Walden University Writing Center

Where instructors and editors talk writing.

By Brian Timmerman, Senior Writing Specialist

The strength of any piece of writing (fiction or non) is dependent on the strength of its narrative. Plain and simple. I might even have that put on my tombstone: “Here lies Brian Timmerman: The strength of any piece of writing (fiction or non) is dependent on the strength of its narrative.” Seriously.

And keep in mind, this is not just me telling you this. It’s smart people too. As Mark Turner (2001) concluded in The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, story (the same lowly technique used by, yes, schlock writers like Danielle Steele) is still the primary mode in which our brains organize information. To use any other method to organize a paper, any paper, he argued, would be ridiculous, counterintuitive to the way we process information (Turner, 2001).

So, a DDP should read like a story?

Yes.

A Praxis?

Story.

Even a KAM?

Yup.

What about a CRS-7?

You made that up didn’t you?

Yes, as simple as it sounds, everything you write needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs to, as our own Iris Yob (2007) pointed out, tell a story, and “you...need to follow that story line from beginning to end” (p. 24). It needs to introduce characters (typically a specific demographic that you think is in trouble), and have a plot (a way to get your reader to understand some sort of solution for the characters). And for God’s sake, it needs to have some sort of moral (i.e. “Revoke NCLB,” “We should be less reliant on corn-based products”).

And remember: The strength of any piece of writing (fiction or non) is dependent on the strength of its narrative.

By Jeff Zuckerman, Writing Center Director

Students occasionally ask the writing staff about our favorite books on writing. I hesitate to recommend books to students: To me reading about writing can be another excuse not to write.

But because you asked, here goes:

For grammar help the leading contenders are (no surprise here) The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss—but do get the American version. A couple others are Comma Sense Richard Lederer and John Stone, and, as far as I’m concerned, the best grammar book around because it’s the funniest: Woe Is I by Patricia O’Conner. Dr. Laurel Walsh on our staff recommends Grammar Sucks by Joann Kimes, which Laurel says is adult-themed and offensive. Now there’s a grammar book for a snowy night.

If you’re looking for a couple of great books on writing style, Senior Dissertation Editor Martha King recommends William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well, while Editor Jen Johnson has enjoyed Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. The author is one of my heroes, Joseph Williams, at the University of Chicago, and I’ve used that book when I’ve taught a graduate editing course.

Senior Writing Specialist Amber Cook offered this endorsement of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: “The focus is on the process of writing (revisions, motivation, that kind of thing), and it's super readable.” Amber added the caveat that Ms. Lamott swears a lot.

Two other books that popped to mind were The Craft of Research, recommended by Dissertation Editor Tim McIndoo, an excellent book at one time required of all MSEd students at Walden, and The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language by Mark Turner, and recommended by Senior Writing Specialist Brian Timmerman. I skimmed the first chapter online, “Bedtime With Shahrazad,” and immediately saw its entertaining, readable, and thoughtful way of discussing storytelling as a powerful means of expository writing.

As for me? My new favorite book is Death Sentences: The Decay of Public Language by an Australian writer, Don Watson. Thirty doctoral students learned about Mr. Watson’s rant during my most recent “Politics and the Junk English” presentation at the Dallas residency. (And say? If you found the copy that I left on a Delta flight, I’d be grateful if you mailed it to me.)

My next read will be Past Dark. Jen told me author Bonnie Friedman addresses topics that affect writers of all stripes, including writer’s block and (ah-hem) procrastination.

I mean it. I’ll read it when I get around to it. I really will.

By M. Laurel Walsh, Writing Center Faculty

The problem with human communication is that fully flawed humans are doing it. One person’s constructive feedback is another person’s flagellation. It is easy to see how individual interaction can become protracted miscommunication when emails sent to large numbers of people are available to be misinterpreted by any or all of the recipients. Mind the ever tempting blind carbon copy. It is the siren call of the email communication and must be used sparingly. You do not want information that an individual couldn’t possibly know (unless it had secretly been also sent to them) being discussed where you are not.

Anything that is sent from a work computer has implications for work. Professional communication requires rigid and inflexible guidelines regarding what is permitted. Any company can pay a forensic computer detective to look at what employees have been sending from the office and what has been sent to those individuals. Unprofessional communication is not just a bad idea; it has resulted in litigation that was not even physically possible twenty years ago.

It is important to really double check to be sure of who you scroll down and click in your To: section. A Human Resource manager at a St. Paul healthcare company recently discovered that she was sending hilarious furry animal photos to Steven Mitchell (colleague) and not to her intended Stephen Mitchell (cousin). Spelling is everything, so make sure to carefully survey all of the subheadings and body of an email before sending. Spell check is not just a good idea; it is a must. Even then, reading your email quickly out loud before you press the send button is a vital revision tool that can catch things that scanning with your eyes would not. If no one is around to hear you, read with verve; if you are in a crowded office, mutter inaudibly but make sure that important messages are carefully reviewed. The good news is that many of the most egregious email offences are easily avoided. We at the Walden Writing Center hold these e-truths to be self-evident:

1. Civility can quickly erode in the absence of face-to-face interaction. Save to drafts any email communication you compose in haste after experiencing a strong emotional response to a professional email.

2. Email is to letter as Instant Messaging (IMing) is to texting. Do not be impatient if you do not get an immediate response to an email. Text or IM a person if you need an instant reaction.

3. Use salutations. It takes two seconds to write a person’s name at the top of the email, and it will increase the warmth level exponentially. Use an exit tag line before your name. Consider the email as part of the letter family of correspondence and remember to sign off. (Never sign off on a text; always sign off on an email.)

4. Recognize your client or colleague more formally in email correspondence than they do you. If they begin to use your first name, use their full name one last time. If they twice send their first name as an exit line, then switch from “Mr. Smith” to “Stuart”. Email is the place to take the higher ground and resist the temptation to become more casual than the previous email response.

5. People in offices across the hall from each other have created havoc via email. When it is not going to be too physically difficult (your boss is not in Hong Kong), speak to actual humans regarding tricky or unpleasant situations. Such conversations do not leave a permanent trail across a computer’s hard drive.

6. Never respond to professional emails if you’ve been to Friday night happy hour. (It seems to go without saying, but I’m still blushing from emails I’ve been exposed to that turn out to be written by less-than-sober individuals.) Would you answer a call from the boss in a compromised situation? The same logic should apply, but for some unfathomable reason does not when it comes to email.

7. Don’t just avoid all contact with a problematic piece of communication. One client admitted to stacking a folder with increasingly frantic emails from a colleague, so that the problem had at least become “out of sight”, but it was clearly not mitigated. Dealing with a difficult email is like ripping off a band-aid; it’s best done quickly and kindly.

8. Forwards should never be sent to professional colleagues under penalty of death. If you feel you should send a message to your entire address book, resist the urge. (Having said that, some people have great taste in forwards and amuse us, we call these people our friends. Make sure to open those emails at home and never leave evidence of your casual communication on work devices if possible. One man’s funny joke is another man’s discrimination lawsuit.)

9. NEVER USE ALL CAPS. This is another seemingly obvious thing that repeatedly comes up in email gaffe escalations that spiral into full blown feuds. Caps used even as one word looks like it is yelling at the reader. Avoid the caps lock email at all cost. It does not look assertive; it looks like you need Anger Management for Dummies.

10. Subject lines rock. Use them with precision, and a lot of your fellow e-citizens will welcome you to their inboxes (and as an added bonus, these folks will be able to find you in their searches of the trash/sent folders of their web accounts if you get accidently placed in the trash or marked as spam).

By Kari Wold, Writing Specialist

We have all written The Ugly Paper. Yes, I’ll admit it. I was a journalism major, I’ve been teaching writing for years, and I’m working on my PhD, but I still mess up. I have acute, painful memories of clutching poorly-written papers to my chest and sobbing in bewilderment over why these papers weren’t loved in offices of uncomfortable-looking professors.

The thing is, though, sometimes papers can be train wrecks. We may or may not know the reasons behind the Ugly, either. At times, we write Ugly because we’re just busy. I get it: I’m in a full-time doctorate program with an assistantship and work as a writing specialist. Or at times, life emergencies force us to just do the best we can to cope and have to dash off some Ugly in the process. Other times, we pour our hearts into a paper and get feedback deeming it Ugly while we’re left cocking our heads in bewilderment with a vague mandate to improve.

No matter the reason, summoning the will to fix these rejected papers can be tough. But because fixing the Ugly papers in our lives is an important step in showcasing our credibility as scholars, I’ve gathered some road-tested ways that show how I and many others have gotten through this process:

1. Psych yourself up. Look, you’ll need to go into some mental trickery here. Make yourself love your topic, fix your mind on an end goal, and check your attitude to make sure it’s at least vaguely positive. Your attitude will creep into what you’re putting on the page, so it’s important you’re engaged in what you’re writing. Additionally, this fixing the Ugly process will go much more quickly if you’re at least faking excitement.

2. Remind yourself text is not precious. Yes, it’s tough to change or to even delete the text you initially wrote. But you need to change the Ugly in order to improve it, and in general, pieces drastically improve with some good revision. I promise! What helps me emotionally in this process is creating a separate MS Word document where I can paste all my “deleted” text. It makes me feel a bit better to know that I’m not really deleting it…

Another trick to get yourself removed from your own work is to make your work look like someone else’s, as it’s so much easier to edit someone else’s piece. Put your piece in a different font, a different size, or a different color. Not only is it amusing (and a great procrastination method), it will help you be more effective when tearing into the Ugly.

3. Sit. Stay! Use your time wisely. My house is never cleaner than when I need to fix a paper, and when a deadline is looming, there is no greater draw than the Internet. But we all know our high-energy mental hours, and those high-energy mental hours need to be spent in front of academic work. You’ll thank yourself later.

4. Make checklists. To be an effective editor, you need to know what you’re reading for when you go through a piece before you can hope to change the Ugly. Think about what your professors or your friendly neighborhood writing folks keep mentioning. List those in an MS Word document and group them into APA, writing, and content categories. You can then go through your work once for APA, once for writing, and once for content, looking at each checklist in tweaking the Ugly. It’s actually fun for me, but because I’m a huge nerd, you might have to psych yourself up for this.

5. Let it cool. When you’re done fixing the Ugly, it’s tempting to send off the assignment and forget it ever existed. The temptation is strong, I know! But if you have time, let the assignment cool a bit. Go off and do something completely different. Move your body around; you’ve earned a bit of a breather. Then, come back and read your work again. Read your work out loud. You’ll surprise yourself by what you find.

You may well be rolling your eyes by now as what I described above isn’t exactly a picnic of a process. But hey: The reaction is understandable because summoning the will to fix the Ugly is tough for everyone. But once we actually stop fussing, sit down, and start working, we might very well come up with something much less Ugly than before. In fact, we might come up with something quite Beautiful.

By Sarah Matthey

I was recently at the Lansdowne residency and while talking to students, I found that we discussed the same daunting writing issue in seminars, advising sessions, and in the labyrinth halls of the National Conference Center. Our discussions centered around the use of the scholarly voice. Many students were frustrated by trying to attain what they viewed as unattainable: the graduate-level academic style of writing. We writing specialists (nerds, grammar-obsessed, otherwise unemployable English majors, you can pick) talk all the time about the importance of the scholarly voice. We use that catchy phrase in our presentations and when providing feedback to students (not when writing blogs—this is clearly in the informal voice). But, what does this phrase really mean? How does one describe the scholarly voice? Defining this concept was more difficult than I thought it was going to be. However, after much internal debate (and internal monologue), I think I came up with a quantifiable list of what it means to write in the scholarly voice.

The first component of writing in the scholarly voice concerns vocabulary usage and word choice. One way to help determine what kind of language you should use is to consider your audience. When writing in a graduate community, the writer is addressing a formal audience. This means that casual forms of speech like slang (dang), metaphors (my heart is a lonely hunter of articles and the library is an emptied forest), similes (the due date is looming like a storm cloud), or cliché phrases (those researcher’s findings were as clear as mud) should be avoided. These types of speech not only detract from your academic voice, but they may also be confusing to the reader. A metaphor or a cliché phrase may mean something different to everyone who reads it. Along those same lines, contractions (won’t, shouldn’t, can’t, etc) should also be avoided because they are casual forms of speech. Eliminating informal language from your paper will not only make you sound more professional, but it will also make your language more clear and concise.

In addition to removing casual language from your paper, you should also consider removing unnecessary pronouns. Some pronouns to avoid include the personal you (as in, you are reading this blog), the editorial we (we all know this or that to be true), and the over reliance on the personal I (I know how much you must enjoy reading what I wrote and I would appreciate you telling my boss). When a writer uses the personal you, they appear to be speaking directly to the reader (like I am doing now. See? It’s distracting), as if they are having a personal conversation with them. This is too personal for a scholarly paper.

APA 3.09 states that broad uses of the word we may leave readers confused about who the we encompasses (p. 69). For example, if a student wrote “We need to exercise greater self-control,” the reader is not sure whom the plural we might encompass. Does it apply to the reader or to some unseen other person? Try to use the proper noun whenever possible.

Finally, while some assignments require that the personal I be used (like reflection papers, assignments that require a personal example, or when the writer has conducted research himself or herself), academic papers require the third person voice to be used. Use of the third person is objective and will sound more scientific. Although personal feelings and experiences are valid, they can be difficult or even impossible to support with the literature and may not be understood by a reader. It is best to try to use nouns instead of pronouns in academic writing.

The final component of scholarly writing is the use of unbiased language. As a social scientist, everything you say must be objective and supported by evidence. APA 3.07 states that arguments should be presented “in a professional, noncombative manner” (p.66). Writing using unbiased and neutral/noncombative language can be tricky. Be on the lookout for making broad generalizations; avoid using over-sweeping adjectives (outstanding, obvious), adverbs (really, clearly), and qualifiers (some, many, a bit), in particular, always and never. Qualifiers lead to generalizations, which can be demonstrative of bias. Try to avoid using emotional (I am deeply moved by Sarah’s comments) or inflammatory (I am sick and tired of APA) language. Instead of saying that Smith’s findings were terrible, embarrassing, horrific, and so on, state that Smith’s findings were questionable.

Be sure that everything you say is supported by evidence. If you make an assertion, be sure that a citation is nearby. Try to think of a Writing Specialist sitting on your shoulder say, “Oh yeah? Can you prove it?” Using unbiased language and supporting your assertions will show that you are an effective, scientific researcher, and that you are serious about contributing to the scholarship in your field.

Writing as at the graduate level is different from writing at an undergraduate level. Mastering the unbiased voice and supporting everything with evidence is challenging. However, like everything else, it will get easier with practice. So as you sit down tonight (or whenever, this is an asynchronous program) to craft that literature review, remember to challenge yourself to be the best social scientist you can be and that graduate-level, scholarly writing is not unattainable.