1. Style--It's clear to me but is it confusing to someone else (Cloudy)? Have I said the same thing the same way too many times? (Repetitive/Redundant?) Could I make my point more simply, more directly? (Wordy?/ Overly Complex & Difficult?) Am I struggling to impress my reader with my sophisticated vocabularly to the detriment of getting my point across? (Pretentious?) Am I staying within the genre conventions for the type of writing I'm doing? How does the language of a speech differ from that of an expository essay? (Departs from genre conventions?)
2. Correctness--Have I mastered the fixed, unbreakable rules for mechanics? (Punctuation, spelling, capitalization). When do I use a comma and not a semicolon? When do I capitalize a letter? Does this word need an apostrophe?
3. Diction--Am I careful about the words I choose? I think I know the meaning of that word, but do I really (precision and accuracy)? Have I made an accurate word choice? What would be a better word to use? Why would it be better? Have I used the same word too many times? (variety)
4. Structure/Usage--Do I know the rules which govern sentence structure (coordination and subordination of clauses?) and usage (agreement between subjects and verbs?, pronouns and antecedents?, verb tense and form changes?, etc.)? What makes a sentence a sentence? When does it become a non-sentence (fragment)? Do I know what the difference is between an independent and a dependent clause? Do I know the phrasal and clausal modification structure of English such as adjective and adverbial clauses, prepositional, participial, and gerund phrases? If my subject is singular, must my verb be also? If the antecedent of my pronoun is plural, must my pronoun be plural too? And what the heck is an "antecedent" anyway? Why do I keep mixing up "its" versus "it's" even though I've had God knows how many years of English instruction? Likewise for "to" versus "too" versus "two" or "their, there, and they're."
Where do these difficulties come from? Do I have a knowledge gap? OK, maybe I just don't know these rules and principles because I never learned them, so I can't be faulted for not applying them. If I have a knowledge gap, I need to get it filled in fast. I need to read my handbook. I need to do practice exercises on the web. Mr. Sheftman will give me a wee bit of help but since this is 1A he's got other things on his mind than teaching a sentence structure and grammar course. He's not going to give many formal lectures on usage, structure etc. --he did A LOT of those things in lOOB.
Maybe I know the rules but they're locked up in my brain somewhere and I've lost the key! I can't tap into my knowledge to apply it. So, I need a refresher (back to the handbook).
Or, maybe I actually know these rules but I'm not using them because I have a proofreading gap. I don't spend enough time rereading my papers with microscopic scrutiny, so I don't catch stuff like repeating the same word twice one after the other, writing "at is" instead of "it is," not putting a space between a word and the one which immediately follows it. Have I tried reading my essay aloud to myself? Have I tried reading each sentence backward? Have I tried reading with just one area in mind such as whether my finished manuscript is formatted properly?
If I'm having some difficulties in language use because English is not my first language, am I doing helpful things like keeping a log of the type of usage errors I'm making? Once I have a log, am I using it as an evaluative tool to go through my draft looking for and correcting each type of error?
Return to Mr. Sheftman's EWRT 1A Home Page
updated 9/99