to generate a list (a real list that you write down, not a list that you keep in your head!) of keywords before you sit down to the computer. When your first keyword doesn’t work, try other words on your list. Also, as you’re searching in the database, you’ll keep building and adding to your keyword list. You do this by noticing which subject terms the computer uses for articles that you generate in your searches. Most databases will have a list of subject terms. If you see one that’s not on your keyword list, add it. Sometimes, you’ll be surprised at the strange words the database uses for your topic. Keep a list, and you’ll be able to find quality research faster and with a lot less work!

Also, I think it’s worth repeating that you can always ask a librarian for help with your keyword list. Librarians work with databases every day, and they might have ideas about what words will find the best results.