I am one of those weird people who gets a kick out of an appropriately placed semi-colon. I am the one who corrects my friends, and they come to me for help with editing their papers. The difference between to, too, and two has always been obviously clear and I have difficulty respecting people who can’t take the time to type out later, instead of l8r, in an e-mail or text message. I love the English language so much, that come September, I will have a tattoo expressing my passion.
My favorite things to write are pieces that have a strong sense of passion and emotion behind them. To this day, I think one of my best pieces of writing was a letter that I wrote to president Elson S. Floyd to “express my extreme displeasure at the ultimate decision to eliminate the Department of Theater Arts and Dance from Washington State University”. In this letter, I verbally lambasted him for the lies he told me, demonstrated the lack of respect I was given, and expressed my shame of having to tell my friends that the love of my life, theater, was no longer deemed important at WSU. This letter filled two pages at font size 11 and when I re-read it, it still brings tears to my eyes. The letter I received in return was two paragraphs and did not address any of my concerns. When I am able to express such passion and emotion through the use of words and punctuation on paper, I feel a great sense of accomplishment. It gives me pride knowing that I can convince people of my convictions by just taking the time to craft a piece that I am proud of.
While I do love my formal writing and personal expression, I know that I have some issues that need to be worked on. The biggest of these is commas. I have always tested at the top of my age group in the areas of reading and writing. I passed my WSU writing portfolio with distinction and I currently work at the writing center to help my peers become better writers. When I initially applied to the College of Education, I was denied entrance based on a writing exam I had to do. This was the first time I had ever been denied based on my writing skills. When I returned to my test to see what had gone wrong, I found that the largest culprit was my comma usage. Even the test evaluators had some different comments as to which commas where appropriately placed and which ones were extraneous. I briefly refreshed myself on comma usage and re-took the test, but because my confidence had been shaken so much, the second piece of writing I submitted did not express my thoughts and concepts nearly as well as the first had, but because the punctuation was correct, I was admitted. I was deeply upset that my ideas were not valued as highly as my conventions. I guess sometimes you just have to play the game.
As a native English speaker, sentence structure, formatting, and organization comes naturally for me. As I work in the writing center though I sometimes struggle to explain to an English language learner why something is the way it is. I know I am correct, but why? My goal for this semester is to learn not just how conventions and words interact on a page, but why they do whatever it is they do.
I will always strive to be an effective communicator. Even in informal pieces such as e-mails or text messages or blogs I will use punctuation marks to get my point across. I may break the rules and use an ellipsis to suggest a pause as opposed to an omission, or use parentheses instead of commas to indicate an aside, but I pride myself on ensuring that everybody involved in my communications will completely and clearly understand what I am saying.
Can you hear me now?
Good.
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