Writing is rhetorical: it is designed speech. If you are like many of my past students, you might dread the responsibility of making your written work rhetorical. You shouldn’t. You already use rhetorical choices in your day to day conversations because you interact with a variety of listeners. You wouldn’t speak to a tax auditor in the […]
Classic job interview advice: if asked to lunch, never order the spaghetti. It’s almost impossible to eat it with aplomb. Semicolons are a spaghetti dish. A critical eye can overlook a comma mistake or two without blinking, but a semicolon mistake might as well be red sauce on a white shirt front.
Many writers prefer an outline to be a casual construction, but sometimes writing needs a more extensive master plan. Assignments that ask for an annotated outline help us learn to read deeply. As a side benefit, analyzing a published writer can teach us how to construct a more thorough planning outline for our own writing.
