The Elements Of Style By William Strunk Jr.

In the book A Writers Reference, authors Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, experts in English

This book is like a lighthouse that will guide and illuminate you on this turbulent journey of writing. In conjunction with, this book represents the rule of law in English writing, it will explain you the way and how you can approach writing essays without breaking any English writing rule.

So, you’ve got Bywater’s English 1010 class and you don’t know what to write about? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Although Professor Bywater’s class may seem intimidating, it truly is one of the most rewarding classes you will take at DSU, and it will help you throughout your college career when it comes to writing papers. Professor Bywater’s class comes with an amazing textbook titled Rules of Thumb and a checklist, or Writing Guide 101, and this checklist will save your life and your paper. Using transition sentences between paragraphs, understanding pronouns, and using the correct point of view are the most important points in Professor Bywater’s checklist, and I will show you the correct usage and implementation of all three. Read and retain the following information and you will succeed in English 1010 and gain the skills you need to succeed in college making your life, and your papers, easier.

I read the book Pretties By: Scott Westerfeld, the book is about how a young girl named Tally was living in what she thought to be a perfect world. Although, something in her life seemed to be missing she couldn’t place a finger on it. Tally was part of the “crims” a very special and popular group. She end up finding two pills left for her, they were the cure to being “pretty minded”. She shared the pills with another person, Zane. Zane is the boy she fell in love with, they have a strong bond of love. Along Tally’s journeys her friend, Shay, becomes jealous of Tally. Shay wanted to be cured, just like Tally. There became a strong tension, that put the two of them against each other. After Tally left a lot had changed around New Pretty Town. Tally had made it finally to the New Smoke, and was reunited with Zane. Not long after, special circumstances

The following design was inspired by the subsequent excerpts from Elise de Wolfe’s book, A House in Good Taste. Elise de Wolfe was one of the first recognized interior decorators. In her book she discusses many decorating tips, successes, and mistrials she has discovered with experience. While the book was written in 1913 and design styles have changed drastically since then, I have taken many of her ideas and have adapted them to fit a more modern design style. I chose to adapt her ideas from the chapter A Light, Gay Dining Room due to the fact that a lot of de Wolfe’s hardest projects, yet biggest successes have been with dining rooms.

Wild Style (1983) was a film that documented the real world of hip hop before most people even knew what hip hop was. This movie brings about the four crucial elements of hip hop - emceeing, graffiti, break-dancing, and deejaying. These features are the backdrop to the story of a graffiti artist named Raymond who lives in the South Bronx that goes by the name “Zoro”, who is played by well-known New York graffiti artist Lee Quinones. The movie goes through the tribulations of his life and relationship with Rose, while showing some of the historical aspects of hip hop.

Sometimes, when writing, we tend to focus on creating graceful and aesthetic sentences that, even though are very appealing, are not relevant to the point we are trying to make and only distract and discourage our reader. In “Beware the Trap of Bore-geous Writing”, Ayelet Waldman calls this “bore-geous” writing and describes it as the result of focusing on the beauty of our sentences, disregarding their significance in the whole writing (103). All sentences should play a specific role and contribute to support the point the writer is trying to make. She emphatically makes her case when she

A piece of writing is much more than just words on a page. Just as a potter carefully molds and carves every detail and shape into a piece of art, so does a writer. Each comma, dash, antecedent, and fragment is picked cautiously. Each grammatical choice brings to pass a different rhetorical effect creating an irreplaceable and unique piece of art filled with fine detail. Rhetorical grammar is the clay of a potter. One must have it to begin and it has a variety of options to choose from. A person’s ability to understand and use grammar is as the technique owned by the craftsmen. Just as clay can be brittle and weak, so can grammar if used incorrectly or not to its best ability. The most amazing work is not made simply by chance but because of

This is because as writers, most of us become frighten to what our readers will think of “this” and “that”. With this constant way of thinking our writing will never improve because we won’t be interested in the actual story being implemented, instead we will substitute that attention towards the thoughts of our readers. Just like King claimed, “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need of define some sort of writing as “good” and other sorts as “bad’, is fearful behavior” (King, 128). This argumentative analogy demonstrates how constant fear becomes the dilemma between a reader’s decision to continuously keep reading or to put the book back on the shelf. Constant fear in any writer’s report, becomes the cause of having the need to go to thesaurus to change their vocabulary, yet having no idea if the “substituted” word works. This becomes useful in realizing that one must be able to write without that constant deliberation of questioning ourselves as writers. Perspicuously, another tip that would be useful is having the proper organization/style. Every writer without counting if they are authors or not, are prone to having a style, some sort of organization that defines them. However, to many unassertive eyes’, difficultness appears when knowing the length of your paragraphs. With knowing the length of your paragraphs, it all comes down to one simple portion of this whole writing process? A simple portion that consists of the topic. If you are writing an expository prose, you shall know that the paragraphs will be a bit longer than the rest. Expository proses, whom are continuous paragraphs that “contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first” (King, 130). Nonetheless, you would never find an expository writing piece with two sentences per paragraph; however, what about fictional stories? Within

Although Summer was coming to a close, the smothering heat had yet to subside. As a result, Alfred Jones was spending his last few days of freedom, relaxing on top his cherry red Chevy truck, sipping cold bottles of soda and whistling old tunes. He kept going over a particular phrase mentioned to him again and again, that vacation always seemed to fly by, but these past weeks, every hour seemed to drag on until every day seemed meaningless. He brought the rim of the bottle to his mouth and surveyed Calamity look-out. Lush trees, cracked roads, obnoxiously coloured houses... Same old, same old. It drove Alfred insane, he was never able to stand the peacefulness of it all, everything in (think of town name later) was so... unimaginative. It

Zinsser cites White, Mencken, and Herndon to display the differing forms of effective writing. White’s writing is effective through refreshing diction and his passionate tone about poultry. Mencken uses a different approach by being a bold and expressing his view point—no matter how much they differed from the “popular” opinions of the time. Herndon has an “artless style” where he purposely breaks grammar rules to get his point across. I believe Mencken’s style is the most effective, because it is bold, honest, and memorable. As much as he enjoys

English is a framework of general agreements, working to support a patchwork of various forms and types of language that we call English. After reading “Bodi’s Pet Peeves” and “Do Not Do/Learn,” I recognized most of the things listed, but realized that most of the time they are ignored. Improper English is used throughout a majority of people’s days, and with this convention of English, we ignore proper mechanics. Lack of proper English mechanics causes the use in essays and writing assignments to suffer because of the transition between proper and improper use.

I’ve always struggled to break the boundaries entangled within the composition of traditional essays. Between AP Language/Literature courses and AP U.S. History, my writing had become noticeably formulaic; I relied heavily on templates and felt awkward abandoning the traditional five paragraph essay. Although the formulaic way of writing assisted in my capability to critically recognize the difference between opinion and evidence, the patterns were not helpful in developing my organizational skills. My ability to form argumentative ideas from given prompts strengthened, while unity and coherence within paragraphs proved to be my downfall. It was not until my second semester of English at the University of Georgia that I noticed my organization was not comprehensible to the reader. Some paragraphs were like mazes; they left the reader wondering how the first sentence connected to the following sentence. Along with organization, English 1102 helped identify my lack of transitional phrases within paragraphs and the tendency for my argument to shift. Nonetheless, this course has highlighted my strengths as a writer, including my ability to incorporate evidence so that it supports an intelligent, challenging thesis.

Simon states “some people are pleased to call linguistic evolution was almost always a matter of ignorance prevailing over knowledge” (209). This statement shows the opposing view of the liberal -linguist. On the other hand, the other group of people the opposition of the liberal-linguist mentioned by Simon believe that “there is such thing as Standard English” (208). This makes the works of this article balanced and truthful. As a conservative, Simon wants individuals to preserve the English language and not just go with any fad that may come upon us. Henceforth, Simon wants us to teach ourselves and he stresses training yourself. Though Simon presents favoritism toward what he describes as the minority or the conservatives. “we are here… to arrest unnecessary change” (209). He accurately reveals the two viewpoints regarding good English usage.

It is not uncommon to say that grammar instruction plays an important role in language teaching. Regarding the status and importance of grammar teaching, a variety of opinions have been made. Batstone (1994) states that “language without grammar would be chaotic: countless words without the indispensable guidelines for how they can be ordered and modified” (p. 4). More vividly, Wang (2010) makes two similes. She compares grammar to the frame of a house, which is a decisive factor to ensure the solidness of it. Additionally, she regards grammar as a walking stick, whose function is to help and support students to learn English. Thus, the nature of grammar instruction manifests its own significance as it helps students