ESSAY CEMETERY

Who doesn't wish he could write like Mark Twain? No one is probably the answer, if only for the purpose of getting through our B.A. unscathed. Experts before me have gathered some writing tips from the 19th century master of American wit, and I will now try to explore briefly the wisdom behind some of his recommendations. The tips in Twain's words I copied from a list at about.com .  Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please . This suggestion is very pertinent to us when writing our seminar papers, because of the quantity of information we have to process. First, make sure you understand the argument that your secondary source is making. After you have understood exactly what the author tries to say, you may – elegantly of course – utilize their words in a way that suits your argument. Use the right word, not its second cousin . If you are uncertain whether the word that comes to mind is the exact right word, take some time to use the thesaurus.

It is often helpful to pause and remember that words are the most basic building blocks of language. Just as the choice of brick helps determine whether a building will appear rustic or flashy, word choice helps lend preciseness to every text. Paragraph and sentence structure are crucial to the clarity of a text, but attention to shades of meaning contained in the words that you use will help give your paper particular focus. Certain conventions of writing should be followed and broken only in very particular cases. In the third edition of the Bedford Handbook for Writers, Diana Hacker provides several valuable tips regarding word choice. First, she recommends scanning sentences for redundancies. If a sentence contains any repetition, eliminate it. For instance, she proposes the following changes: Mr. Barker still hasn't paid last month's rent yet. >> Mr. Barker still hasn't paid last month's rent. Our fifth patient, in room six, is a mentally ill patient. >>

Some problems are universal to all writers, regardless of background or accomplishment. As Daniel points out, even Woolf and Tolstoy suffered from writer's block. Unfortunately, some issues occur more frequently in the writings of certain types of authors. Ardent watchers of television might form brilliant arguments, without the slightest comprehension of paragraph structure or punctuation; speakers of certain dialects have trouble spelling words phonetically. These tendencies more often than not are easily mitigated by simply reading more. For non-native speakers of a language, however, certain problems seem to persist regardless of the volumes of literature consumed. For me and many other non-native speakers of English whose work I've reviewed, prepositions seem to be the most elusive part of speech. Getting those prepositions right generally takes a lot of conscious hard work. The University of Ottawa website provides us with a useful alphabetized list of prepositions: abou