In high school, a major problem for me was putting evidence and meaning of the quotation before and after I introduced the quotation itself. In other words, I often had only one thought about the quotation and would therefore end up repeating myself in my thoughts. My second problem is voice – I write too much how I speak – slang and with many hyphens. My greatest struggle is finding the right word because I do not have a great vocabulary, so I end up saying the exact same words I often use when I talk too – “often”, “suggests”, “like”, “and stuff”. So I end up using my actual voice way too much when I should be using my professional voice. However, when it comes to writing to a specific audience, I can be very good at that because I have paid close attention in the past to how people address one another. When they talk to their friends, students tend to use a “top dog” technique trying to prove who is coolest. But when a student speaks to a teacher, his voice is much lighter and timid, and he tends to use much better vocabulary. Then, students addressing their families tend to be somewhere in between.
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"My second problem is voice – I write too much how I speak – slang and with many hyphens."
ReplyDelete"heh," as a lot of SLers say. Writing formally is changing and becoming less formal. Even as writing morphs with speaking, a few matters will continue to what concern me more as a writing teacher.
Notably, always to be sure you start early and make a good effort to weigh evidence for a project, rather than try to shoehorn in sources that support a claim you have already decided true.
That said, informality won't "fly" in a lot of courses, Core included. Academics value precision in language almost as much as they do precision in finding evidence. That's why I want "all suitcases unpacked." In the end, the prof is "top dog," albeit a rather dorky dog.