Jul 14
… you guessed it: under perpetual revision!
UPDATE as of July 2011: Almost a year ago I had the idea to turn this site into the repository for all my teacherly advice about how students might improve their writing (although the best piece of advice I can give anyone is conveyed in the name of this site!)
But then I realized that more and more of my advice had to do with writing for web audiences as well as digital media composition, and the handouts on those topics are on my FutureOfWriting.net site. So I’ve stopped adding new material to this site and will eventually shut it down in its current format and perhaps reprise it as a blog.
For links to all my sites as well as general info on the classes I teach, please visit: AmyGoodloe.com
Mar 13
Below are a few notes from a recent class discussion. I’ll expand this page as we continue discussing the principles of effective presentations.
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Jan 16
Although this isn’t a handout, I thought it was relevant enough to the purpose of the site to be worth posting here. See the full article for some helpful advice on proofreading.
From the January 14, 2011 edition of Inside Higher Ed:
“Editing Matters”
by Carmen Werder and Karen Hoelscher
Editing — oh, whoop-de-do — hardly a topic of intense interest in and of itself. One challenge of focusing on issues such as grammar and usage is that they seem to matter only when they’re not in place. Unlike matters of content, where you can impress readers by developing intriguing ideas and clever metaphors, editing issues seem mundane and not a topic for engaging others seriously — except, perhaps, for rhetoricians or grammarians.
Your readers simply assume you will follow the appropriate conventions until you do something to suggest otherwise.
So why get too worked up about it? After studying the responses of 14 non-academics (business people) to various kinds of errors, Larry Beason suggested why: while the range of reactions tended to be broad, with some patterns of agreement, the ultimate result of error was that readers “constructed a negative ethos of the writer.”
Read the rest of the article…