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.

Elegance in Technical Communications

For a technical writer or editor, elegance is inextricably linked with clarity in written communications. Elegance incorporates both content and style. An elegant communications piece both informs and maintains a reader's attention through its attention to sentence balance, coordination, and word choice. In certain situations, an elegant piece will be rhetorically sophisticated, with nominalizations providing ballast. In other situations, an elegant piece will be technologically sophisticated, with hypertextual opportunities to extend a conversation. Most importantly a sense of purpose, audience and content will govern the approach taken in choosing a stylized, or elegant, approach to writing.

Style and Language Evolution

Gina Fish

ENG 5365

February 9, 2010

Dr. Rich Rice



Style and Language Evolution

Technology has made writers of us all. At my first job in magazine publishing in the 1970s, 10 poker-faced copy editors and 20 skilled secretaries hammered out the errors from everyone’s bad prose. These ancient editors ruled using arcane rules from style manuals that never changed. A young editorial assistant took at least a decade to apprentice onto the copy desk. Suddenly, into the newsroom came the industry’s first publishing software: ATEX. Life in the newsroom changed forever as we traded in our Selectrics for computers. Technology shaped our editing and writing immeasurably.

Fast forward several decades into the internet age. Copy editors seem to have disappeared, and few secretaries are around to massage executive communication. Workplaces have evolved, and there are fewer layers of review involved as hierarchies flatten. From the number of errors that appear in metropolitan dailies or in the Wall Street Journal, we can deduce that writers input stories directly into publications without editing. Bloggers scoop news outlets to attract followers who admire their content, style, and currency. A premium is placed on writing gracefully and clearly. Writers use style rules that suit them, and they ignore rules that don’t. With crowd sourcing freed from stilted and arcane rules in an interconnected world, the English language changes at an accelerated rate.

Communicators who adapt to a hypertextual world are prospering as they learn how to appeal to audiences stylistically. Writing clearly and gracefully has traditionally come to those who grew up reading good books. Unfortunately, however, many of our tech-savvy children rarely read, and therefore a significant group come to college and struggle with writing. These students present a challenge to instructors who are astounded at their lack of knowledge of their own language. It is difficult to describe the grace of elegant prose to those who don’t read; it is even more difficult to prescribe grammar rules to those who have rarely heard clear speech. Literacy segregates our society. Teaching the fundamentals of style takes on a new urgency to prepare members of our society for technological forms that are still developing. Clarity and cohesion are more important than ever.

As Richard Lanham notes, style is not peripheral, but rather “choreographs the whole dance of human consciousness, a dance in which practical purpose and information play but one role” (2003, p.8). Seen in this light, we recognize our English language as organic beauty rather than historic artifact. We know that styles that developed over time will continue to change as language evolves in a changing society. While the impact of technology upon style has been widely documented, less attention has been paid to an equally important demographic shift that will alter our language in ways yet unknown.

A fisheye-lens view of the English language in America would capture divergent Indian Asian diction among our programmers, black vernacular dialect in our hip-hop, and Latinate forms sparring with satisfying Anglo-Saxon words everywhere else. Our language at any given time reflects where we came from long ago and who joined us recently. The widely documented changes in publishing technology may not change our language as much as the immense demographic shift America is now experiencing. While we are dazzled with technology, we must also examine social change. We cannot overlook a group whose impact will contribute to the next great change in the style of our language.

A number of states, including my own state of Florida, are experiencing surges in the growth of the Latina/o population. In a recent five-year period, we had a 36% increase in our Latin/o population (New Strategist, 2007). As most composition instructors do not share the culture of students from Mexico, Honduras, Peru or Cuba (merely 4.5% of us are Latina/o (New Strategist, 2007)), we are already experiencing in our classrooms the impact of this demographic shift, and we are a bit bewildered about how to integrate biculturalism into our composition programs. By the year 2015, Latinas/os will make up the majority school-age population in several states (Durran and Weffer, 1992). Some college composition classes in my state already are being taught in two languages with students taught to brainstorm in Spanish and write in English.

Many of these students immigrated as adults. The work of adults who think in Spanish and write in English will inevitably echo their native tongue. With enormous demographic changes, writing as “a social practice” Correa (2008, p. 1), will change stylistically. Most notably, immigrants and native-born second-language writers from Latin American countries will contribute to evolution in vocabulary and sentence structure just as ancient conquerors changed our language.

Few of “us” are knowledgeable about the ways in which Latinas/os think or write. As the population continues to grow and Latinas/os enter our colleges in increasing numbers, our vocabulary will be enriched by additional choices. Think, for instance, about the words that have made their way into our language to express concepts we hadn’t thought about: mestizo, taquito, machismo and albino. Webster’s suggests that we had no idea what to call an alligator in Florida until a Spaniard named it “el lagarto.”

Latinas/os while writing in Spanish use different rhetorical approaches and revision strategies (Eaton, Brewer, Portewig & Davidson, 2008). Spanish has different grammar rules that can carry over into English for a second language writer. English continuous tense patterns are very different (Espinoza, 1997). English paragraphs contain topical coherence while Spanish paragraphs do not (Simpson, 2000). Even seemingly simple things like comma usage are different in the two tongues. A college-educated Peruvian in my English Language Learner (ELL) class last week was pondering my lesson about using commas when joining two independent clauses with the word “and.” “We don’t ever do that in Spanish,” he noted. “We learn as children that ‘y’ is too short to put a comma before.” I suddenly recognized why none of my Latina/o composition students seem to “get” that rule. I asked Antonio Elias if he ever did his thinking in English. No, he always thinks in Spanish; all of his classmates concurred.

Consider the impact of these factors: a huge proportion of our adult population is thinking in Spanish before writing in English, one out of 10 Mexicans actually lives in the U.S. (Hellman, 2007), and some of our schools are becoming majority Latina/o. It is clear that the style of our written language is destined to evolve.

Our language will change so long as we don’t cleave the immigrant population into a permanent segregated underclass based on linguistics. It is unlikely that our democracy will put up with segregation over the long run for a group that is esteemed for being such hard workers. It is more likely that our language will slowly be transformed; prose styles may be more relaxed with looser topical structures. Scholars have noted that Latin cultures use emotional appeals and feelings as a form of persuasion (Eaton et al, 2008). Some of this rhetoric will rub off on us. After all, it has been noted that none of us think or write completely outside of the culture in which we live. (Crowley & Hawhee, 2004). That culture is changing. I’ve already changed kairotically as I interact with these students in ELL class. My view of time has shifted: at the designated starting time for each class, I look out at a completely empty classroom. This used to bother me, but now I simply begin prepping my lesson. Students straggle in one at a time as life allows, sharing stories, problems, and successes. Some of our best learning occurs during these one-on-one conversations rather than during the grammar lessons. In teaching Latinas/os the style of the English language, it appears in some important ways that I’ve been the one whose style has evolved.

When we focus rightfully on the impact of technology upon style, we recognize that technology has made writing ascend in importance in our lives. While technology’s dramatic influence captures our attention, it is equally important to pay attention to demographic shifts in America. These changes will have a profound stylistic impact in ways yet unknown if we show second-language students how to participate in the conversation and share the technology. States like Florida are in the vanguard; Cubano politics and biculturalism change our classrooms, conversations, and physical environment. Inevitably, language in a vibrant democracy will embrace the emotionalism and style of another Latin diaspora.













 

References

Correa, D. M. (2008, February). Understanding voice in the disciplines: The struggles of Latina non-traditional students and their instructors (Dissertation). University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Duran, B. J., & Weffer, R. E. (1992). Immigrants' aspiration, high school process, and academic outcomes. American Educational Research Journal, 29(1), 163-181. doi: 10.3102/00028312029001163

Eaton, A., Brewer, P., Portewig, T. & Davidson, C. (2008, May). Comparing cultural perceptions of editing from the author’s point of view. Technical Communication 55(2). 140-141.

Espinoza, A.M. (1997), Contrastive analysis of the Spanish and English passive voice in scientific prose. English for Specific Purposes 16(3). 229-243 doi:10.1016/S0889-4906(96)00034-8



Lanham, R. (2003). Analyzing Prose. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.



Hellman, J. (2007). The world of Mexican migrants: The rock and the hard place. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

New Strategist Editors. (2007). Who we are: Hispanics. Ithaca, NY: New Strategist Publications.

Simpson, J. (2000, September) Abstract. Journal of Second Language Writing, 9(3), 293-309.

Topic: What is style, why do we write things down, and in what ways does technology determine style?

To begin at the end, there are myriad ways in which technology determines style. First, we select tools such as writing instruments (there's a descriptive term for the technology of pencil and pen), then we select a medium in which to express our thoughts, and finally we form a discourse community, which is dependent on the technology selected.

Available technology determines if we IM sans discernable grammar or tweet for 140 characters. Our audience is important as we write. We observe the norms of the discourse community, as Baron notes, in our writing for the virtual community. If we violate the norms of style to which the community is accustomed, we are flamed nearly instantaneously. This has the effect of helping us to self-regulate our style.

Some of us write to think, some of us write to remember, some of us write to empathize in tragedy or great joy. We mix both public duties and private thoughts in the stream of words that symbolically represent ideas  otherwise fleeting and inscrutable. Our style emerges from the choice of graceful or clunky phrases, our mastery or ignorance of contemporary grammar rules, and our purpose in putting writing tools to work.

Why is Style Important in my Workplace?

Style is critical in my job teaching writing for an online college. I facilitate asynchronous conversations among 40 students from all over the country in two classrooms. I have nine weeks to teach the fundamentals of persuasive writing and grammar.

My students sometimes write badly; Joseph Williams in Style nails the causes of bad writing (Chapter 1): students have been scarred by overcritical English teachers; students try too hard to make simple ideas impressive; students are writing about subjects outside their experience.

Sadly, I also find regional differences in students' ability to compose the simplest sentences. As Baron notes in A Better Pencil, literacy separates the disadvantaged from the advantaged in our society (23).

Regardless of background of my students, I enforce high standards for virtual writing. I agree with Baron that virtual communities are self-regulating, and that norms are emerging ("spelling counts online, just as it counts on the page" (xiii)).


I work on style issues with every student. I model college writing for students who struggle with clarity. Others explore stylistic consequences of passive voice and danging modifiers and finding voice. The technology my school employs makes it possible for me to provide virtually a personalized writing seminar to every student, no matter what level of expertise they possess. My goal is to encourage students to think of themselves as writers, even if they are studying to become a medical assistant or a police officer. As universal access meets digitized instruction, writing teachers have extraordinary challenges and exciting tools for working with students.

Keep the Texting Where It Belongs

English is a rich and descriptive tongue. We can pick from gutteral Germanic words or elegant French synonyms depending on our mood. Our Latina/o neighbors contributed a fiesta of descriptive and joyful words. Why, then, are our classrooms afflicted with students who write: "RUK"  and "OMG" and "LOL" like they are instant messaging their friends?

Even worse, young writers have to be reminded that, yes, in English, we capitalize the "I."

If we're not in IM, leave out the texting language. There is no English teacher in the country who wants to see that stuff in the classroom.