Advice for Incoming Students - Inside Higher Ed

Advice for Incoming Students - Inside Higher Ed

ENG 110 APA Reference and Format Information

ENGLISH 110 Student Information
Watch the following helpful videos to learn more about APA formatting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls3iVprG010&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls3iVprG010&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwte1ntB2gA&feature=related

ENGLISH 110 Student Information

Anotherhelpful videos to learn more about APA formatting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_320539&v=9pbUoNa5tyY&feature=iv

High, Middle, and Low Styles

Richard Lanham in Analyzing Prose describes high style as writing that uses Latinate diction, patterms such as isocolon, chiasmus or parallelism, and other noticeable forms. He describes middle style,"see-through" writing (p. 185)that can also be contrived, as perhaps an ideal type of writing. He describes low style as language that deals with facts and that uses down-home Anglo-Saxon diction.

The book chapter that I edited in ENG 5365 used a rather low style of writing. There were few graceful turns of phrase and many grammatical errors and redundant sentences. I perceived that certain sections might have been copied from a how-to manual. The topics discussed ranged from storage of student portfolios to what computer resources would be needed. No word plays, no repetition, and no alliteration provided rhetorical interest. I spent my time improving clarity and making suggestions on removing jargon and clumsy phrases.

The Lure of the Dark Side of the Web

*What is the dark side of the Web, and how does it play into your paper about style and technology?*

The web offers many lures for those of weak character. These lures include hitching posts for pedophiles and neo-Nazis, pornography for faithless spouses, and scholarly research for the unscholarly.

The issue of unscholarly research is pertinent to my work as a composition instructor. Unscholarly research is tied in to my term project on ways to use technology to improve instruction for today's college students. Despicable websites such as studentoffortune.com are a daily reminder to first-year composition instructors that students who are unprepared for college often succumb to the lure of cheat sites that offer term papers and class assignments for sale. Students sell their assignments for a few dollars to future students. Plagiarism checkers fail to find these assignments as they are not published on the web. Students can graduate from freshman English with the same deficient skills they entered with.

Technological solutions and skill development are the only answers to bring students back from the dark side. My college has developed software that requires students to submit every piece of writing into a database at the time it is posted for grading. If a second student submits the same piece, a plagiarism flag will alert the instructor, and sanctions can be applied. The plagiarism checker works simultaneously with grammar and style-checking tools. As cheating generally occurs because students are unprepared for college, it can be reduced by skills instruction and sophisticated detection techniques.

Think about all you've read in Baron, Lanham, and Williams--as well as the presentations and discussions you've seen. Define style (again). And, list out as many elements of style as you can.


Style at the most basic level is a series of suggested rules that allow writers to compose clear and graceful prose. Style, conversely, can be expressed by breaking rules. A confident rule-breaker can begin sentences with “And” or “But” and throw off a rule that serves no purpose. Style for mature writers, therefore, is a series of choices that allow them to achieve a specified purpose in communicating with a given audience. Stylistic choices must be made in the areas of:
• Cohesion
• Concision
• Correctness
• Elegance/Gracefulness
• Eloquence
• Emphasis
• Metaphor
• Person
• Repetition
• Rhythm
• Symmetry/Shape
• Transparency/Opaqueness
• Voice

Writing style changes from discipline to discipline, and evolves from one time period to the next. Lanham notes that visual conventions differ in scholarly books from popular books, and in scientific treatises versus Victorian texts. He further notes that a writer can produce text converted into shape, in imagistic self-consciousness. Texts may be transparent; texts may be ornamental; writers in their stylistic choices create texts that convey ideas, emotions, and content.

"A Better Pencil" and Style

Dennis Barron explores the development of writing tools. As someone who has been involved in publishing since 1976, I found it fascinating to see my personal history appear in his book, A Better Pencil.
Baron shows how pencil writing was supplemented but never surpassed by typewriting. For many years, I used pencils and typewriters side by side. I chose to write personal letters, invitations to parties, and condolence letters by hand; I used an electric typewriter to prepare book manuscripts and transcriptions of the dictation of my boss, the editor of U.S. News & World Report (a writer who was scared of all technology except his dictation machine and ancient manual typewriter). All of my work was one-of-a-kind; my less fortunate colleagues struggled to format mag card Selectrics to mindlessly produce form letters. We had “a better pencil” with automated typewriters, but few used them. At least mag card typists didn’t have to hit ENTER at the end of each line.

I earned my way through grad school by typing 60 words per minute with two errors. I had to type letters at least three times each to produce an error-free product. It took me 18 tries to type one letter addressed simply to “The White House, Washington, D.C.” You couldn’t send the President a letter with Wite-Out on it.

As typewriters hung on, calculators had begun to replace the slide rule/pencil calculations that we had done through high school. They were definitely better than pencils but were too expensive for me to buy even as an MBA student. I was a whiz with a pencil and a financial table. Excel, the best pencil of all, was still in the future.

I finished my MBA and found a job at a computer retailer, Entre Computer Systems. In 1982, I was sitting pretty with my $10,000 IBM PC, but at night, my eyes would burn and I would lay in bed with a washcloth to sooth the eyestrain from the terrible screen of this computer. I hated memorizing formatting codes, and I also hated the slow buffers that made keyboarding laborious. Colleagues edited nonstop simply because they could. I distinctly remember one colleague endlessly looping 26 drafts of an annual report across my desk. PCs didn’t yet replace pencils as we didn’t know how to use them efficiently.

We couldn’t get much use out of PCs until the development of email. Now emails are ubiquitous, even for personal letters and even, horrifyingly, often for sympathy notes. Definitely a more efficient pencil, albeit sometimes an ineffective one as it allowed us to use technology to avoid personal contact. Not only personal contact, but personalized style--the choice of color schemes and tactile images—took a back seat. When PCs stopped crashing, managers and writers couldn’t exist without them.

Pencils finally disappeared out of my purse as the iTouch arrived. I was no longer humiliated hunting for a piece of paper when my electronic address book was at hand. Like the Blackberry, iPhones with their tiny keyboards suit texting colleagues who use pre-keyed replies and forget that we capitalize “I” in our language. One could spend all day playing with digital tools: pens that record and digitize motions are sold next to tablet computers that generate prose; although I’ve never actually touched either of these, they may change our language in ways unknown.

Our Online Learning Systems change education as facilitated tutorials replace professors’ lectures. The Internet crowd-sources term paper research; ghost writers in Pakistan prepare term papers for my students who are too busy facebooking to write their own essays; British spellings tell the tale. All of these tools are designed to feed the omnivorous screen that devours many of our waking hours.

The style of our writing and the tools we use are changing rapidly, too rapidly for some. I still have students who hit ENTER at the end of each line in WORD. When I see a page of green squiggly lines, I know I’ve found another technophobe. I cannot imagine how long it takes keyboarders to line up all those sentences when they add a word to a long paragraph.

For my project this term, I’d like to study how to present style in English education. Specifically, I’d like to look at the best technological tools and pedagogical approaches for teaching the principles of style to students who rarely read, those who engage more fully with presentations than with style manuals. I’d like to study some innovative ways of engaging students in communications classes. I’d like to figure out how best to teach the articulate Rip Van Winkle middle-agers now entering college who still hit ENTER at the end of each line, and I’d like to learn how best to teach clear and graceful writing to the technowhizzes whose writing needs stylistic help.

Reference
Baron, D. (2009). A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.