How Do I Know So Much?

Okay, I know the title of this entry sounds a bit, well, arrogant, but honestly, I've had students ask me this question before. I teach Composition 1 and 2 (among other writing and literature classes), and I usually allow students to select their own topics. Allowing students to self-select topics makes them more interested in the writing and makes me more interested in reading their resulting essays (can you imagine reading 40 essays about the same topic, any topic? I can't.). It also leads the students to do better writing and thinking because they care more about the topic, perhaps even have a personal investment in the topic.

However, allowing students (mostly) free reign on topic selection means that my knowledge will be pushed to the limit. Not my knowledge of the English language or writing or research; they seem to understand that my knowledge is sufficient in those categories. No, it's things outside my degree that I know that they seem impressed by (or sometimes aggravated by).

For instance, I may have to point out to a student that she doesn't have a clear understanding about what a "bifurcated needle" is, and therefore shouldn't simply use that phrase because she saw it in a journal article about small pox without explaining it to the reader. Or I may have to explain to a student who is writing about the Berlin Wall that he hasn't capitalized the nouns properly in his all-German epigraph. Or I find myself commenting on a student's essay that organic doesn't necessarily mean healthy; rather, it is a term that indicates that the farm's processes have been certified organic by the USDA, and that some of the practices that certified farm uses may still not produce healthy (or happy) food.

So, small pox needles to capitalizing German nouns to organic food--that's quite a range. How do I know all this stuff?

The answer to that question is something that I desperately want students to understand: your education doesn't come solely from a brick building. Life is education...if you take the time to open yourself to it. And you can find education everywhere.

• Read books. Lots of them. All different kinds. I learned about the bifurcated (two-pronged) needles used to administer the smallpox vaccine in a book I read: Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic. I also learned about the Flu Pandemic of 1918, the Swine Flu debacle in the 1970s, and a potential terrorist-induced smallpox epidemic and what it would take to prevent and/or react to such an epidemic. It was a fascinating read, and I learned a lot that I had never knew before. Now, when researchers worry that the new Swine Flu might turn out to be as much a killer as the Flu of 1918, I understand what they are talking about.

• Make connections between what you learn and what you know. I've never spoken German, never visited Germany, never even known any first-generation German. So how did I know that the German language capitalizes nouns? Well, that actually comes from a class I took on History of the English Language. Our English words have been influenced by many other languages, Anglo-Saxon (a Germanic language) being one of them. It was during this class I learned that German languages capitalize nouns, so I was able to point that out to the student. But then, I connected that to a question I had always had about Early American writings. You've probably seen them--words in the middle of a sentence strangely capitalized, even though they aren't proper nouns. Have you ever wondered, like I had, about why they were capitalized? It's a holdover from the Angl0-Saxons' influence on our language. Next time you see those strange capitalizations in the works of our Early America writers, notice that they are nouns!

• Take a broad range of classes. I've heard students complain about taking a math course, or a writing course, or a statistics course, and the complaint is nearly always the same: "I'm going to be a ____________; why do I have to take this course, since it has nothing to do with my future career?" First, how do you know it won't have anything to do with your future career? What happens if you are an award-winning mathematician and you have to write an article on how you discovered the answer to a mathematical conundrum? If you don't know how to write, you'll look like a fool--in print, no less! Maybe you're going to write the Great American Espionage Novel. If you know nothing about biological warfare, how will you write convincingly of it? The point is, jump into each class and learn as much as possible. You never know when you will need that one bit of knowledge, and every bit of knowledge you glean about the world around you will only help you. Nobody ever died because they took a course that they thought was irrelevant to their future, but many students have said later they were glad they took a seeming irrelevant class, because it helped them to better understand some important concept. Your degree is designed to give you a "well-rounded education," to lead you into classes you might normally not take--and that's a very good thing!

• Soak up and research your personal experiences. As you go through life, you gain wisdom and experiences. Think about what you've learned in your life. Obviously, the older you are, the more experiences you've had to learn from. But don't just accept your experiences; learn more about them! For instance, my on-and-off battle with cancer has led me to do a lot of research about nutrition and the food we eat, which has led me to better understand what organic means--and it isn't necessarily healthy. Much depends upon how the farmer has raised the animals and grown the food, and organic only means that a certain percentage of the food has to be organically grown according to the USDA's lenient criteria. As a result of my research, I've drastically changed the way I shop for food and feed myself and my husband; I now grow my own vegetables and herbs without pesticides and herbicides, and I've become an advocate for healthy food. And, of course, I was able to help the student who was writing about organic food get clarity on the issue.

• Ask questions. You've heard the adage, "The only dumb question is the question that is never asked." So why not ask questions? We have no trouble asking them when we are children. I once babysat a young boy who was clearly in the "why" phase of his childhood. Anything that happened, anything I said, was followed by his question, "Why?" When do we lose our curiousity? Or are we just taught not to ask questions of authority figures as we grow? Slough off your concerns about "sounding dumb," "feeling stupid," "rocking the boat," and ask those questions! If your teacher uses a word you don't understand, ask him to define it for you (or look it up for yourself). If someone says something hateful to you, a great way to diffuse the situation would be to ask a question: "You seem really angry. What are you upset about? What can I do to help you?" Don't be afraid to ask your teachers or your boss why something is done a certain way, why you must use a certain citation style, why a statement is considered to be true. We learn by asking questions and receiving answers. Questions are an opportunity for you to grow. (Caveat: Tone will be really important when you ask questions. Be ever mindful of your tone.)
  

So, how do I know so much? I really don't, in the scheme of things. I have a smattering of knowledge in lots of different areas and an impulse to ask questions and research topics I don't understand. I always keep in mind the lyrics to A Piece of Sky from the Yentl soundtrack:

The more I live,
The more I learn;
The more I learn,
The more I realize
The less I know.

I'll never know everything, and I realize that I know so very little of all the knowledge available in the world. But I keep reading, making connections, taking classes, researching, and asking questions.

My Name is Kris, and I Am a Biblioholic

I have been addicted to books for as long as I can remember. Friends and family tease me about the number of books I own (well over 2,000) and call me the Home for Wayward Books. But I don't just take books in; I love to read them. Many are one-time reads; others, like The Lord of the Rings set, I have read multiple times (I lost count on LoTR at about 18).

My taste in books is eclectic; I love autobiographies, science fiction, medical essays, classics, and more. If you named a genre or subgenre, I probably have at least one book from that category on my shelves. I've actually entertained the notion of labeling my books with the Library of Congress call numbers, but so far have sublimated my OCD urge and resisted.

My love for books was a gift left to me by my mother, who died unexpectedly from an aneurysm when I was five, just after my youngest sister was born. Here's a paragraph I wrote about learning to read, included as part of a handout I created for students about writing descriptive passages:

My mother taught me to read when I was four years old, just one year before she died. I can still see the faded olive cover of the graduated primer I learned from, still feel the rough, knotty texture, still smell the musty fragrance of the book as she turned its yellowing pages. So began my love affair with books.

Actually, the primer I refer to in this passage was one of two my mother used to teach me to read. I read them over and over again, completely in love with the stories, the illustrations, and the act of reading itself. I don't know what happened to those books; most likely, they were taken to the Salvation Army with her other effects after she died, or perhaps a relative took possession of them.

I do know that I have searched for those two books for more than 20 years. Every time I go to an antique store, I seek out the old books booths and search through the children's readers. I have sought the books online, but my search has been severely hampered by the fact that I can recall neither the titles of the books nor the authors. I can only remember the stories: one book begins with a story about rabbits: "See Father rabbit. Hop, hop, hop. See Mother rabbit. Hop, hop, hop." I don't quite remember any of the other stories, nor a lot of detail about this first story. I think the family of rabbits hop into a forest at some point, but my four-year-old's memories may be mistaken.

I did stumble across the second book just a couple of weeks ago. I was visiting family in Iowa, and my youngest sister and I visited a new resale shop in the area. While my sister was trying on clothes, I popped next door to the vintage book store. The shop had a couple of sections of children's readers and, as usual, I started pulling them off the shelves, one by one, and thumbing through them. Suddenly, I spied one that seemed familiar. (But after a while, they all seem familiar.) I opened it up to a story about the Gingerbread Man . . . and recognized the illustration! Immediately, I wondered whether this reader was indeed the second book I had hoped to find, the book with the story about the old woman whose pig wouldn't jump over the stile. I turned to the table of contents, and saw "The Old Woman and the Pig" listed! Nearly holding my breath, I turned to the story, and it was the story I remember, and the illustrations were like old friends. I had forgotten much, and yet just looking at these unique illustrations by Frederick Richardson lifted my spirits.

The book cost $20 plus tax, but was well worth it. The book is purely for sentimental purposes--I don't have any children to teach to read, but it is a connection to my mother as well as a symbol of how important reading is to me. I am still hoping to find the other reader with the rabbit story. If you have information about this book--title, author, etc.--please leave a comment!

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Grammar Police: Our Duty is to Serve...Not to Serve Time

As regular readers of Professorial Musings will have noted, I'm appalled by the terrible typos, problematic punctuation, and grammatical gaffes that appear in ads, business documents, and on public signs. A colleague and friend of mine sent me a link today to an April 7, 2008, article on Gimundo titled "Man Drives Cross-Country, Correcting Typos." Apparently, 28-year-old college graduate Jeff Deck is touring America, correcting grammar as he goes.

He's my kind of guy. (Just a little young.)

He's doing what I've always dreamed of doing--correcting public grammar goofs so people don't mistakenly think that the mistake is the reality. While I admire his enthusiasm for the project, though, lessons learned in childhood conflict with my desire to make public people's mistakes:

1. Don't deface other's people's property. My siblings and I were taught to treat other people's property with respect. Clearly, marking up people's signs--especially in a permanent way--is defacing property. It's quite possibly even punishable as a misdemeanor or felony, depending upon the value of what is defaced.
   
   
   
2. Don't point out when other people are being stupid. This is a hard lesson for me to adhere to sometimes, and I'll admit that this blog occasionally pokes at people who haven't proofread very well. But to physically mark up a sign so that everyone can see the mistake, well, that's equivalent to posting a neon sign that says Stupid Works Here. And frankly, it isn't stupidity that causes people to make grammatical and other mistakes; it's usually simple ignorance of the rules. Why not find a positive way to instruct people instead of making people look stupid for not knowing or understanding the rules? Even people who work with language every day make mistakes and need to look up the occasional rule.
   

I will admit to having thought about correcting signs or offering unsolicited lectures about grammar. For example, it's difficult for me to walk through the vendor area at a craft fair and not stop to explain why the wood-burned house plaques should read The Smiths instead of The Smith's. Instinct cries out These errors must be corrected! Save our children from improper apostrophe usage! But I avoid that dark side and simply refrain from buying an improperly apostrophe-d plaque.

I did, however, relapse about a week ago. My roommate and I were dining in a local Mexican restaurant where I noticed that the whiteboard near the front counter announced the evening's Special's. As we walked up to the counter to pay our separate bills, I made my roommate go first in order to distract the employee at the register while I snuffed out the apostrophe.

At least I didn't deface their property, and removing the offending apostrophe only made them look smarter.

Dare I Try Their Services?

In my composition classes, I talk with my students about professional presentation: how they present themselves on the page will cause the reader to perceive them in a certain way. If their essays don't follow the conventional format or are chock full of sentence-level errors, the writers lose credibility with the reader.

I wish someone would talk with advertisers about this issue. I can't recall where I saw this advertisement recently--it may have been in Facebook. Read carefully and guess what went wrong:

Over Thirty Singles: It's not hard to meet people, it's hard to meet the right type. Our screening process will works. Let us find you someone special.

Ads like this one make me cringe. I don't even have to be reading them; the errors act like magnets, drawing my eyes to the text despite my best efforts to avoid the ads. Were you able to spot the errors?

First, the reader must struggle to decide whether Over Thirty Singles is a boast that more than 30 single people are available for dating through this service or whether the ad is attempting to gain the attention of an audience whose age is higher than 30. Since having more than 30 people available for dating isn't much of a boast, I'm going to guess that the company means the latter, in which case a hyphen is needed to show that Over-Thirty is a compound adjective that describes Singles. Adding the hyphen--Over-Thirty Singles--reduces the confusion.

Second, the comma splice in the first sentence is troubling. I know that advertisers often play hard-and-fast with punctuation rules since space is money in the industry, but honestly, what would it have hurt to convert the improper comma to a proper semicolon? A comma splice occurs when a comma is improperly used to join two complete ideas that could stand alone as sentences. In this case, the ideas on each side of the comma could stand alone: "It's not hard to meet people" and "It's hard to meet the right type." But commas don't complete ideas. To fix the comma splice, a period could be used to make two complete sentences, a comma with a conjunction could be used ("It's not hard to meet people, but it's hard to meet the right type"), or a semi-colon could be used ("It's not hard to meet people; it's hard to meet the right type"). I advocate for a semi-colon in this instance, since semi-colons are used to join two complete ideas that are related--and these two sentences are related. So people, why can't the advertiser just replace the comma with a semi-colon?

Finally, the penultimate sentence states "Our screening process will works," clearly adding an s unnecessarily to work. Which leads the reader to wonder whether the screening process truly will work, given the fact that the advertiser's error-screening process apparently doesn't.

Have you come across any ads recently that make you cringe? Please share them!

One Space after Closing Punctuation. Period.

Today I get to put on my "picky English teacher" hat. To adapt a Seinfeld phrase, this is a blog entry about...nothing. Just dead air after punctuation marks.

I am always amazed when I am working on formatting issues with my students and I mention to them that they should have just one space after a period, not two. Alas, the consternation! The heavy sighs, the panicked looks, the livid faces! Generally, someone will say, "But my other English teacher said we should have TWO spaces after a period."

I'm always tempted to say, "But is your other English teacher giving you a grade for this class?"

Instead, though, I work to smooth over ruffled feathers. You see, people really don't like change, and students like change least of all. And when you start messing with their spaces after punctuation, well, you have a potential mutiny on your hands. Yes, they're right. The rule USED to be two spaces after a colon, a period, and other closing punctuation marks. However, now it's one space.

Why only one space? The publishing industry is partly to blame. In publishing, space is money, and an extra space after each closing punctuation mark is wasted space--and therefore, wasted money.

Additionally, PCs have to take part of the blame. Remember the old Courier font? Well, each letter of the Courier font takes up the same amount of space--for example, an i and an m would each take up the same amount of space--so we needed two spaces after the period in order to be better able to recognize where one sentence stopped and the next began. Now, however, we have proportional-spacing fonts, which means that each letter takes up only the amount of space it needs--an i takes up less space than an m, and therefore one space after a period is sufficient.

Bill Walsh, copy chief at The Washington Post's National Desk, discusses the spacing issue in the first chapter of his book The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English:

Are you still putting two spaces after periods, exclamation points, question marks and colons? You shouldn't be. Some places are still clinging to this typewriter convention, no doubt, but as a standard operating procedure it went out with the IBM Selectric. (3)

If you're a student, however, you're perhaps more interested in what your particular citation format handbook has to say. Here is a rundown of a few of the more commonly used citation styles:

APA Style, from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 15th ed. (2001), p. 290

5.11 Spacing and Punctuation
Space once after all punctuation as follows:

• after commas, colons, and semicolons;
• after punctuation marks at the ends of sentences;
• after periods that separate parts of a reference citation; and
• after the periods of the initials in personal names (e.g., J. R. Zhang).
  

Exception: Do not space after internal periods in abbreviations (e.g., a.m., i.e., U.S.) or around colons in ratios.

CMS Style, from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (2003), p. 61

2.12 Line spacing and word spacing.
A single character space, not two spaces, should be left after periods at the ends of sentences (both in manuscript and in final, published form) and after colons.

Turabian Style, from A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., p. 375

A.1.3 Spacing and Indentation
Put only one space, not two, following the terminal punctuation of a sentence.

MLA Style, from MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (2003), pp. 93-94

3.2.12 Spacing after Concluding Punctuation Marks
Publications in the United States today usually have the same spacing after a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point as between words on the same line. Since word processors make available the same fonts used by typesetters for printed works, many writers, influenced by the look of typeset publications, now leave only one space after a concluding punctuation mark. In addition, most publisher's guidelines for preparing a manuscript on disk ask professional authors to type only the spaces that are to appear in print. [. . . ] [I]nternal punctuation marks, such as a colon, a comma, and a semicolon, should always be followed by one space.

I deal with MLA format last because although the other formats require one space after closing punctuation, MLA is a little, well, forgiving:

As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor requests that you do otherwise. (94)

And I say, come now, MLA! What gives?

I suspect that the Modern Language Association is catering to the traditionalists who can't break the habit (or simply aren't willing to) of typing two spaces after a period; therefore, the MLA Handbook offers them a one-sentence license to forgo industry and academic standards. Is it any wonder my students complain that their other English teacher did things differently?

Bottom line: One space after closing punctuation. Period.

To Boldly Split What No One Has Split Before...

Space: The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission:
To explore strange, new worlds,
To seek out new life and new civilizations,
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
--Captain James T. Kirk

I confess--I'm a Star Trek fan. I have attended small-venue conventions and met cast members from all the Star Trek series except Enterprise. But you don't want to hear those stories. You want to hear what Star Trek has to do with language.

Well, it's all about the split infinitive. In my previous blog, Grammar "Policies" Masquerading as "Rules," I indicated that avoiding split infinitives is what I would consider a grammar policy, not a hard-and-fast rule. And the Star Trek prologue noted above doesn't just split an infinitive--it does so boldly.

An infinitive, simply put, is the to form of a verb: to run, to spit, to go, to laugh...you get the picture. When an infinitive is split, an adverb is inserted between the to and the verb--in our Star Trek example, to boldly go is a split infinitive, with the adverb boldly inserted between the two halves of the verb to and go.

The problem is that the grammar we have such a love/hate relationship with derives from Latin, which was once thought to be THE language. Our grammarians thus tried to organize the structure of English to replicate the elegance of Latin.

But Latin does not have infinitives in the way we think of them, and therefore it was impossible to split them! Since Latin had no split infinitives, our grammarians decided that English shouldn't have them, either. As a result, avoiding split infinitives has been considered a rule by grammar purists; however, good reasons exist for using split infinitives. Don't get me wrong--I don't advocate splitting infinitives just for the sake of splitting them or splitting them unthinkingly. You should have a purpose for splitting them. Know the grammar policy before you bend it!

Acceptable reasons for splitting infinitives include

• Emphasizing how something is done. When an infinitive is split, the emphasis rests on the word doing the splitting. In to boldly go, boldly receives the emphasis--since it is an interruptive force in the verb--but isn't that the point of the phrase? It isn't enough to go where no man has gone before--one should do it boldly!
  
  
• Avoiding confusion. Sometimes, not splitting an infinitive leads to misplaced modifiers or other confusing problems. For example, "Joe decided to quickly move for a vote," where quickly splits the infinitive to move, means that Joe moved for the vote quickly after making the decision to do so. If we were to avoid splitting the infinitive and move the adverb quickly to a different place in the sentence, the meaning of the sentence changes. For instance, "Joe quickly decided to move for a vote" means that he made the decision quickly, but not that the motion for the vote was quick. Why avoid splitting an infinitive only to end up with a sentence that doesn't say what you mean?

One caveat: if your English instructor or your company style manual indicates that splitting infinitives should be avoided at all costs, it's smart to follow their guidance. But at least you can take secret delight in knowing that splitting infinitives is sometimes acceptable. And we can thank Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, for showing us how to boldly split them!

Grammar Policies Masquerading as Rules

As a college English professor, I find that many students come to the classroom full of grammar "rules" that they have been admonished to live by. Clearly traumatized by the blood-red ink on their essays and by indecipherable abbreviations such as awk scribbled in said pen blood, these students are greatly surprised when I tell them that it's okay to, say, split an infinitive. This surprise is quickly followed by wide-eyed panic as students leap to the conclusion that either their tight-bunned English schoolmarms of yesteryear lied to them or that my summer sausage has completely fallen off my cracker.

I suppose I see English teachers residing on a continuum: At one extreme are what I call the grammar purists (instructors who are unforgiving of broken--or even slightly bent--grammar "rules," no matter how nonsensical or archaic); at the other extreme, grammar organicists (instructors who see grammar as a language structure that changes and develops as society changes the language). In other words, a purist would scarcely survive being in a room where someone says, "It just ain't right," whereas an organicist wouldn't even blink an eye at the contraction that has been in the language since the early 1700s. A language purist would experience a massive coronary if her child said, "And I went, 'you're so lame,'" whereas an organicist would understand that went is youth-speak for said.

I see myself as a sort of grammar moderate, falling between the two extremes, probably because I recognize that since our grammar is essentially a language structure imposed upon English from Latin, it doesn't always work as well as it should. In fact, if one adheres strictly to grammar rules, we would all be walking around saying things like "A grammar handbook is something without which one cannot be." Come again? Adhering strictly to grammar rules often leads to difficult-to-interpret sentences, awkward phrasing, and unlovely language. I recognize that sometimes it is better to bend the grammar "rules" (or at times, break them) in order to achieve clarity, special emphasis, or just be able to hold a normal conversation with an audience without seeming overly formal. Additionally, language is organic--it changes over time--and therefore the grammar rules we once lived with may be a bit outdated.

So, by now you are probably wondering why I've been writing "rules" in quotation marks. I've done that because many purists will teach students grammar "rules" when what they are really teaching them are grammar policies--or rather, policies of style--designed to create clarity and help students avoid more serious grammatical problems.

For example, one grammar policy that is often promoted as a "rule" is that one shouldn't begin a sentence with the words and or but. And yet, one can begin a sentence with and or but that is grammatically correct--as I have done in this sentence. But English teachers have a reason for instituting this policy: following this policy prevents students from writing certain kinds of fragmented sentences, such as

Outside, it was raining. And snowing.

The second sentence isn't really a sentence at all--it's a sentence fragment, and should be combined with the first sentence:

Outside, it was raining and snowing.

Because instructors teach such policies as "rules," students avoid committing these grammatical sins, only to find in college that some of their instructors (although not all) encourage them to break the rules. It doesn't mean their previous English instructors were bad, or wrong, or even out to get them; rather, it was a way to ensure that the students stopped committing grammatical suicide.

Here are a few grammar policies that my students have faunched over:

• Never begin a sentence with and or but.
• Never split an infinitive.
• Never dangle your participles.

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Have you been taught certain grammar "rules," only to find out later that they were actually policies? Share your story! Or, if you have a grammar question, feel free to post that, too. You never know--I might actually do a complete post about it!