Grammar, Style, and Absolute Phrases
By Jonah Charney-Sirott, Writing Consultant
When revising your work, it’s important to proofread for
grammatical errors, as well as for stylistic concerns. What is the difference
between the two, you might be wondering? A grammatical error is one that breaks
a rule of the English language, an error that can be definitively noted as right or wrong. Style, on the other hand, is much more subjective. Take
passive voice, for example. Rules-wise, there is nothing incorrect when it
comes to the phrase “A qualitative approach was utilized to conduct the study.”
Government officials, for example, speak this way all the time (“mistakes were
made”). However, APA prefers students
write in the active voice instead.
Now that we’ve got the difference between grammar and style
out of the way, let’s discuss what are known as absolute phrases. An absolute phrase is an example of a grammatical
rule, not a style issue, because if you use an absolute phrase incorrectly,
your sentence will likely confuse your reader.
Community: Your Secret Weapon
By Jamie Patterson, Dissertation Editor
I don’t
want you to be afraid, but only a little over half of all students who enroll
in a doctoral program actually complete the program with a degree (Wao & Onwuegbuzie,
2011). Those who do complete the degree tend to take about double to quadruple
the amount of time prescribed by most programs, with the delay occurring during
the dissertation writing process.
As a
dissertation editor I work with student writers who are at all stages of writing
the dissertation. They all approach me with the same plea: tell me how to write this monster of a document.
I’m
afraid the only advice I can give to them, and now to you, is simply: write.
Seek out help and write. The seeking out help part is the key, and here at
Walden we’re trying to develop services that will provide relevant help at just
the right time. For instance, we have been piloting capstone study writing
groups and are hopeful that this will be a service available to all students in
the near future. For now, if you are an EdD student in your first course of
8090 we have a pilot writing group beginning July 16 and running for 6 weeks.
If you’re interested in learning more, email us at writinggroups@waldenu.edu. If you
don’t meet the criteria for this pilot, not to worry, there are options for you
too.
Calling All International and Multilingual Students!
By Kayla Skarbakka, Writing Consultant
Every so often, we tutors receive e-mails from students
expressing concerns about writing in English. “Some of my issues are related to
translation,” a student recently noted. “My first language is Spanish, so you
can imagine how difficult it is to write a paper in English.”
As someone with an embarrassingly limited knowledge of other
languages, I certainly can imagine the challenge. There’s no way around it:
scholarly writing is tough. The sophisticated vocabulary, tone, and structure
needed to write clearly about complex ideas can prove arduous even if you’re writing
in your first language. When you’re writing in a second (or third or fourth)
language, the challenge is, of course, all the greater.
Free Yourself in the First Draft
By Julia Cox, Writing Consultant
American writer Isaac Singer once lamented, “The wastebasket
is a writer’s best friend.” Even though we now have a metaphorical wastebasket
via the delete button, Singer’s sentiment remains true. Sometimes the best
route to a good piece of writing is a truly horrible and scattered first draft.
There is a grand illusion that writing of any kind is a
singular event—that The Great Gatsby
was written in one sitting, or that Will Smith composed the lyrics to "The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air" on a whim. All forms
of writing take time and revision, academic papers included. Setting aside the
pressure to produce an immediately perfect piece can actually create a more
effective drafting process. Here are
some tips for getting that first draft down—minus the pressure:
The Northwest Passage, or Why You Should Cite Yourself Only Sparingly
By
Matt Smith, Writing Consultant
To attain a graduate degree,
especially a terminal degree, is to specialize in a chosen field. When you
begin your study, you move from the general (an interest in teaching, let's say,
or psychology) to the specific (enhancing your classroom methods with
differentiated instruction, for example, or studying the use of
cognitive-behavioral therapy in treating substance abuse).
Developing your
capstone project necessarily involves the discovery of new scholarly terrain,
and it makes sense that, as an explorer in the wild, you would strive to be as
resourceful as possible in these efforts; after all, you have no idea whether
there’s water or sand over the horizon. In this spirit, students working on
their capstones or other large projects often want to use work they’ve already
created (course papers, capstones from prior degrees, etc.) as building blocks
for the work they’re really interested in.
For example, rather than rereading Bandura’s
writing on social-cognitive theory, which you read two semesters ago and wrote
a five-page paper about, you might want to reuse your ideas from that paper and
get down to business researching the cutting-edge stuff recently published in
major journals. As an intrepid explorer, you must have faith in your powers of
deduction and reasoning—after all, that’s how you managed to navigate your way to
this new territory in the first place.
However, your understanding of
something—anything—shifts over time and depends greatly on your perspective and
circumstances; how you think about a place you’ve never been to is inherently
different from how you think of it once you’re there. In other words, you should avoid relying on your previous work because
the way you look at a subject now will almost certainly be different from the
way you looked at it before.
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