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BWE 8: Comma Errors

Comma Error: comma missing after introductory phrase

Comma Error: comma missing after introductory phrase

Comma Error: two commas needed around parenthetical element

A Note on Restrictive versus Nonrestrictive Elements

Comma Error: two commas needed around parenthetical element

Comma Error: restrictive elements should not be enclosed within commas

Comma Error: no comma setting off restrictive clause

Test Yourself 19.10: Comma Errors

BWE 9: Spelling/Diction Errors That Interfere with Meaning

Spelling/Diction Error: “It’s” versus “Its”

Spelling/Diction Error: “Their” versus “There” versus “They’re”

Spelling/Diction Error: “Then” versus “Than”

Spelling/Diction Error: “Effect” versus “Affect”

Test Yourself 19.11: Spelling/Diction Errors

Glossary of Grammatical Terms

Assignments

CHAPTER 19 Appendix

Index

Preface

* * *

When we first contemplated writing this book two decades ago, we wanted to produce a short monograph that would provide some kind of lingua franca for faculty teaching in cross-curricular writing programs. The first several writing pedagogy seminars we offered to faculty at our college taught us that the language we had learned in graduate school for talking about writing didn’t work well with our colleagues from other departments. This turned out to be, in fact, an understatement.

So we read what our faculty had to say about what they’d learned in our writing seminars and what they wanted from student writing and used this information to develop a book that might sustain a faculty writing cohort on campus, allowing its members to talk to each other about writing across disciplinary lines. Six editions later, we are still working on that goal and learning about what college students need in order to succeed at academic writing both in first-year composition courses and in the various discourse communities they migrate among during their undergraduate careers.

The clearest consensus we’ve found among faculty is on the kind of writing that they say they want from their students: not issue-based argument, not personal reflection (the “reaction” paper), not passive summary, but analysis, with its patient and methodical inquiry into the meaning of information. And yet, most books of writing instruction devote only a chapter, if that, to analysis.

Among the reader reports that we pondered for this edition, we found faculty reporting that students are coming to them prepared to do five-paragraph themes and arguments but radically unprepared in thinking analytically. This edition of Writing Analytically remains committed to the goal of giving students the tools they need in order to engage in the analytical habits of mind that will be expected of them in their courses and in the world they encounter after graduation. Students who learn to analyze information and who know how to use writing in order to discover and develop ideas will continue to be in demand in the workplace, regardless of the form that writing takes or the medium in which it appears.

As the book demonstrates, the analytical process is surprisingly formulaic. It consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves. People who think well have these moves at their disposal, whether they are aware of using them or not. Analysis, the book argues, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world.

Entering this analytical frame of mind requires specific tasks that will reduce students’ anxiety for instant answers, impede the reflex move to judgments, and encourage a more hands-on engagement with materials. Writing Analytically supplies these tasks for each phase of the writing and idea-generating process: making observations, inferring implications, and making the leap to possible conclusions. The root issue here is the writer’s attitude towards evidence. The book argues that the ability of writers to discover ideas and improve on them in revision depends largely on their ability to use evidence as a means of testing and developing ideas rather