Think of punctuation as road signs for your readerSee Appendix 1 (205) in Style: 10 Lessons in

Clarity and Grace

• Punctuation tells them when to pause Comma and semicolonWhen to stopPeriods and colonsWhat you borrow from another writerQuotations Punctuation makes it easier for them to follow

you

• Sentence fragments impede rhetoricFound at the end of the nineteenth century.Not as recent as thought, HIV virus. Scientific discovery revealed.A recent scientific discovery revealed that the

HIV virus originated at the end of the nineteenth century.

• When you craft sentences think in terms of a subject/character, an action and an object.

People waving signs and yelling. Lined the streets in protest.

People waved signs and yelled. They lined the streets in protest.

People waving signs and yelling lined the streets in protest.

• Your style guide asks you to scan the first 8 words of a sentence looking for the subject and verb.

• “The lessons are simple, and we learn them well. Men and women are different, absolute opposites. The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.”

• “The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.”

• Fused or run-on sentences occur when two independent clauses are joined without punctuation or a word to connect them.

• “Black Books” ranks as one of the funniest television series of the last decade it stars and was written by the brilliant comedian Dylan Moran.

• Missing a semicolon or connective comma and conjunction.

• Comma splices join two independent clauses.• “Black Books” ranks as one of the funniest

television series of the last decade, it stars and was written by the brilliant comedian Dylan Moran.

• Remember that you separate complete sentences with a semicolon or a period.

• Remember to distinguish the difference between plurals, possessives and contractions:

• “It’s” serves as a contraction of “ it is” while “its” is the possessive form

It’s always a sound practice to edit your writing.Canada places an intrinsic value in the health

care for its citizens.

Comma Use• Use a comma with a coordinating conjunction to join

independent clauses:Paul Newman was a rare talent onscreen, and his philanthropic

donations were significant.Use a comma to join three or more items in a series: Paul Newman

was an actor, a devoted husband, and a humanitarian.Use a comma to set off a parenthetical element: A lecture about

grammar rules, although it may seem superfluous in a university writing course, is also a useful tool for advanced as well as struggling writers.

Use a comma to set off an introductory subordinate clause: By the end of the semester, you will have learned argument techniques.

Avoid ellipsis except for quotes

• Using ellipsis is the mark of an amateur in essays because its purpose is to signal something omitted or dropped at the end of a sentence. Your job is not to leave unstated assumptions floating around.

The upcoming election makes me wonder about our future. . .

Use them only to cite what may be missing from the middle of a quote [. . .]

Also avoid exclamation points!!!!!!!!! It’s the equivalent of shouting!!!

Quotation Marks

• Double quotation marks open and close any words in an essay that someone else has written or said.

• Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus verifies studies claiming that women speak more than men are in essence a way to present “female loquacity is generally combined with disapproval” as a tacit argument for women to say less.

• Single quotation marks are to signal a quote within a quote.

• Parentheses signal an afterthought and stand inside the period.

Television and radio discussions about the economy have seized a common thread in blaming women’s spending habits (as if something such as weekly pedicures had anything to do with corporate greed on Wall Street).

The dash serves the same purpose.

Page 214 10 ways to end a sentence

• 1. Parentheses: I win (you lose).• 2 Comma alone: I win, you lose.• 3 Conjunction alone: I win and you lose.• 4 Dash: I win—you lose.• 5 Comma+coordinating conjunction I win,

and you lose• 6 Semicolon: I win; you lose.

• 7 Colon: I win: you lose.• 8 Semicolon and coordinating conjunction:I win; and you lose.9 Period and coordinating conjunction:I win. And you lose.10. Period: I win. You lose.

The Paragraph

• A paragraph is a series of related sentences. The first sentence is indented. It has three parts:

• A topic sentence introduces the main idea• Support sentences establishes the idea with

evidence and examples.• The concluding sentence links to the main

idea or to the next paragraph

The first paragraph of “The Myth of Mars and Venus” by Deborah Cameron

“Do men and women speak the same language? Can they ever really communicate? These questions are not new, but since the early 1990s there has been a surge of interest in them. Countless self-help and popular psychology books have been written portraying men and women as alien beings, and conversation between them as a catalogue of misunderstandings. The most

• Successful exponents of this formula, writers like Deborah Tannen and John Gray, have topped the best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Advice on how to bridge the communication gulf between the sexes has grown into a flourishing multimedia industry. John Gray’s official website, for instance, promotes not only his various “Mars and Venus” books, but also seminars, residential retreats, a telephone helpline and a dating service.”

• Ideally, you should be able to read the topic sentence of each paragraph and have a clear development and have it make sense without even reading the paragraph itself.

Cameron’s topic sentence for the second paragraph:“Readers who prefer something a little harder-edged

can turn to a genre of popular science books with titles like Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain, The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don’t Iron.”

• Her topic sentence for the third paragraph:“Writers in this vein are fond of presenting

themselves as latter day Galileos, braving the wrath of the political correctness lobby by daring to challenge feminist orthodoxy which denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different.”

• 1. Myths and Why They Matter• 2. A Time and a Place: Putting Myths in Context• 3. Partial Truths: Why Difference is not the

Whole Story• 4. Worlds Apart? Mars and Venus in Childhood

and Adolescence.• 5. Cross Purposes: The Myth of Male-Female

Understanding

• 6. Back to Nature: Brains, Genes, and Evolution

• 7. Public Speaking: Mars and Venus in Politics and the Workplace

• 8. Doing What Comes Culturally: Gender, Identity, and Style.

• 9. Beyond Mars and Venus?

• Brainstorming/taking notes/making cards.• Drafting not writing.• No need to start at the beginning.• Build and edit.• Examine the sentence level and beyond.• Visually scan the essay without reading it.• Don’t get too invested; you have to be able to

delete.

• When you edit paragraphs ask yourself:Is it unified? Does it support the main idea

expressed in the topic sentence?Is it cohesive? Do the sentences follow in a

logical and clear order?Is it developed? Does it provide examples,

relevant interpretation or quotation?

• Read your essay out loud before you turn it in.• Is your sentence structure repetitive? Does each

sentence begin with “The ad”?• Do you use attributive tags to talk about what the

advertisement does? “The tag line endorses violence against minority groups,” “Featuring bloody hues of red splashed around the prone models, the advertisement argues women are designated victims.”

• Are you clearly stating the argument?

• Do you hone your sentences to include descriptive and specific language instead of empty modifiers such as “good,” “bad,” “many”?

• Do you have at least three examples from each ad to discuss?

• Do you avoid overuse of the first person?• How is the tone?

Student SampleFirst Paragraph

• The ad by Skyy vodka tells a story set in nostalgia to show that the female model is sexually available to the man in the sidelines. The ad tells the story that men can use liquor to make women give in to sex. The ad is saying that successful men have access to beautiful women. The audience is clearly men 21-30.

Works Cited

Chevy Avalanche. Advertisement. Time 14 Oct. 2002:104.Wrangler Jeans. Advertisement. Ads of the

World. 8 Aug. 2008 http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/wrangler_we_are_animals_6

Concision page 109 Lesson 7

• Williams and Nadel identify 5 principles of concision during the editing process:

1. Delete words that mean little or nothing.2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of

other words3. Delete words implied by other words.4. Replace a phrase with a word.5. Change negatives to affirmatives.

Productivity actually depends on certain factors that basically involve psychology more than any particular technology

• Delete meaningless words:

Kind of, actually, particular, really, certain, virtually, various, individual, basically, generally, given, practically

• Delete doubled words:Full and complete, hope

and trust, any and all, true and accurate, each and every, basic and fundamental, hopes and desires, various and sundry, first and foremost

Delete redundant modifiers• Terrible tragedy, basic

fundamentals, final outcome, various different, future plans, free gift, true facts, each individual, consensus of opinion

Delete redundant categories• Period of time, membrane

area, pink in colour, shiny in appearance, educational system, recreational activities

• Size, shape, nature, character, type, time, area, state are all often used redundantly.

Replace a phrase with a word• Carefully read what you

have written > Edit• The thing to do before

anything else > First• Use X instead of Y > Replace• Sequences of subjects and

verbs > clauses

Change negatives to affirmatives• Not different> similarNot the same>different, not

notice>overlook, not many> few, not include>omit, not stop>continue, not often> rarely.

Except when applicants have failed to submit applications without complete documentation, benefits will not be denied.