@kraglynn

okay! i suppose we can do this then!

. ? ! , : ; ' " – — - · ... [ ] { } ( ) / < >

here's our list of punctuation at current moment .

(gonna like really quickly assume you know what the first four are for. they're easy. periods end sentences, question marks end sentences when the sentence is a question, exclamation points express emotion (raised tone i guess? it could be excitement. it could be annoyance. you get it), and commas break down sentences and whatever. you know commas.)

colon and semicolon are kinda like a comma in that they will subdivide sentences. some schools of grammar like to do this thing where they all are like. supposed to represent a period of time you should pause for? so it's like the period/question mark/exclamation point pauses longest, then the colon, then semicolon, then comma. it's a whole thing. i figure most of you also know how to use these

an apostrophe is for contractions! i'm pretty sure you also know this. quotation marks are for quoting things or occasionally as irony punctuation (called scare quotes in this case)

for the en dash and em dash, i'm going to refer you to either of these posts (though one of them is slightly off. there is technically a separate minus sign but some people use an en dash)

the hyphen (or technically hyphen-minus. don't worry about it. it changed when typewriters were invented so it's basically just the normal hyphen but i don't like it so) is used for hyphenated words. and names. you know the ones. look up a list of hyphenated words if you don't know any. some people use two hyphens in a row to be an em dash but that's kinda dumb. sorry.

the interpunct is mostly used in non-english languages honestly. in french it's cool because it thwarts the horrible gendering by being fun and making the word gender neutral (basically it's "word with masculine ending·feminine ending" as in étudiant·e . it's not official but like. no gender neutral stuff in french is official. so . i don't care.) but also it's in a lot of twitter screenshots so. and also also, sometimes i will count bullets as interpuncts because. it's easier. they're similar okay • vs · is fine (it actually bothers me but we can redecide on it later)

... you know ellipses right? sorry i'm busy, so i'll skip em. they're longer than a period in the length thing i think

[ ] brackets like these are mostly used for adding information, context, whatever to quotes! they're sometimes called square brackets. it's mostly just quotes.

{ } curvy brackets/braces are mostly used in math. they do have uses technically but like. they're mostly here because i didn't want to leave them out

(you know these too right?)

/ good ol' fashioned slash. not a backslash that's this guy \ anyways. this is used for like. either/or a lot. or pronouns. those are fun

< > these are technically the less than/greater than signs but they're honorary angle brackets because it's easier to type. proper angle brackets are these ⟨ ⟩ and they're used to offset parenthetical information if you're not using an em dash or parentheses for whatever reason. sometimes called chevrons. afaik the less than/greater than signs can be substituted unless you're like. writing something extremely formal. also sometimes used in comics to indicate something has been translated! also sometimes used to denote thoughts! ⟨hm should i call this a day now?⟩

yeah. that's good enough. but if you want more info on any specific punctuation, you can ask me more specifically and then i will answer it when i am less busy probably

Please do more of the writing head canons. It’s really interesting to see other people’s ideas on the topic, so if you can be bothered, I would highly appreciate more, thanks bye <3

Y’all don’t know how happy I am to talk about these headcanons, they are my babies and I love them so much :’) thanks for asking g <3

Handwriting Headcanons

Same dynamic as before, try to guess whose handwriting it is before reading and tell me how many you got right! <3

You can find the first post here (no need to check it tho)

Quick disclaimer: halfway through making my initial notes, I remembered I had one (1) single lesson of graphology in my applied linguistics class, but that was a year ago and some information might be off. I just thought it was neat to include.

Another quick disclaimer: I don’t know much about Hylian, but I like to think it has a similar stroke system to Japanese, so the pressure and accuracy of your strokes play a major role in your handwriting (among other things, ofc.) so there are some parts where I focus more on that

(First Row, from left to right)

Sky

Our first boy is mother hen! Believe it or not, he has the prettiest handwriting out of all of them! Sky: probably has nice, even elegant handwriting because Sun forced him to practice when they were little. In the end, that paid off because his handwriting is the prettiest one. There’s no pressure, but he is confident in what he writes that his lines aren’t thin. Mistakes? what is that? this boy has impeccable grammar and spelling. No mechanic errors to be found in his letters! I’d like to think that many of Hyrule’s classic/staple poems were originally written by the firt king aka sky child. Like, imagine, after a retiring from being a Person of Power (as the first ruler), Sky finds comfort in the arts: revisits his old woodcarvings and starts writing poetry about the world he still doesn’t fully understand. wowie. tldr: sky writes poetry and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.

This is what one of his letters would look like: 

Next one is the one and only, our Hero of Time

2. Time

I’ll die on the “Time didn’t know how to read and write” hill. His handwriting is simple, not pretty but not messy. It has some grammar and spelling mistakes here and there. Can become unreadable if writing in a hurry, he sorts of forgets spaces between words are a thing/letters have different sizes and lowercase letters end up the same size as capital letters. I’m not saying he sometimes forgets to write articles: he just doesn’t want to. Honestly, he just has this dad-neat handwriting. He is a gentle dad and writes like a dad, if he puts too much pressure onto the paper, his handwriting become too sharp/angle-ish and ends up looking ugly. And as much as he would like to not care about it, in the end he does (:

Malon taught him how to write and it was quite the experience. At first he didn’t want to because he was ‘too old’ to learn and it was torture at first, but now look at him devouring his cowboy novels. 

A chunk of his handwriting: 

*sniff* such a dad quote.

3. my mansss, your  4x1 deal at Target: Four

Look, my boy is patient! He could do some nice and fancy lettering if he wanted to. He was taught that handwriting and spelling said a whole lot about him as a person, you know, like a first impression kinda thing; so he always proof reads more than twice before sending ­a letter. Super rare grammar mistakes.

The faster he writes, the more slant his writing becomes. Under stress/ when not sure how to write things down, run-on sentences are everywhere and his handwriting is inconsistent in general (I don’t headcanon each part of him having completely different handwriting because handwriting becomes muscle memory over time. It’s just slightly different variations of the same, like idk  Vio’s handwriting is neater than Green’s and Red writes hearts instead of any dot/circle and no, I do not take constructive criticism on that, jk i do.) Adding on to each of the colours’ handwriting, I’d think Red and Green write with words slanted to the right( inclined), Vio is a mix of the opposite, so reclined and straight, and my mans blue a true neutral writes straight (kinda like Time’s).

The logic behind this is that inclined writing supposedly means honesty and need for giving (and getting) affection; reclined means, as you can probably imagine,  defensiveness and repression of true feelings, but also shows great concentration; straight handwriting means self-control, observation and reflection as well as distrust and indifference. But as complete being (tm), Four just writes as in the image example which is not too straight and not too inclined, and I believe that’s a good middle for him

HOWEVER, if I’m feeling in the mood for crack, I totally accept this boy to have the ugliest, chicken scratches-looking handwriting! :’D It’s just funny to think that someone like him, who has to be precise and careful in his work, can't write neatly to save his life. 

One of his letters would look like this: 

Also I just LOVE how his hero titles look in this font ksksks

and that’s

(Middle row, from left to right)

4.- Mister Bunny Boy - Legend

His uncle taught him how to write. I’d call his handwriting pretty and neat at a first glance, but he presses too hard on the paper, most of the time staining the back or the following page. Sometimes will retrace some words if he doesn’t like how it looks (which only makes it messier). According to my notes, a thick or strong handwriting represents determination/commitment.

As I also headcanon him to know many languages, mechanical errors are more present than grammar ones; that is, weird capitalisation of words. Punctuation is somewhere in between; uses too many commas when he should just cut the sentence. he mixes punctuation from two languages or more in writing when too distracted (or too focused, because, well, pressure.); when he writes for himself, he has almost no problem following said language’s punctuation rules. Also, this is just polyglot culture, and I’m projecting a bit, but when he forgets a word in the language he’s writing, he just replaces it with its equivalent in another language because we don’t care about fluency, but rather functionality. in this household (more on that in my language hc, ksksks).

An example of his writing:

so powerful

4.-  Mr. Wolfman, howl me a song - Twilight

I don’t have much for him because 1) I don’t think he writes a lot and 2) he is a hands-on/visual learner, I’ll die by that. He only learnt how to write because Ulli insisted it was important and he was not about to disrespect his momma; he IS That Guy, but doesn’t really write enough to have neat handwriting.

Many people seem to overlook the fact that his house is filled with books and write him as completely illiterate (which if not explored properly, ends up feeling a bit disrespectful and full of prejudice, but go off I guess; and that’s on my core Headcanons for Twi); however, he sticks to simple sentences. Knowing how to read and understanding a text is different from knowing how to write them. Like, when we would see a semicolon and understand its position in the text, but didn’t understand the nature of it. Is this clear? idk i’m sorry. So yeah, boy reads a lot, writes very little.

As for his Actual Handwriting, as opposed to Legend, his handwriting is thiccc but not because he presses into the paper; he is just that messy, he has no sense of ink-flow-control, he does what he can with what he has. To the untrained eye, his handwriting illegible letters like v, n, u are very similar; when he makes notes for himself he does it in the form of doodles or small ‘icons’. But! He reads a lot, so he rarely makes spelling mistakes (: he is your go-to guy when you don’t know how to write a word.

An example of his writing:

He keeps a journal, sue me.

3. My first born- Warrior

Okay, first off... I accept this is completely biased. I saw the idea and said “That’s True”. If you haven’t, please read Effective Communication; or The Lack of Thereof by htruona, a fic where the boys reflect on the language barriers between them. It’s incredibly funny and probably what made me start making these silly notes. So, if you’ve read that fic, you know where I’m going.

My man, Warrior, can’t fucking write. I mean, he physically can, but it’s very bad. Here’s the reason for it, tho, and it’s not his fault: Technically, he knew how to write alright but he joined the military and whatever note he had to write had to be concise or in the worst case coded. He mixes capital and lowercase letters. If we consider that he joined the military at around 15, his handwriting and grammar had yet to continue developing. Just think about how after summer break, your handwriting was always slightly worse than before because you didn’t write for an entire month. Now think what 2 years can do to that. Hmm, not cool, dude. He makes quick notes, when writing he’s all gotta go fast. he is the lighting mcqueen of writing; good for emergency messages, not ideal for love letters. His punctuation also suffered a lot, he only know full stops and commas and hardly uses them. A sentence for him is either one word or fifty without a single comma, no inbetween.

His hero title and an example of his writing.

(Bottom row, or what I like to call “fuck cursive” row)

7.- Magic man - Hyrule

I’m basic and I do agree with the popular headcanon of he not knowing how to write because well, y’all know his Hyrule. He only knows how to write his name because that’s important, same with numbers. I don’t see why would he write/read except checking the roadsigns. (he can even use this as an excuse for getting lost frequently; he thought it said something different.) But I do think that because his habitual reading consists of roadsigns, his ‘punctuation’ is weird af and places full stops/points/periods at the same level of his words and his commas/question/exclamation marks below them. Yk, creative license. Sadly, I don’t have much about my magic hands man so here’s what his writing would look like if he actually wrote a paragraph:

Man, I love Hyrule.

8.- Man, I don’t understand this boy -  Wild

Cursive? ain’t nobody have the time for that. He woke up and had to save the world in his underwear while not knowing how to read nor write.  He learnt during his journey and was taught by multiple people from different regions, that explains his inconsistent spelling of things and names for them. So Wild knows language variations for many items and uses them interchangeably (even if they aren’t exactly the same). Another headcanon related to writing/language skills that I’ve been thinking about is that if the shrine was able to cause amnesia, I’m sure there were other areas in the brain affected which leads us to language disorders such as agraphia and aphasia. But that’s a story for another day ksksksk

An example of his writing (after relearning)

9.- The best of sons - Wind

I don’t have much for him and that makes me sad. Look, he’s a kid, doing kid things like stabbing dudes on the head. This boy was taught cursive by his grandma, but could never do it and no one needs it anyway. His handwriting is good enough for his pirate life, Tetra is the one to handle Official stuff, he just gotta sign. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound. He is still relatively young and can correct his handwriting if he desires. But same as Wild, with how many times he’s been thrown out and hit his head, I’m starting to consider some language disorder for him as well.

An example of his writing:

aaand that’s it.

Thanks, y’all for showing interest in this silly thing uwu it was fun to finally talk about this. If you ever want to discuss ideas/headcanons(especially if they are related to language and culture), I’m your person (: I’m always happy to hear new headcanons. Feel free to add anything to this post either in a reply or in a reblog, I’d love to hear from y’all <3<3

How to Use a Dash—in Fiction Writing

I've been getting more requests to do posts on proper punctuation, and one that a few people have mentioned is the em dash. I actually think this one is a little trickier to use than the semicolon (which I argue is actually one of the easiest), just because the rules surrounding it are more lax. However, like the semicolon, you can pretty much get away with almost never using it.

But a great em dash can be really effective, and sometimes it's just the punctuation mark you're looking for. It's worth noting that em dashes feel more informal. They make the text more casual, which may or may not be what you are looking for.

With that said, let's get started.

For Interruptions

As an editor, one of the most common (but understandable) problems I see with dashes is that the writer uses an ellipsis (. . .) to indicate an interruption instead of a dash. An ellipsis in dialogue means that the speaker sort of just trailed off:

"I don't know. Maybe it's something . . ." she trailed off.

But an em dash means they are cut off.

"I don't know. Maybe it's something--"

"Like an animal? Maybe a bear?" Callie interrupted.

Interruptions may not always be from another speaker. They can be a sound in the environment:

"If only--"

A police siren suddenly went off. We looked at each other, and then ran pell-mell down the alley.

They can be an action in the environment:

"Now I just need peaches, grapes, apples and--"

A shopping cart crashed into mine.

Sometimes you can even get away with the character's own thoughts interrupting their dialogue if they have a sudden realization.

"I don't know! Maybe it's something like--"

A jaguar, she suddenly realized. Yes, that fit perfectly!

Basically when a character is cut off in dialogue (or in some cases, even thoughts), you should indicate that with an em dash.  

If action interrupts a complete sentence of dialogue, you set it off by em dashes:

"You said"--she wrenched open the car door--"that she would be safe!"

"You said that she would be safe" is a complete sentence, but "she wrenched open the car door" is an action, not a dialogue tag, so technically it should be set off like that example.

For a Sudden Change of Thought

Similarly, your character may sort of "interrupt" themselves in that they may have a sudden change of thought. In that case, use an em dash.

"If only--hey, want to go to dinner?" I asked.

This can sometimes happen out of dialogue if you are in deep viewpoint.

I slowly put down my bag. If only--maybe she'd want to go to dinner.

As a Counterpoint to Parentheses

Em dashes can also function like parentheses . . . but different.

Parentheses imply a sort of aside. I personally think of parentheses as the "whisper" equivalent of writing. It's additional information that is read "quieter," like having a friend whisper something to you when you are at a lecture.

Dashes can set information aside too, but rather than "whisper" it, it's being highlighted. It carries a little more intensity and tends to be read at a faster pace than parentheses. (Even though it may be additional, side information.)

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see--root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta--and piled them into his shopping basket.

Notice how this has a slightly slower, less intense feel when in parentheses:

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see (root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta) and piled them into his shopping basket.

Dashes are also a little different in that if you use a dash to set off the beginning or end part of a sentence, you don't need a second one. You only need two when you're setting off something in the middle of a sentence.

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see--root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta. He piled them into his shopping basket.

Or

Root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta--he grabbed every kind of soda he could see. He piled them into his shopping basket.

With parentheses, you always need to close them.

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see (root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta). He piled them into his shopping basket.

And you typically don't start a sentence with parentheses, unless the entire sentence is in parentheses.

For Quick Emphasis

Similar to the last section, you can also use em dashes for quick impact.

You can use a dash to highlight or emphasize a single word.

There was only one place he dreamed of being--Hawaii

This can also work in places where parentheses typically won't (which is why I'm putting this in its own section).

Hawaii--it was the only place he dreamed of being.

Of course, you can do this with more than one word.

Joshua had two loves in life--Lucy and tater tots.

To Help Readability

Dashes can also be used to help make a sentence easier to read. This is usually done when a phrase set off by commas has a lot of its own commas within it.

When the medicine arrived, about two months, three stomach aches, five headaches, and six sleepless nights later, she felt so sick, she didn't know if she could keep the pills down, so she begged to be taken back to the hospital.

-->

When the medicine arrived--about two months, three stomach aches, five headaches, and six sleepless nights later--she felt so sick, she didn't know if she could keep the pills down, so she begged to be taken back to the hospital.

Like a lot of things in writing, you can argue that some of these sections overlap (because can't this dashed part just be put in parentheses? Or be considered an interruption?).

For Missing Text

This is sort of outdated and not something I recommend using except in special circumstances.

Sometimes the em dash is used to show that certain text has been left out. If you read some older books, like some of the classics, you may notice em dashes are used to avoid giving specific dates or names.

For example, in Jane Eyre, you will find text like this:

Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote, ----shire.

Which is meant to say the place is called something shire.

Or you may find dates like this:

19----

So the story avoids giving a specific year.

Fiction today doesn't usually do that.

The em dash can also be used this way when the text is unknown. The only way I can see this working in fiction today, is if your character found a paper or something that was damaged so they could not make out the words properly. You might would write the note like this:

My dear ------,

Please come to m---- at t---- and bring ------

Sincerely,

----t

When used this way, two em dashes denote part of a missing word and three em dashes denote a whole word is missing.

It's completely possible to go through your whole writing career and never need to use em dashes this way.

Hyphens vs. En Dashes vs. Em Dashes

When people talk about "dashes," they are almost always talking about the em dash, which is what this whole article has been about, but there is also the en dash and the hyphen. En dashes are shorter than em dashes and hyphens are shorter than en dashes.

Hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (—)

An en dash is about as long as the letter "n" and an em dash is about as long as the letter "m" (which is where they get their names).

The differences between the hyphen and the en dash can get a little fuzzy in the industry, so I'm going to pull from the The Chicago Manual of Style (which is what fiction uses) website and let them explain it.

The hyphen connects two things that are intimately related, usually words that function together as a single concept or work together as a joint modifier (e.g., tie-in, toll-free call, two-thirds).

The en dash connects things that are related to each other by distance, as in the May–September issue of a magazine; it’s not a May-September issue, because June, July, and August are also ostensibly included in this range. And in fact en dashes specify any kind of range, which is why they properly appear in indexes when a range of pages is cited (e.g., 147–48). En dashes are also used to connect a prefix to a proper open compound: for example, pre–World War II.

You probably don't need to worry too much about the differences between a hyphen and an en dash, so I don't recommend stressing about it. Just know they are different, and you can look them up if you really need to. And definitely don't go walking around like you are smarter than everyone because you can tell the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

How to Properly Write an Em Dash

You may notice now that you don't actually have an em dash key on your keyboard. You have a hyphen. This often gets used as both a hyphen and an en dash. To denote an em dash, you hit that key twice (--); today, most word processors will automatically turn that into an em dash (—).

In the traditional, standard manuscript format, em dashes are written as --. This is in part because SMF uses a Courier font, where every character is the same width, so technically a hyphen is going to look the same as an em dash, so you need to use two hyphens to indicate an em dash. You can also use two hyphens to indicate an em dash when automatic reformatting is unavailable. You've probably noticed on my blog that I usually use -- for my em dashes. My blogging platform does not reformat them to em dashes, and I have much better things to do than copy and paste them all in. Besides, there is nothing "wrong" with using --, technically speaking. It's just if something is going to be professionally printed, you should use —.

In fiction, there should be no spaces before or after the em dash.

Wrong:

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see — root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta — and piled them into his shopping basket.

Correct:

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see—root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta—and piled them into his shopping basket.

Also Fine:

He grabbed every kind of soda he could see--root beer, cream, orange, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Sprite, even grape Fanta--and piled them into his shopping basket.

(But reformat for professional printing)

And that's about all you need to know about em dashes for fiction writing.

*This is based on U.S. styles, and I’m not sure if em dashes are written differently elsewhere.

Oh hi! This ask might be a little particular because I do feel confident enough in my stories but I got a little problem and this is that English isn't my native language and I keep using the punctuation rules of my language. So I wanted to know if I could get a summary for it. (For example, I still have no clue as to what is the Oxford Comma :/) Thank you a lot! Love the blog

Ask and ye shall receive! I actually wrote a little cheat sheet of some punctuation uses a few years ago. Your question about the oxford comma will be answered below but I wanted to add more grammar information while I was at it. I’ve added a bit to it now to make more sense but I should say that this is a simplified cheat sheet of some grammar points that can be more complicated (but don’t have to be hard to understand) so I apologize if in summarizing I miss something. 

I should also say that since it was years ago I don’t have the exact sources I used to compile it but as far as I remember the main places I used were GrammarBook.com, Grammar Girl, and I used Grammarly today to add a few other things (though I personally would not recommend using the Grammarly plugin). 

Okay, first I want to talk about some basic points about grammar so the punctuation makes more sense.

A complete sentence includes a subject, verb, and object. The subject is the noun that is doing the thing in the sentence, the verb is the action, and the object is the thing being acted on. John(subject) eats(verb) pizza(object). Some sentences have implied subjects or objects. For example: John walks. That is technically a complete sentence even though it is short. You can think of it like John is the subject and object who is walking himself. A sentence also needs to express a complete thought.

A clause is a group of words that has a verb (predicate) and a subject. A complete (or independent) clause is like a full sentence in that it can stand on its own. An incomplete (or dependent) clause is like a piece of a sentence that needs to be joined to another clause to be part of a full sentence. Although John is lactose intolerant, he loves to eat pizza. In this example the italicized part is the dependent clause because it can’t stand alone as a sentence, the underlined part can.

So a combination of clauses can be a full sentence, a dependent clause is not a sentence, but an independent clause can be a full sentence.

Conjunction: and, but, or, nor…

Adjective: words that describe nouns

Adverb: words that describe verbs (commonly end in -ly)

So now let’s talk about punctuation points that affect sentence grammar, specifically commas, semicolons, and the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes (there is a difference). I’ll give a list of the uses of each and briefly how it’s used. Examples are in the parentheses.

Commas

lists

when using two adjectives (he is a strong, healthy man)

surrounding a name. (Will you, Ashley, do it for me)

interjections (I am, as you have probably noticed, very nervous)

connecting incomplete clauses but beware of comma splices. This is where you connect two complete clauses with a comma without a conjunction (I love to ride my motorcycle, it is so fast. A way to fix it would be either to use a period or: I love to ride my motorcycle because it is so fast.)

phrases that start sentences (As you can see, this puppy is adorable.)

separating two strong clauses with but, and, or, for, nor…

The Oxford comma: a comma in a list before “and” or “or” in a list (The bananas, apples, and pears had gone bad)

There’s controversy over whether people should use the oxford comma because in the example above it is not really necessary so it is mostly a style choice. But there are instances where it can make a big difference. Here’s an example from Grammarly: I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty. This could be interpreted to mean that your parents are Lady Gaga and Humpty (see point three). Using the Oxfrod comma avoids that possible misunderstanding by writing it: I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty.

separating pieces of a sentence for confusion (We bought sweaters and I picked out red and green, and blue was his first choice.)

quotations. Always put a comma either before a quote or after depending on where you put the tag (He said, “I’m so tired.” OR “I’m so tired,” he said.)

separating statements from a question (I can’t go, can I?)

Contrasting. (This is mine, not yours)

surround however, therefore, etc. when used as interrupters

Semicolons

Connecting two closely related independent clauses without a conjunction. (Call me tom; I’ll give my answer then). This is another way to fix comma splices. Both pieces of that sentence are independent clauses, but they make sense connected. A comma is too weak to do the job, but a semicolon can. So, when connecting two independent clauses either use a conjunction (and, but, or…) or a semicolon.

separate units in a list when comas have already been used. (The train stops at Montreal, Quebec; Toronto, Ontario; London, Ontario…)

With conjunctions when a comma has already been used sort of like the example above.

HYPHEN (-) 

(Note: the following differences are more nitty-gritty grammar things that you should know if you are really pursuing writing and publishing but in general I don’t think most people know this. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as en and em dashes until I looked this all up)

This is just the hyphen button on the keyboard

compound (eye-opener)

adjectives before noun (friendly-looking man)

adverbs not ly before noun (well-known actress)

numbers (thirty-two)

fractions (one-third)

prefixes on PROPER nouns (un-American)

prefixes ending in ‘a’ or ‘i’ if starts with same letter (ultra-ambitious) if they are different vowels don’t (proactive)

double e and o usually make one word except for (de-emphasize co-owner)

EN DASH (–) 

On a Mac, you can make this by pressing Option + -

differentiation (1997–2013, US–Canada border)

EM DASH (—)

On a Mac, you can make this by pressing Option + Shift + -

source of quote (Inspirational quote — Alex)

informal writing instead of semicolon (I pay the bills—she has all the fun)

interjections or asides (I just needed to say—I can’t believe I’m doing this—I’m in love with you.)

the above two points are sort of stylistic. As you might see you can use semicolons or em dashes so it depends on your writing preferences. From what I’ve seen, most novels and such use the em dashes instead of semicolons.

Change in thought or tone (I just wish—never mind.)

Incomplete thoughts in quotations (Emma was saying, “I couldn’t believe when I saw—” when an alien jumped out of the bush and attacked.)

These were the things that I wanted more clarification on when I wrote this and so I figured other probably would benefit from it too. Obviously there are a lot of other parts of grammar and punctuation so if you have any specific requests I can try to help you out!

Perfect Punctuation: The Comma.

Hi guys, thanks for coming back for the second video of my latest series, this time on perfect punctuation. Now, as I stated in my first video, these are aimed at teaching you the rules and basics of punctuation that you will need when writing fiction, short stories, dialogue and books. It is not a masterclass in all types of punctuation and it’s not claiming to be research for an English degree, this is just an easy to follow guide to basic punctuation with lots of examples to help you understand. I did a lot of research for this series, I spoke to a lot of other writers and asked them what they would have found useful and I’ve tried to include it all as best I can.

Now, onwards to todays topic, the comma. This is one of the most common punctuation symbols. It is used to indicate a pause in a sentence, to form a kind of list within a sentence, to separate information, to add additional information, or before a common conjunction word such as and, but, yet, or, for, so etc.

Commas can get a little confusing, especially when you have to remember all the rules. So lets start with the basics, using the comma to indicate a pause, which is how most people use a comma and would tell you how to use it.

Here is an example of the comma being used to create a pause point in a sentence. “The cat didn’t like chicken, he preferred fish.”

If you are unsure as to where to put your commas you can always read your sentence aloud as this should show you where you would naturally pause.

Believe it or not, there are more than one type of comma and they all have different jobs. So I’m going to go into them separately, and hopefully this will make things a lot easier to understand. Rather than only telling you when to use a comma, I’m going to explain the jobs that they have as I find this makes it easier to remember when and how to use them.

First up is the listing comma.

Just as the name implies, it is used when forming a descriptive list, or to separate items within a sentence. The whole point of a comma, any comma, is to make your writing easier to understand, to make your meaning very clear and to eliminate any confusion.

You would use a listing comma between words, phrases or clauses that appear in a series of 3 or more.

That means that one word is a stand alone: ‘The cat was black.’ There is nothing to add here, so no comma is needed.

Two words are dealt with with the use of the word and, as the second word is an additional piece of information: ‘The cat was black and white.’ Once again, we didn’t need to add a comma.

When we start moving into three or more words, that is when our little comma friend makes his appearance, replacing the word ‘and.’ We do this to make the sentence easier to understand, but also for a visual reason. Technically you could just keep using the word and, but that is a very childish way of writing or speaking.

‘The cat was black and white and ginger.’ It sounds like a young child getting very excited to tell you all about something, and while its cute on a kiddie, its not how us adults speak or write, or at least it really shouldn’t be.

‘The cat was black, white and ginger.’ See how that just looks and sounds so much better?

Now let’s look at comma as a way of separating additional information, or as I like to call it, side note information. It’s a little addition that you need but that doesn’t really fit the original flow of the sentence.

“My car, which once belonged to my Dad, is old, but reliable.”

This sentence is a good example of using a comma before a common conjunction word, in this case the word ‘but’, where you would naturally pause. ‘old, but reliable.’

There is an exception to this rule, as there is with most things. If the two main clauses are short and the sentence is very simple, then the comma would not be needed.

‘Jasmine rode and Frank walked.’

In most cases do not use a comma before a conjunction that links two simple words or phrases. For example, two names and two actions.

‘Frank and Jasmine ate and drank all night.’

As before, if you are listing more than 3 words or names, that is the time when you whip out your comma.

‘Frank, James and Jasmine stayed up all night eating and drinking.’

The purpose of the comma is to make a sentence very easy and obvious to understand but also to help with the flow. If I hadn’t have used that comma the sentence would have looked like this:

‘Frank James and Jasmine stayed up all night eating and drinking.’

That makes it look like Frank’s last name is James, Frank James, which obviously isn’t right.

‘Frank and James and Jasmine stayed up all night eating and drinking.’ Ok, so that clears up the confusion as to Frank’s name, but once again it looks childish and not how we would phrase it if we were speaking it. if you are unsure as to how your sentence reads, then please, please, read your work aloud to see how it flows. Just reading that sentence out felt awkward and not at all comfortable.

Another time when you would use a comma is before a name, but this is only when someone is being addressed.

“Hi, Grandma, how are you?”

This sentence would still make sense without the comma so some people think that you don’t need it, like that little comma guy is redundant, but he’s not. Please don’t leave him out as he can be the difference between:

“Let’s eat Dad.”

And “Let’s eat, Dad.”

We are not promoting cannibalism here, so let’s get it right.

So, to clarify:

- Use a listing comma in a list wherever you could use the words and/or instead. Do not use them anywhere else.

- Use a listing comma before and/ or only if this is necessary to make your meaning clear.

Now we’re moving on to the joining comma.

He is slightly different to the listing comma and a tiny bit trickier to master, but once you get the basic’s you’ll find that with practice it’ll become second nature to know when and how to use him.

A joining comma, as the name suggests is used to join two complete sentences into a single sentence. When using it, it must be followed by a suitable connecting word. The connecting words which can be used this way are and/or/but/while and yet.

Here are some examples of it being used.

“You must finish that project by Monday, or you will be fired.”

“Jason applied for the promotion, and we expect Sam to do the same.”

Remember that you cannot join two sentences with a joining comma without once of those joining words. For clarification, here are some examples of it being wrongly used:

“The British are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages, the Dutch are famously good at it.”

“Mel and Sue once hosted a baking show, Noel and Sandy took over.”

These sentences don’t have the required joining words.

Joining two sentences like this is one of the most common punctuation errors and one that I’ve done many times myself in my early days of writing, but it is also one of the easiest to avoid if you pay a little attention to what you are writing.

You must either follow the comma with one of the connecting words listed before, or you must replace it with a semicolon, which I will cover in another video very soon.

It’s important to remember that most other connecting words cannot be proceeded by a joining comma. For example: however, therefore, hence, consequently, nevertheless and thus.

With this rule the following examples are also WRONG;

“Two members of the group were too ill to go on, however the rest decided to continue.”

“West Ham are two points behind the leaders, therefore they must win their last game.”

Once again, these sentences require a semicolon to join them, not a comma.

To recap: Use a joining comma to join two complete sentences with the words and, or, but, yet or while. DO NOT use a joining comma any other way.

The gapping comma:

The gapping comma is very easy to use. We would use one to show that one or more words have been left out when the missing words are simply repeats of words already used in the same sentence.

Here is an example of a sentence without a gapping comma:

‘Some students wanted to base their school mascot on the name of their team, others wanted to base it on the name of the school.’

A gapping comma would be used in the second half of the sentence just before the second statement.

‘Some students wanted to base their school mascot on the name of their team; others, on the name of the school.’

That little gapping comma allowed us to cut out unnecessary repeating words. I’ve also used a semicolon there to abide by the rules I explained before about the joining comma as there wasn’t a correct joining word there, again I’ll explain the semicolon in another video.

Now, here’s were we get a little more complicated.

A gapping comma and a listing comma can both be used in the same sentence to better convey your meaning, making your writing easier and clearer to understand. But don’t you worry, it’s not as daunting as it sounds, I promise. Work with me, we’ll break it down and make this a painless a lesson as possible.

Here is an example, I’m going to tell you the commas as I read the sentence out to you so you can spot them.

‘Italy is famous for her composers and musicians, (listing) France,(gapping) for her chefs and philosophers,(listing) and Poland,(gapping) for her mathematics and logicians.’

I followed the rules of the gapping comma being used to show that words are missing, and the listing comma to create a list within the sentence because there were three countries mentioned and I used the correct connecting word of ‘and’.

The gapping commas weren’t strictly necessary here, I just added them to show you how it could work. You could leave them out and the sentence would still be perfectly clear.

‘Italy is famous for her composers and musicians, France for her chefs and philosophers, and Poland for her mathematics and logistics.’

Again, I followed the rules, there were three or more countries and I used the correct connecting word.

This is a question of judgement and personal tastes. I always prefer to have a simpler and less crowded sentence if I can, so if the sentence is clear enough without the additional gapping commas, then I would leave them out. It’s good to remember that when reading people tend to naturally pause when they see a comma, obviously that’s what most of us were taught in school ‘add a comma when you pause’. But that can actually draw out and fragment a sentence in a way that you didn’t want. So always read your work out loud to yourself, pausing for the commas and see if it feels clunky and fragmented to you. if it does, then leave them out or re-write it in a way that sounds better to you.

Honestly I rarely, if ever, use a gapping comma myself. I prefer to change the sentence to avoid the repetition we are eliminating with the gapping comma as if find that it can sometimes feel a little old fashioned for my tastes. But that is purely personal preference and how I prefer to write, you will develop your own style in time.

And lastly, we have the lovely little bracketing commas, a cute little pair (sometimes called isolating commas) that have a completely different job to the other three. Just to make life, and writing, more interesting. The little buggers.

The rule with bracketing commas is that a pair of them are used to mark off a weak interruption in a sentence. This is to add additional information to a sentence and then continue the original sentence flow straight after as if the brackets and the interruption, never happened. They are basically used in place of brackets especially in dialogue.

For example:

‘Gemma, a friend of the family, came up the path and knocked on the door.’

‘The teaching assistant, who had come from another school, was named Rachel.’

‘Julie did, of course, like sausages.’

As you can see, I’ve used bracketing commas to add a little nugget of information. Here’s the rule with using bracketing commas, as I said before, the sentence before them should continue to flow as if the interruption never happened. That means that if you took away the commas and the additional information, the remaining writing should fit together and make a seamless sentence that still makes sense.

This is always the case with bracketing commas and it gives you a very simple way of checking your punctuation. If you have off set some words with bracketing commas and you can’t then remove those words without destroying the entire sentence, then you have written it wrong.

For example:

‘But, beyond the door, lay freedom.’ It sounds like a lovely little sentence, but if you take away the commas and smush it together, it makes no sense.

‘But lay freedom.’ That’s not even a thing.

The correct way to do this would have been to not get fancy and have it as a sentence in its own right.

‘But beyond the door lay freedom.’ There is nothing wrong with keeping things simple.

Here’s another example of them being incorrectly used:

‘She dug in her bag for her cigarettes, and finding them, quickly lit one.’

Again, as a sentence in a book it sounds fine, it paints the scene quite nicely, but we aren’t here for that, we are here to make sure the rules of punctuation aren’t broken, and you my friend, are a broken sentence.

Take away the offset words and what do you have?

‘She dug in her bag for her cigarettes quickly lit one.’ Does that sound right to you? you had better not say yes, because if you do you can get off this learning train right now. The sentence feels incomplete and makes no sense.

In this case the best thing to do would be to move the commas.

‘She dug in her bag for her cigarettes and, finding them, quickly lit one.’

Now if you take away the bracketed words you get.

‘She dug in her bag for her cigarettes and quickly lit one.’ It’s not a great sentence, but it makes sense, which is better than nothing.

Now, a bracketing comma used as an interruption can be used on its own and not as part of a pair, when the interruption comes at the beginning or the end of a sentence.

This is for two reasons. We never put a comma at the beginning or end of a sentence, can you imagine it? how weird would that look?

The other reason is because there is nothing else to separate it from. It’s not a pause in speech, its an interruption or additional information from the full sentence.

For example:

‘At the end of the day, I think I can count this as a job well done.’

Or:

‘I think we can count this as a job well done, at the end of the day.’

Both are technically correct and the sentence both make sense without the additions, although I personally feel that the second one feels a bit clunky and odd to me. Again, personal preference, as I know many people that would speak the sentence in that way.

So, bracketing comma golden rules:

-Use a pair for a weak interruption which could be removed from a sentence without it ruining the comprehension of the sentence.

- If the interruption comes at the beginning or the end of a sentence, use just the one bracketing comma.

- Make sure that the words you isolate with the commas are really an interruption and that the sentence makes sense without them and flows on its own.

Let’s recap all the commas once more before I sign off.

- We use a listing comma in a list of three or more items or people where the words ‘and or or’ would be possible instead.

- We use a joining comma before the words ‘and, or, but, yet, or while’ followed by a complete sentence.

- We use a gapping comma to show that words have been left out of a sentence instead of repeating them.

- We use a pair of bracketing commas to set off an interruption in the middle of a sentence, but only one if the interruption is at the beginning or the end of a sentence.

Well done guys, we got through it. I hope this has made things a little easier for you. as always, if you have any questions or any suggestions of things you would like me to cover, hit me up on here or one of my social media accounts. I’m always happy to help.

Until next time, blessed be and happy writing.

do u have any advice about writing? i really want to start writing fics but im afraid they wont be any good

1. Don’t try to write in a vacuum, and don’t feel pressured to bust out a whole fic, or chapter, or whatever in one sitting. Always reread your work a day later with a fresh eye, taking your time, adding and changing stuff as you go.

2. Have someone else that you trust read your work. Ask them to give you comments not just on grammar, but on flow, and content, and where you should expand. Ask them how they are interpreting scenes or dialogue. If their interpretation isn’t want you were going for, add or change things as necessary so that you get your point across. Sometimes they’ll suggest something to add, and it’s great, it’s exactly what you want. Sometimes, though, they’ll suggest something and you’ll get a repulsed feeling in your stomach. A feeling of ew, that’s not what I meant. Listen to that feeling. Don’t add what they suggested if you think it’s wrong. You’re the author, you know what you mean. But do something in that place. Add something different that is what you want. 

3. Know the rules of grammar. And then say fuck it. Break rules with intention. I love starting sentences with and. And but. I love not using a comma when I should if it allows me to create a tone that I’m aiming for. Don’t be afraid and don’t feel confined by the rules of language. Know the power of words and punctuation, and the apply them in a way that works for your piece of writing.

4. Vary your sentence structure. Sometimes, long flowing sentences are necessary, sometimes they help create a gentle, languid tone. But then -- but then, sometimes short sentences are good, too. Sometimes those pack a bigger punch. In fact, don’t be afraid to let some sentences stand completely on their own; feel free to make a short, simple sentence its own paragraph if that will make your point hit home harder. Remember when your fourth grade teacher told you paragraphs had to be a certain number of sentences? Fuck that.

5. The thesaurus is your best friend. Find a word that means exactly what you want to say, and don’t settle for anything less. Your character is upset? I don’t know what that means. Upset has so, so many different interpretations. Tell me which one it is. Are they distressed? Livid? Hurt? Those are all synonyms for upset, but they are all such different breeds of a negative feeling. Make me feel what your character feels. But also, remember that words have connotations, not just meanings. Don’t use a word just because it technically means what you want to say, make sure the feeling of the word is right, too. One definition of simple is technically innocent, but it also can mean stupid and feeble-minded. Be conscious of that and make an effort to not use words that your reader could misinterpret.

6. Be aware of the tone of your piece. If it feels soft, sweet like honey -- if it pulls your reader into a serene state of bliss, a crass word is going to disrupt that fucking tone. Sometimes you want that. Sometimes you want to jolt your reader out of that mindset. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes to you want to let them savor it, bask in its warmth. Know which you’re wanting, and writing accordingly.

7. Writing isn’t just about words and grammar and content. This is twenty goddamn eighteen. Computers have given us so much freedom, all with the touch of a few buttons. Use all of the fancy ways we can type. Want a reader to emphasize a word in their mind? Italicize that fucker. Need something to jump out? Bold it. And while you’re at it, don’t forget about punctuation, either. Sure, everyone remembers periods, and commas, and question marks -- but what about their often-forgotten friends? Don’t be afraid of mdashes. Don’t forget that semicolons and colons exist. Use every tool at your disposal.

8. Repeat yourself. Don’t be redundant -- that’s annoyed as all hell. But if you have something you want to say, something that you really want your reader to get, say it. And then say it again. Say it as many times as you think is necessary for it to fucking resonate. Vary the way that you say it, sure. You don’t want just copy and paste your same sentence over and over again. Maybe even drift away from the topic for a moment if you want to, if you have something else that’s relevant and related to say. But then come back. Say it one more time. Make sure they fucking know.

9. Know what you suck at. Either avoid it, or work on it, or make your editor pay extra attention to it. You know what I suck at? Quotation marks. I never fucking know where the punctuation goes, or when I’m supposed to capitalize something. I know it, and I always make sure to have someone else look at that when I write.

10. Three is a powerful number. I don’t know why, but it is. When you’re giving lists, or examples, or feelings, a lot of times three just packs the right punch. Look at my writing in this piece. I’ve done it over and over and over again. Look at the first sentence of point seven -- there’s three. And the synonyms I give for upset in five -- there’s three again. And right now, I’m doing it one more time -- this is it, this is the third example. It works. It’s powerful. I don’t know why, but it is. 

Family Sketch

Helen Schatvet Ullmann, CG, FASG [adapted from the author’s article in New England Ancestors 8:3 (Summer 2007):41–42, 45]

Do you have a thick file or a notebook full of information you’d like to write up for your family? Or even boxes and boxes of it? Maybe your data is in Family Tree Maker or some other program. Or maybe you’re just in the beginning stages of your research. In any case, whether you just want to write about your grandparents or compile a whole book, the basic building block is the family sketch, treating a couple and their children in an organized and interesting way. Word processing, extremely flexible, is a wonderful tool for genealogists. Remember the old days when we had to cut and paste and retype, perhaps introducing new errors as we went along? About twenty years ago, NEHGS sponsored a seminar held at the Museum of Science here in Boston. My only memory of the whole day is Alicia Crane Williams saying, “As soon as you get a little information, put it in Register style. This is part of the research process.” So I went home and on my quaint little Apple IIe began transcribing old family group sheets crammed with information. My descendants might just take them to the dump! What is a family sketch? It’s just a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the first paragraph that contains the vital information about the parents — all of it. So, if the reader later wants to check back to see just when your great-grandmother married her second husband, it’s easy to find. The middle is whatever you want, usually a biography in chronological order. It could include funny stories or a serious analysis distinguishing between your grandfather and another fellow who bore the same name. At the end is a list of children with their vital data. You may have mentioned each child as he or she joined the family, married, or died, in the biography above, but it’s still important to have a straightforward list of children at the end. Children for whom there is a lot of information may be continued in their own sketches. You can begin with just shreds of information. I started one sketch with my mother’s memories, her grandparents’ names and the recollection that she would sit on her grandfather’s lap and braid his side whiskers — plus the fact that he was a Congregational minister. Then I listed her mother, her aunt, and her uncles, using “Conversation with . . . ” and her name and relationship in footnotes. On the other hand, I have many folders of notes gleaned in the ’70s and ’80s, b.c. (before computers). It’s fun to open one, outline the family structure, and start adding information almost at random as I go through the file. As I work, I can see where I need to bolster a statement with pertinent analysis or where I could undertake more research. Before starting to write, you might read some sections in Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century,[1] especially the pages that diagram the different elements of the parents’ and children’s paragraphs. There isn’t space here to discuss all the fine points, including numbering systems.[2] Many other matters, such as whether to use abbreviations, are really your own personal preference. Generally the fewer the abbreviations, the smoother the reading. Complete sentences, rather than lots of semicolons, also make reading easier. Now you can just start writing. But here’s a suggestion: if you are going to start from scratch (as opposed to creating a “report” from your genealogy database), go to AmericanAncestors.org. Click on the Publication tab, then on theRegister, and then under Side Links, on “Download a Register Style Template for Microsoft Word.” Then “Download the Template!” If you have Microsoft Word on your computer, a document that can function as a template will open. I won’t repeat all that the template says, but it will help you format your sketch, especially those pesky children who appear in hanging paragraphs. This template contains all the “styles” that we use in the Register, everything from title to footnotes. The word “style” here does not refer to Register “style.” It is a word-processing term that refers to the format of each paragraph. When you open Word, you will be in “normal” style, but this paragraph is being written in “body text indent.” The only difference is that the first line is indented. Hanging paragraphs for children are more complicated. These paragraphs line up roman numerals on a “right tab.” There are even styles for quotations and grandchildren. If you’ve already arranged some material and want to use that template, simply copy your work into the blank template. First select your whole document and make sure it’s in normal style. Go to “Format,” then “Style,” and select “normal.” Delete all tabs and spaces you added to format the children. After pasting your work into the new document, save it under the name you want to use. Then review the text and select the “style” for each paragraph by placing your cursor in the paragraph and choosing the style from the Format menu. There should be a little window on your toolbar that lists the styles and offers a quicker route. You can select many paragraphs at once. (A technical detail: if you want to edit the style in any way, say choosing a different font or left-justified text, go to the Format menu, choose “Style,” and click on “Modify.”) In the Register we generally use “normal” style for the first paragraph where the parents’ vital data appear. Then we switch to “body text indent” for the biography. We introduce the children with a “kid’s intro” style and then choose “kids.” When you use that style, hit tab, then the first Roman numeral and a period, then hit tab again. Both tabs will then appear, and you can start typing the child’s name. Small caps are very elegant here. Notice that we include the surname for each child. Then there’s no doubt about the surname and indexing is easier. If you want to list grandchildren, you’ll find the “grandkids” style works a little differently. No tabs needed. Just type the arabic numeral and a period. Then two hard spaces help the names line up nicely [use Control-Shift-Space]. In the Register we use italics for grandchildren’s names. Even the footnotes and footnote references have their own styles. We encourage you to cite your sources for everything. Footnotes are much handier if your readers will really use them, but endnotes may seem less intimidating. The basics of citation format are not difficult. Look at issues of the Register for examples. A current guide is Evidence!,[3] good to have at hand, but the Register often uses simpler formats. The Chicago Manual of Style is also helpful.[4] It saves time to enter the notes correctly the first time. (By the way, the footnote reference number goes after the punctuation.) A further hint about writing style: try reading your work out loud. Are you using empty phrases you would never use when talking? Can you say something more concisely? Are your sentences really sentences? Passive voice — “The ball was hit by the boy,” rather than “The boy hit the ball” — deadens the tone. And proofread, proofread, proofread. You’ll improve your sketch every time.

All the best Family Sketch Images 38+ collected on this page. Feel free to explore, study and enjoy paintings with PaintingValley.com. As I look toward shifting to a different family line in my own research, I think I’m going to take the time to write a bio sketch for the main ancestor I’ve been researching, George Washington Adams (1845-1938) before I say goodby to him for a little while. I think it should be a fun exercise. 93,432 family sketch stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free. See family sketch stock video clips. Family future plan group of sketch family people walking in the garden building a family sketches of future family design interior family sketch color family and money family with money thinking wall.

Finally, for the “icing on the cake,” dress up your sketch with illustrations! Insert photos, autographs, pictures of houses and gravestones, the ship on which your ancestors crossed the ocean, maps — whatever you can find. Your final product should be elegant and attractive, not just to your children but to their grandchildren and beyond.

Sidebar:

A few little tips

Commas and periods go inside a closing quote; semicolons outside.

Footnote reference numbers come after the punctuation.

Titles of published books should be italicized.

Titles of articles and unpublished materials need quotation marks.

Titles of sources such as land, probate, and vital records do not need italics or quotes unless they are published.

Proofread on another day.

Try reading your prose out loud!

Sidebar 2:

Polishing that database reports

In word processing you can discuss all sorts of nuances of dates, places, and identities wherever they seem to fit. Such additions are not so easy when working with a genealogy database. There are quite a few differences between what we consider Register style and the quasi-Register-style report generated by most genealogy programs. If you are using one of these programs, here are some things to consider.

Once you have generated a report, it will carry its own set of word-processing “styles.” You can just accept them, or eliminate all of them by selecting the whole document and putting it in “normal” style as described above, then copying it into a blank Register template. If you do so, eliminate any sex designations for the children first. (You can easily comment on any unusual name in the text or a footnote.)

Family Sketch Clipart Black And White

You should make some other changes as well. First, consider the order of the information. Do the wife’s name and vital data appear after the husband’s notes, with notes on her following? Move information on the wife into the husband’s paragraph and integrate her notes with his. Next, did you document those notes with citations in parentheses? All citations need to be moved into footnotes (or endnotes if you prefer). Multiple footnotes for the same piece of data should be combined into one note, with semicolons between the different sources. You must also consider the format of names, dates, and places. Small caps are good for names, but your report will probably have a mixture of lower and upper case. Capitalizing names of the parents of husband and wife would be distracting. Place names don’t require a county or state after first use in each sketch, but it’s helpful to the reader to add “County” where appropriate. Postal codes are also distracting. In the Register we spell out the names of months and states in the main text and abbreviate them (except those with five letters or less), with periods, in the children’s paragraph

Family Sketch Picture

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1Michael J. Leclerc and Henry B. Hoff, ed., Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (Boston: NEHGS, 2006). 2See Joan Ferris Curran, Madilyn Coen Crane, and John H. Wray, Numbering Your Genealogy: Basic Systems, Complex Families, and International Kin, National Genealogical Society Special Publication No. 64 (Arlington, Va.: National Genealogical Society, 1999). 3Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1997). The introductory sections of this book are especially valuable. 4The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Cartoon Drawing Of A Family

This book publishes, for the first time in full, the two most revealing of Mark Twain’s private writings. Here he turns his mind to the daily life he shared with his wife Livy, their three daughters, a great many servants, and an imposing array of pets. These first-hand accounts display this gifted and loving family in the period of its flourishing. Mark Twain began to write “A Family Sketch” in response to the early death of his eldest daughter, Susy, but the manuscript grew under his hands to become an exuberant account of the entire household. His record of the childrens’ sayings—“Small Foolishnesses”—is next, followed by the related manuscript “At the Farm.” Also included are selections from Livy’s 1885 diary and an authoritative edition of Susy’s biography of her father, written when she was a teenager. Newly edited from the original manuscripts, this anthology is a unique record of a fascinating family.

Pro Writing Tip

Because I’ve edited two schoolteachers’ memoirs at this point, and the fact that I’m seeing this problem so frequently in their work is concerning me.

So, y’all’re familiar with the em-dash (“—”), semicolon (“;”), and colon (“:”), yes? Good, because I’m gonna tell you how to use ‘em.

Technically speaking, you use the semicolon to set off an independent clause, the colon to set off a dependent clause — i.e. explanation/expansion, according to the dictionary — or a quote or a list, and the em-dash to set off a descriptor. But that can be confusing and hard to recognize when writing, so here’s a more useful rule of thumb:

The em-dash is a hard comma, the semi-colon is a soft period, and the colon... well, we’ll get to that in a second.

See, the em-dash is probably the one you’re either using exactly right and don’t need my help with, or the one you’re confusing with the colon. (Keep in mind, while this information is accurate, there are also different peoples’ takes on the em-dash and all are legitimate. As an editor, this is what I look for; it’s also what some professors will look for. I’ll post an article I found with more ways to use it at the end, but know that this is a complicated piece of punctuation and can be much more versatile than what I’m laying out here.) It’s an aside, a spurt of additional information that you’d imagine being spoken quickly as a bit of background information. It’s also completely unnecessary. What’s inside the em-dashes is what, if you’re trying to lower your word count, you go back and delete mercilessly; this is the biggest proof that it’s not quite the same as a comma, which could potentially bookend an important, but necessarily set-aside, phrase. It also helps lower comma counts. And keep in mind that it isn’t necessary in your work, grammatically speaking, yet it can help with tone. Go to the paragraph with the asterisk (*) for that example/explanation, or just keep going through everything until it pops up.

The semicolon is perhaps the easiest to explain — despite it taking me, personally, the longest time to master. Once you get it, though, you tend to find yourself using it everywhere; it’s just so simple! That’s because all it does is just combine two sentences without a conjunction. So, if you have two sentences where the first leads into the second, why not just soften the period’s pause with a semicolon? It can get addicting, because it’s that easy. Try it! No conjunction needed, and it has the added benefit of just sounding better — less pause than a period, more immediacy than a conjunction.

And now we get to the colon. I’m not going to lie, this one’s the trickest to explain for me. The best I can figure to word it, the colon exists to set off lists — duh, we all know that — but also to indicate non-list, yet non-sentence, thoughts and items. But, it doesn’t work as a comma or an em-dash does. That’s how I generally view it, though: in comparison to the comma and em-dash. As I mentioned above, both of those set off unnecessary but still somewhat important information that can be cut if need be. But a colon always precedes information that is necessary and important. In short, the colon signals to the reader that s/he should pay attention to what follows. The paragraph with the asterisk explains this so much better.

*If you’re still have trouble with when to use em-dashes and colons and commas, consider these three examples:

I was talking to my friends — Dave and Paul.

I was talking to my friends, Dave and Paul.

I was talking to my friends: Dave and Paul.

Okay, now, how did you read them? I will admit it’s a bit odd to have only on em-dash in a sentence, so that may have change things, but the first should sound a lot quicker, as though the speaker remembered at the last second that the reader might not know their names (note: a singular em-dash can also further emphasize, as the link below will explain). The second is a bit calmer and slower, and we can take or leave the importance of their names, although it does somewhat signify that they may be characters showing up later. But the third and last sentence makes the reader think that the sentences following this statement are going to be about, and elaborating on, Dave and Paul; we get a sense of their importance from just the punctuation. Once again, I will acknowledge that the single em-dash may give the readers the same cue, but, once again, em-dashes are generally used in pairs. So, a sentence such as, “I was talking to my friends — Dave and Paul — when I saw my grandma fall,” is probably more accurate to the speed and tone with which the content within em-dashes is delivered/read.

Now, keep in mind that rules will always have exceptions — the biggest ones being dialogue and spoken-style writing — but also keep in mind that, grammatically speaking, you should try to stick to what I’ve outlined above. (Em-dashes are an exception, of course, but they are presented here mostly so that you do not confuse them with the other two.)

Okay, thanks for reading, and have fun with your writing! Experiment with these different punctuation marks and see what feels nice — it can be fun! — or just ignore them entirely, whatever floats your boat. Hope I helped clear up any confusion! :)

Here’s an article I found that goes into all of this and provides more ways to use the em-dash: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/semi-colons-colons-and-dashes/

dissertation copyediting

Every one of us finds it necessary to interact with others through text based communication all the time in the daily routine of our fast paced lives. Fortunately, almost all of us can comfortably communicate by means of SMS, chat, email and printed letters too. These forms of communication do not pose any significant challenges to any of us because we possess a 'reasonable' degree of literacy and writing aptitude that is adequate for such purposes.

It can prove to be an altogether different proposition though when communication requires the composition of a serious written document that has to be presented in a formal style. When such a need arises, many otherwise capable persons may discover that they are not quite able to grapple with this task. After all, not every person can express himself with sufficient eloquence when complicated descriptions, abstract concepts and novel ideas need to be committed to paper or an electronic medium in such a way as to convey the information clearly and in an attention grabbing manner to the intended readership.

If you believe you belong to this category, think again! It is quite possible to make a dramatic improvement to your own writing by observing certain basic rules of composition, and then following it up with some editing and proofreading work, in accordance with the guidelines suggested here. By adhering to these simple rules, which should not prove too difficult to the majority of English speakers, you will be able to create effective written documents that measure up to acceptable literary standards. Only in the case of certain specialized or highly technical documents would you need to seek the services of a professional editor.

The first thing you need to get right is the sequence in which you are going to present all of the information that you wish to convey to the reader. In order to facilitate a ready understanding academic copy-editing services  and grasp of the subject matter on the reader's part, you must arrange the snippets of information so that they all follow in a logical order. When imparting information, you should take particular care not to do anything in the nature of putting the horse before the cart. It is common practice to present matters in a chronological sequence but it may be quite appropriate to depart from this approach if you are convinced that the subject matter could be treated with greater clarity by arranging the information in some other order. Also, make it a point to present only the pertinent information and leave out what is irrelevant.

The next thing you should pay attention to is the sentence structure. If you are not an expert writer, the best way to approach this task is to start writing about the subject using short, simple sentences, while observing the correct order of presentation rigorously. Complete the whole document in this manner and then read it through. It will probably look like it has been penned by a Grade 5 student, but do not be discouraged by this. Now start combining the short sentences into longer sentences by joining together those that relate to the same point or idea. Once you begin doing this, each of the short sentences, which sounded so insipid when read in isolation, becomes more interesting and the writing begins to acquire some character and style. How much of these qualities you can add will depend on the skill with which you weave the words together. Fortunately, this is a skill that can be developed with practice.

Now, exactly how do you set about joining the short sentences together? One way to accomplish this is by using the words listed below:

and, but, because, since, for, or, nor, so, yet

You can also use commas and semicolons with or without the use of additional words like those given below to join short sentences together to build up complex sentences:

therefore, furthermore, in addition, in fact, moreover, however, then, after, nevertheless, though, although, lest, unless, until, while, notwithstanding, despite, consequently

The object of making sentences longer is not to impress people but for the simple reason that complex sentences can usually convey the writer's meaning more effectively and elegantly. Try writing out each complex sentence in two or three different ways by re-ordering the words, and you will likely hit upon an arrangement that expresses the idea clearly and neatly.

Then you need to focus on the grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation. It will take you only 3 or 4 days to brush up on your grammar by visiting and picking up many useful hints and tips from those websites devoted to this topic. It is quicker and easier than trying to learn from textbooks where you would have to wade through a lot of stuff and spend much time separating the wheat from the chaff. After you have taken the trouble to brush up your grammar a bit, you could also get some help from the grammar checker of your word processor. But be cautious, as the corrections suggested by this feature can be frequently misleading! If you make any such corrections, just read out the sentence aloud and check to see if it sounds alright. Use your own version if that sounds better.

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It’s not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

“We didn’t really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do,” says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

“It was like, ‘Someone, please help me write my essay!’ ” she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

“I can write it for you,” they tweeted back. “Send us the prompt!”

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“For me, it was just that the work was piling up,” she explains. “As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. … And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it’s just … the pressure.”

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they’re likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

“Technically, I don’t think it’s cheating,” the student says. “Because you’re paying someone to write an essay, which they don’t plagiarize, and they write everything on their own.”

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she’s plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

“That’s just a difficult question to answer,” she says. “I don’t know how to feel about that. It’s kind of like a gray area. It’s maybe on the edge, kind of?”

Besides she adds, she probably won’t use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they’re purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

“Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest,” cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she’s not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

“I have a friend who writes essays and sells them,” says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. “And my other friend buys them. He’s just like, ‘I can’t handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I’ll do the other three.’ It’s a time management thing.”

The war on contract cheating

“It breaks my heart that this is where we’re at,” sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

“Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious,” Finley says. “It’s part of the brave new world for sure.”

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to “Get instant help with your assignment” and imploring them: “Don’t lag behind,” “Join the majority” and “Don’t worry, be happy.”

“They’re very crafty,” says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they’re from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

“I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!” gloats one. “Save your time, and have extra time to party!” advises another.

“It’s very much a seduction,” says Bertram Gallant. “So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world.”

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

“Yes, just like the little birdie that’s there to help you in your education,” explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who’s now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a “professional essay writing service for students who can’t even.”

Some students just want some “foundational research” to get started or a little “polish” to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn’t keep her up at night.

“These kids are so time poor,” she says, and they’re “missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they’re studying and writing papers.” Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more “well-rounded.”

“I don’t necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it’s not something that bothers me,” says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. “I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well,” she says.

“This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do,” sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it’s not just about “a few bad apples.”

“Instead, what we have is a lot … of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us,” he says. “We know officially what is right and what’s wrong. But really what’s driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing” or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that “everyone’s doing it.”

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students’ behavior.

“Yes, they’re serious mistakes. They’re egregious mistakes,” says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

“But we’re educational institutions,” she adds. “We’ve got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That’s our responsibility. And that’s better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts.”

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document’s metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin’s vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it’s as simple as looking at the document’s name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like “Order Number 123,” and students have been known to actually submit it that way. “You would be amazed at how frequently that happens,” says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

“Think of it as a writing fingerprint,” Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student’s other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

“At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not,” he says, “and you get it really quickly.”

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school’s academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, “we’ll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we’ll have a very hard few years,” she says. “But then the message will get through to students that we’ve got the tools now to find these things out.” Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was “gibberish” and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn’t pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is “buyer beware.”

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it’s wrong.

“If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won’t win,” she says. “What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can’t wear their glasses because we’re afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?”

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about “creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter” and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It’s not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

“We didn’t really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do,” says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

“It was like, ‘Someone, please help me write my essay!’ ” she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

“I can write it for you,” they tweeted back. “Send us the prompt!”

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“For me, it was just that the work was piling up,” she explains. “As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. … And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it’s just … the pressure.”

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they’re likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

“Technically, I don’t think it’s cheating,” the student says. “Because you’re paying someone to write an essay, which they don’t plagiarize, and they write everything on their own.”

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she’s plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

“That’s just a difficult question to answer,” she says. “I don’t know how to feel about that. It’s kind of like a gray area. It’s maybe on the edge, kind of?”

Besides she adds, she probably won’t use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they’re purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

“Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest,” cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she’s not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

“I have a friend who writes essays and sells them,” says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. “And my other friend buys them. He’s just like, ‘I can’t handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I’ll do the other three.’ It’s a time management thing.”

The war on contract cheating

“It breaks my heart that this is where we’re at,” sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

“Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious,” Finley says. “It’s part of the brave new world for sure.”

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to “Get instant help with your assignment” and imploring them: “Don’t lag behind,” “Join the majority” and “Don’t worry, be happy.”

“They’re very crafty,” says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they’re from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

“I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!” gloats one. “Save your time, and have extra time to party!” advises another.

“It’s very much a seduction,” says Bertram Gallant. “So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world.”

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

“Yes, just like the little birdie that’s there to help you in your education,” explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who’s now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a “professional essay writing service for students who can’t even.”

Some students just want some “foundational research” to get started or a little “polish” to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn’t keep her up at night.

“These kids are so time poor,” she says, and they’re “missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they’re studying and writing papers.” Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more “well-rounded.”

“I don’t necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it’s not something that bothers me,” says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. “I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well,” she says.

“This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do,” sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it’s not just about “a few bad apples.”

“Instead, what we have is a lot … of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us,” he says. “We know officially what is right and what’s wrong. But really what’s driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing” or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that “everyone’s doing it.”

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students’ behavior.

“Yes, they’re serious mistakes. They’re egregious mistakes,” says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

“But we’re educational institutions,” she adds. “We’ve got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That’s our responsibility. And that’s better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts.”

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document’s metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin’s vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it’s as simple as looking at the document’s name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like “Order Number 123,” and students have been known to actually submit it that way. “You would be amazed at how frequently that happens,” says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

“Think of it as a writing fingerprint,” Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student’s other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

“At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not,” he says, “and you get it really quickly.”

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school’s academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, “we’ll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we’ll have a very hard few years,” she says. “But then the message will get through to students that we’ve got the tools now to find these things out.” Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was “gibberish” and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn’t pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is “buyer beware.”

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it’s wrong.

“If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won’t win,” she says. “What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can’t wear their glasses because we’re afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?”

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about “creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter” and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

Writing Advice: Semicolons and Clauses

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolonWell, semicolons and commas, but semicolons are the next “NEVER USE THIS!!!” that doesn’t get explained.

Which is awful, because semicolons are amazing and necessary and a part of the language.

Now, before I can explain how to use a semicolon, there’s another thing I need to start with:  Dependent and independent clauses.

An independent clause is a part of a sentence that could be used as its own sentence.  A dependent clause is one that can’t be broken away as its own sentence.

It’s honestly that simple; if you have parts of a sentence and you’re unsure if you should use a semicolon or comma, try putting a period and capitalization and see if it reads okay.

Like, with the previous sentence, “It’s honestly that simple.” works the same as how I had it with the semicolon.  If you don’t like how long a sentence is getting, replace a semicolon with a period and make part of it a separate sentence.  If you want to keep things closely connected, make it one sentence with a semicolon.  

Commas connect dependent clauses.  English is a wily beast - “It’s honestly that simple” is an independent clause, so it gets a semicolon.  “if you have parts of a sentence and you’re unsure if you should use a semicolon or comma” is a dependent clause - if I wrote that by itself it’d read wrong and like something was missing.  

It’s actually dependent on the last section, “try putting a period and capitalization and see if it reads okay”, which you can check by attaching the “if” to the end of different clauses - the one it actually makes sense attached to is the last clause.  Basically:

“Try putting a period and capitalization and see if it reads okay if you have parts of a sentence and you’re unsure if you should use a semicolon or comma.”

^

It makes sense there, that’s the part it’s attached to, it’s not something that stands on its own, so in the original sentence, there’s a comma between it and the clause it’s attached to.  

And that’s the important thing to learn about semicolons, commas, and clauses.

Clauses are building blocks, semicolons, commas, and punctuation are how you put them together.  Semicolons separate things that can stand alone, commas separate lists and things that don’t.  Once you have that, you can start rearranging your sentences to mess with how it reads, what’s connected to what, things like that.  You can use it to change how things read to the audience.  Stuff connected with a semicolon is going to read as more connected than stuff in separate sentences, while stuff in separate sentences gives a mental break and is going to register individually more.  

Technically stringing together too many independent clauses in once sentence can make something hard to follow as everything sorta runs together to the reader, but where that settles is pretty debatable.  Pretty much, if you’re not putting half a page in one sentence, how many independent clauses is too many ends up being a matter of pacing and style and opinion.  A sentence with a lot of independent clauses is NOT a run-on sentence, it just might get clunky to read.  

And if you’ve got a sentence with more than one clause, you can change the order up to decide what you want people’s attention drawn to first or what reads with the emphasis where you want it.  

If you’re messing with the order of clauses - and basically anywhere there’s another verb or a conjunction like “if, and, but, instead” etc., you can possibly break a clause off and rearrange it - and you’re not sure if it works?

Read it out loud to yourself.  If it sounds awkward, rearrange it a bit more.  

Basically, grammar rules are a thing we all learn on a reflexive basis as part of learning language when we learn to talk/read, but we don’t necessarily learn to put words and explanations to it, so reading it back to yourself means that you’re hearing/trying to say something you technically have some “instinctive” knowledge of even if you haven’t been through things like “studying advanced grammar and sentence transformation”.  Rearranging clauses in a sentence gets messy, but even if you don’t know what’s wrong with it exactly, it will sound weird when you read it back, giving you the sign to try and tweak it until it doesn’t.  

And honestly, the only way to get better at figuring out sentence construction is to mess with it and see what works and what doesn't, or what you like and what you don’t like; grab the basic rules, take time, mess with it, write and rearrange things until it gets easier.  

“NEVER DO THIS, ALWAYS DO THIS” is pretty much always going to get into someone else dictating their preferences on style without any actual help on how to make things work.  

Also going to add a couple things here, because there actually are some good resources out there for this:

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/semicolon/

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

Write and Speak for the Ear

You and that I might not expect to write books that are excellent or make speeches. But all of us need something to occur when we talk or write. And, the more we direct our words into the ears of listeners and readers, the higher our odds of getting the results we desire.

By talking or writing to your ear, I suggest that written words may not have more energy than spoken words. After personally and we would rather send them, instead of by sending a message.

Naturally, it isn't possible or practical to send every message. However, if we could catch a few of the nuances of the word we could raise the ability of our messages. When we write to your ear, some changes are undergone by our composing. Paragraphs, sentences, and our words alter in lots of ways.

Consider. The majority of us pause often than when we compose. To catch people pauses, use commas or among another 'slowing' punctuation marks, like colons and semicolons.

Sentences are also meant by writing for the ear. And even fragments of paragraphs. Language tends to spontaneity than term, meaning shorter sentences and fragments as you can imagine.

If we create speeches or demonstrations, A number of the very same principles hold. Particularly if we speak from notes.

Anything we say, once we speak needs to go in through listeners' ears. And if you will permit me to belabor the obvious, we will need to write addresses for listeners' ears, not our mouths. It is possible to call on easy and quick methods. As an instance, use words that are short possible. Words like 'many' instead of 'numerous'; ' 'use' instead of 'use'; and 'desire' instead of 'need'.

By using words instead of technical or jargon words it is also possible to speak. After composing it, step back out of your address, whether you use words that a child will know, and then ask yourself. In addition, we want words which fire up our creativity, words, which paint the canvases of viewers 'minds with pictures that are new. Descriptive words which convey emotion and action, words which push ideas.

Use active verbs and not verbs. Words such as 'is', and '' are'. Additionally, check out the term 'being' and rewrite to eliminate it. Bring in verbs which do something. Now that you have got set into sentences that are short. One sentence. Followed by another sentence. However, every once in while put in a sentence for to decrease the odds of boring your audience and also variety. And, keep the ideas easy within those sentences that are long.

I am biased, I understand. After spending the greater part of a decade studying and writing radio news backup, I think that it's a fantastic idea. Try it.

Write something, read it out loud, and ask yourself about the effect. Necessary, and then read it aloud. Repeat the procedure a couple of times. From the time you complete you should have a bit of writing, even though nobody hears it spoken or reads it.