Blog Post #10 – First Overall Impressions

I may come back and revise this later, but for now I wanted to get some things out of my mind so I could study for my lab quizzes tomorrow and maybe get some sleep.

First of all, I totally wrote about the wrong First Impression back in the middle of the month. I wrote about Williams, not S&W. I only cracked open S&W tonight and ok, I love this book. I like how it breaks things down into basic topics and gives pretty clear and fairly concise guidelines for writing. Writing is something I have always done. I consider myself to be a decent writer when I write for myself. When it comes to classroom stuff, I’m moderate. I try to use style guides because I know that I am too flowery and prosy with academic writing. S&W appeals to me because it lays things out very efficiently: Use this word, don’t use that word, this is the rule, you can do this instead. Williams, while a great resource that I will continue to use, leaves too much up to my over-active mind and can sometimes cause me to second-guess myself which puts my self-confidence in the toilet and causes REALLY bad writing. I have a hard time applying general advice specifically to something I am writing. It is a weakness that I am fully cognizant of. I work better from precise and specific feedback. Why a sentence works or why it doesn’t. Why a thought is in the wrong place. I’m not sure where it comes from or how to conquer it, but I sometimes have a very hard time analyzing my own writing.

Actually, that’s not true. I know where it comes from – writing for class at the very last minute and I can conquer that by managing my time and projects better. But I digress.

About my first impression that I posted about Williams: I do like the book and I do think it will be very useful to me as I take further writing classes. I do still believe that most definitions of bad writing are glorified snobiness and require adherence to rules that are archaic and have no real basis in grammar or language usage. Language is alive and always evolving. I’m pretty sure that the great writers of yesterday think that most authors today are total crap. However, that section aside, the rest of the book makes excellent points and offers great advice for becoming a better writer. Things that, despite my 4 years in high school and my 5+ years of college, I never learned before. I know that it’s good to always be revising your work, but I wonder if there can be such a thing as too much revision and too much rule-following? I would think that it would make for some very boring writing. Like that which can be found in the EMU Catalogs.

In short, I like each book for different reasons. I like the detail and the depth that Williams goes into and I like the quickness of S&W. Both are books that will be added to my writing arsenal and not returned to the bookstore.

Blog Post #9 – Revising the Catalog

The passage that I chose is from the EMU catalog regarding grading and transcripts, specifically pass/fail courses:

“Students also should be fully aware of the possible implications of this option for acceptance into graduate schools and competition for financial aid. It has been ascertained that most graduate schools will accept students who have elected to take some courses on a pass/fail basis, but that if courses taken on this basis are sufficient in number on the transcript, Graduate School Examinations may be utilized to determine the student’s acceptability. Graduate schools, in general, do tend to favor those applicants who have good letter grades on their transcripts.”

Talk about turgid. My Heavens. Could it be any more boring? My revision is this:

Pass/fail courses are an important part of a complete education at Eastern Michigan University. However, these courses should be chosen with a judicious eye toward the student’s final educational goals, specifically regarding admission into a Graduate program. Students who plan to apply for Graduate programs should make every attempt to choose courses for which a letter grade is issued, as letter grades for favored over pass/fail courses. If the number of pass/fail courses on a transcript is deemed excessive, Graduate School Examinations may be used to determine a student’s admission.

I changed this paragraph because I felt that right off the bat, there seemed to be no specific point addressed in the first sentence or two. I used the section on page 50 regarding psychological subjects to change the first sentence to address the fact that this passage is talking about pass/fail courses and their effect on Graduate school admissions. This point gets lost in the original, mostly because of the threatening language and boring-ness of it all. However, I did not want to lose the entire point, so I took a lot of advice from chapter three, specifically on clarity and flow. First of all, the original piece did not have much flow. It jumped from “pass/fail bad for money” to “well, Graduate schools will still admit you” and then back to “don’t take too many or your test will count more than you may want it to!” It flip flops from negative to okay back to negative again. My attempt was to make it more of a logical and cohesive statement, without using language that might freak an applicant out. Secondly, by stating the existence of pass/fail courses and why they need to be taken with care, the paragraph gets to the crux of the issue and doesn’t jam up the works with language that a potential Graduate student might freak out about. Hopefully, my changes improved the paragraph without losing the intent of informing students about the effect that pass/fail courses might have on Graduate admissions.