Think of punctuation as road signs
for your reader
See Appendix 1 (205) in Style: 10
Lessons in Clarity and Grace
• Punctuation tells them when to pause
Comma and semicolon
When to stop
Periods and colons
What you borrow from another writer
Quotations
Punctuation makes it easier for them to follow
you
• Sentence fragments impede rhetoric
Found at the end of the nineteenth century.
Not as recent as thought, HIV virus.
Scientific discovery revealed.
A recent scientific discovery revealed that the
HIV virus originated at the end of the
nineteenth century.
• When you craft sentences think in terms of a
subject/character, an action and an object.
People waving signs and yelling.
Lined the streets in protest.
People waved signs and yelled. They lined the
streets in protest.
People waving signs and yelling lined the streets in
protest.
• Your style guide asks you to scan the first 8
words of a sentence looking for the subject
and verb.
• “The lessons are simple, and we learn them
well. Men and women are different, absolute
opposites. The heroic prince can never be
confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or
Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he
does at all, let alone better.”
• “The moral of the story should, one would
think, preclude a happy ending. It does not.
The moral of the story is the happy ending. It
tells us that happiness for a woman is to be
passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It
tells us that happiness is for the woman who
is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a
good woman is a happy woman. It tells us
that the happy ending is when we are ended,
when we live without our lives or not at all.”
• Fused or run-on sentences occur when two
independent clauses are joined without
punctuation or a word to connect them.
• “Black Books” ranks as one of the funniest
television series of the last decade it stars and
was written by the brilliant comedian Dylan
Moran.
• Missing a semicolon or connective comma and
conjunction.
• Comma splices join two independent clauses.
• “Black Books” ranks as one of the funniest
television series of the last decade, it stars and
was written by the brilliant comedian Dylan
Moran.
• Remember that you separate complete
sentences with a semicolon or a period.
• Remember to distinguish the difference
between plurals, possessives and
contractions:
• “It’s” serves as a contraction of “ it is” while
“its” is the possessive form
It’s always a sound practice to edit your writing.
Canada places an intrinsic value in the health
care for its citizens.
Comma Use
• Use a comma with a coordinating conjunction to join independent
clauses:
Paul Newman was a rare talent onscreen, and his philanthropic
donations were significant.
Use a comma to join three or more items in a series: Paul Newman
was an actor, a devoted husband, and a humanitarian.
Use a comma to set off a parenthetical element: A lecture about
grammar rules, although it may seem superfluous in a university
writing course, is also a useful tool for advanced as well as
struggling writers.
Use a comma to set off an introductory subordinate clause: By the
end of the semester, you will have learned argument techniques.
Avoid ellipsis except for quotes
• Using ellipsis is the mark of an amateur in essays
because its purpose is to signal something
omitted or dropped at the end of a sentence.
Your job is not to leave unstated assumptions
floating around.
The upcoming election makes me wonder about
our future. . .
Use them only to cite what may be missing from
the middle of a quote [. . .]
Also avoid exclamation points!!!!!!!!!
It’s the equivalent of shouting!!!
Quotation Marks
• Double quotation marks open and close any
words in an essay that someone else has written
or said.
• Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus
verifies studies claiming that women speak more
than men are in essence a way to present
“female loquacity is generally combined with
disapproval” as a tacit argument for women to
say less.
• Single quotation marks are to signal a quote
within a quote.
• Parentheses signal an afterthought and stand
inside the period.
Television and radio discussions about the
economy have seized a common thread in
blaming women’s spending habits (as if
something such as weekly pedicures had
anything to do with corporate greed on Wall
Street).
The dash serves the same purpose.
Page 214 10 ways to end a sentence
•
•
•
•
•
1. Parentheses: I win (you lose).
2 Comma alone: I win, you lose.
3 Conjunction alone: I win and you lose.
4 Dash: I win—you lose.
5 Comma+coordinating conjunction I win,
and you lose
• 6 Semicolon: I win; you lose.
• 7 Colon: I win: you lose.
• 8 Semicolon and coordinating conjunction:
I win; and you lose.
9 Period and coordinating conjunction:
I win. And you lose.
10. Period: I win. You lose.
The Paragraph
• A paragraph is a series of related sentences.
The first sentence is indented. It has three
parts:
• A topic sentence introduces the main idea
• Support sentences establishes the idea with
evidence and examples.
• The concluding sentence links to the main
idea or to the next paragraph
The first paragraph of “The Myth of
Mars and Venus” by Deborah Cameron
“Do men and women speak the same language?
Can they ever really communicate? These
questions are not new, but since the early
1990s there has been a surge of interest in
them. Countless self-help and popular
psychology books have been written
portraying men and women as alien beings,
and conversation between them as a
catalogue of misunderstandings. The most
• Successful exponents of this formula, writers like
Deborah Tannen and John Gray, have topped the
best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Advice on how to bridge the communication gulf
between the sexes has grown into a flourishing
multimedia industry. John Gray’s official website,
for instance, promotes not only his various “Mars
and Venus” books, but also seminars, residential
retreats, a telephone helpline and a dating
service.”
• Ideally, you should be able to read the topic
sentence of each paragraph and have a clear
development and have it make sense without
even reading the paragraph itself.
Cameron’s topic sentence for the second
paragraph:
“Readers who prefer something a little harderedged can turn to a genre of popular science
books with titles like Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain,
The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don’t
Iron.”
• Her topic sentence for the third paragraph:
“Writers in this vein are fond of presenting
themselves as latter day Galileos, braving the
wrath of the political correctness lobby by
daring to challenge feminist orthodoxy which
denies that men and women are by nature
profoundly different.”
• 1. Myths and Why They Matter
• 2. A Time and a Place: Putting Myths in
Context
• 3. Partial Truths: Why Difference is not the
Whole Story
• 4. Worlds Apart? Mars and Venus in
Childhood and Adolescence.
• 5. Cross Purposes: The Myth of Male-Female
Understanding
• 6. Back to Nature: Brains, Genes, and
Evolution
• 7. Public Speaking: Mars and Venus in Politics
and the Workplace
• 8. Doing What Comes Culturally: Gender,
Identity, and Style.
• 9. Beyond Mars and Venus?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Brainstorming/taking notes/making cards.
Drafting not writing.
No need to start at the beginning.
Build and edit.
Examine the sentence level and beyond.
Visually scan the essay without reading it.
Don’t get too invested; you have to be able to
delete.
• When you edit paragraphs ask yourself:
Is it unified? Does it support the main idea
expressed in the topic sentence?
Is it cohesive? Do the sentences follow in a
logical and clear order?
Is it developed? Does it provide examples,
relevant interpretation or quotation?
• Read your essay out loud before you turn it in.
• Is your sentence structure repetitive? Does each
sentence begin with “The ad”?
• Do you use attributive tags to talk about what the
advertisement does? “The tag line endorses
violence against minority groups,” “Featuring
bloody hues of red splashed around the prone
models, the advertisement argues women are
designated victims.”
• Are you clearly stating the argument?
• Do you hone your sentences to include
descriptive and specific language instead of
empty modifiers such as “good,” “bad,”
“many”?
• Do you have at least three examples from
each ad to discuss?
• Do you avoid overuse of the first person?
• How is the tone?
Student Sample
First Paragraph
• The ad by Skyy vodka tells a story set in
nostalgia to show that the female model is
sexually available to the man in the sidelines.
The ad tells the story that men can use liquor
to make women give in to sex. The ad is
saying that successful men have access to
beautiful women. The audience is clearly men
21-30.
Works Cited
Chevy Avalanche. Advertisement. Time 14 Oct.
2002:104.
Wrangler Jeans. Advertisement. Ads of the
World. 8 Aug. 2008
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/wrang
ler_we_are_animals_6
Concision page 109 Lesson 7
• Williams and Nadel identify 5 principles of
concision during the editing process:
1. Delete words that mean little or nothing.
2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of
other words
3. Delete words implied by other words.
4. Replace a phrase with a word.
5. Change negatives to affirmatives.
Productivity actually depends on certain
factors that basically involve psychology
more than any particular technology
• Delete meaningless
words:
Kind of, actually,
particular, really,
certain, virtually,
various, individual,
basically, generally,
given, practically
• Delete doubled words:
Full and complete, hope
and trust, any and all,
true and accurate, each
and every, basic and
fundamental, hopes
and desires, various and
sundry, first and
foremost
Delete redundant modifiers
• Terrible tragedy, basic
fundamentals, final
outcome, various different,
future plans, free gift, true
facts, each individual,
consensus of opinion
Delete redundant categories
• Period of time, membrane
area, pink in colour, shiny in
appearance, educational
system, recreational
activities
• Size, shape, nature,
character, type, time, area,
state are all often used
redundantly.
Replace a phrase with a word
• Carefully read what you
have written > Edit
• The thing to do before
anything else > First
• Use X instead of Y > Replace
• Sequences of subjects and
verbs > clauses
Change negatives to affirmatives
• Not different> similar
Not the same>different, not
notice>overlook, not many>
few, not include>omit, not
stop>continue, not often>
rarely.
Except when applicants have
failed to submit applications
without complete
documentation, benefits
will not be denied.