Dear U.S. Academic Writing,

          I pen this open letter to you knowing full well that in certain cases, you do have your uses.  You know how to get your point across effectively. You are succinct. You are, indeed, an acceptable purveyor of argument and actuality.  However, I object to your incessant insistence on inserting yourself into every single aspect of writing in American school systems, especially when your presence is less a consequence of necessity than  an outdated habit spanning decades.

          Take, for instance, the essay.  To me, essays are like stories, and who wants to read a story where the ending is revealed to you in the very first chapter?  I certainly wouldn’t. Yet what is a thesis statement if not a blatant spoiler for an ending? Therein lies my greatest qualm with you, U.S. Academic Writing.

          You, my esteemed enemy, are a sledgehammer when you should have been a scalpel.  To be quite frank, you lack finesse. Your linear structure, characterized by a set path of point-evidence-explanation, is the equivalent of trying to pound a nail into a hole created for the sole purpose of housing a screw.  Instead of guiding a reader on a personal journey of discovery and revelation, you immediately tell them exactly what conclusion they are supposed to draw from an essay. Personally, I believe that the true beauty (the very art!) of a good essay lies in its ability to foster genuine interest about novel subjects in readers and to usher them subtly onto a path that will eventually lead them, of their own volition, to reach the same conclusion as the author.

          In my opinion, there is a reason why many students dread writing essays, and that reason is that they struggle with your unforgiving rigidity.  Indeed, even the most practiced of scholarly authors can grapple with academic papers when their thought processes conflict with the mode of their assignments.

          And it is only at this point in my letter, the final paragraph (as far from the introduction as one could possibly hope to be), that I arrive at my thesis statement: let students choose their own structure for the essays they write.  Do not force them to format every single composition in the same exact manner as the hundred or so they’ve struggled through in the past. Release the academic community from your grasp and allow the ineffable power of language possessed by each and every author to reach its full potential by expressing itself in whatever form it pleases.  U.S. Academic Writing, take a step back and let us all remember that the key purpose of an essay is to communicate and propagate ideas, not to judge how well a student can follow some contrived blueprint. If an argument is solid and an author thorough, the structure of an essay should, in all honesty, take a backseat to the quality of its content.

Respectfully Yours,
            Giuliana Weiss
            Writing Center Intern

The first essay we all wrote as a child was most likely, “What I did during summer vacation.”  Every sentence included the words ‘I’ or ‘me’. The word ‘I’ was even in the title. Then, at some point, we were informed that writing in the first person was henceforth forbidden in all academic writing, relegated to the beatnik world of poetry.  In academia, an author using their own voice was deemed unprofessional. Though there is certain value in this precedent, the use of first person pronouns is, in fact, not off-limits in all academic writing.  

Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab, more commonly known by college students as ‘Purdue OWL’, addresses the topic on its page Style, Genre, and Writing: 

The use of first person point-of-view is usually avoided in academic writing. But, sometimes you are allowed to use it; for example, when you explain your own data or primary resources.

As university students progress through their studies they will be expected to conduct their own research more and more.  Hence, the use of first person pronouns becomes an increasingly appropriate choice for their work.  

Author L. Finlay emphasizes that first person pronouns are not just acceptable but actually essential for “closing the distance between author and reader,” (qtd. In Zhou and Hall 348).  Likewise, authors Zhou and Hall point out that writing in the first person is fitting for qualitative research. They explain that quantitative research does not need a first-person perspective since the numbers speak for themselves, whereas in qualitative research the words of the author and participants are part of the evidence (Zhou and Hall 349).  

So take a deep breath the next time your eyes come across ‘I’ and ‘me’ in academic writing.  Consider the context and intent of the author. The taboo might be unwarranted.  

Works Cited

Purdue Writing Lab. “OWL // Purdue Writing Lab.” Purdue Writing Lab, owl.purdue.edu/.

Zhou, Xiaodi, and Jori N. Hall. “Mixed Methods Papers in First-Person and Third-Person: Writing Voices in Dialogue.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research, vol. 12, 357. 3, July 2018, pp. 344–357. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType= ip,url,uid&db=eric&AN=EJ1183557&site=eds-live& scope =site.

Contributed by: Anessa Hughes, Writing Center intern

Maybe I’m superficial, but I like to look at a piece of writing before reading it. I could discuss Cummings’ “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” or  some other avant-garde, experimental literature, but there’s likely no benefit in that. As students, we’re probably most familiar with academic writing and writing assignments formatted in APA or MLA. Each of these formatting styles, and others, have their own guidelines and rules. However, as writers, we can still effectively demonstrate our own voices within these seemingly rigid restrictions, and we must still keep in mind certain things as well. From structure to typography, we students have various choices and opportunities to make our writing our own.

Paragraphs shouldn’t take up whole pages, as a wall of text may block the reader from keeping interest. Personally, we choose how we divide and organize our ideas, where we place paragraph breaks.

Generally, sentences shouldn’t run on—nor be too long or confusing even if grammatically sound—and convey a complete thought. But simple sentences capture attention. With the addition of a dependent clause, complex sentences have space for more context and cohesiveness. Compound sentences have more than one independent clause and they allow for the discussion of one thought, or more.

Within our sentences, there are many pathways for us to present our voice through punctuation. Dividing clauses, one could use commas, periods, semicolons, and so on between independent clauses, and commas, parentheses, em dashes, brackets, and more to separate dependent clauses from the main thought.

Generally, most students will use 12 pt Times New Roman for their writing. Personally, there should be no judgement towards those who use Calibri or whatever font chosen following the guidelines of whatever formatting style—Arial even.

These are just some general considerations and possible personal choices to make in writing, such that maybe we recognize the aesthetic of our writing, for the sake of the reader and, thus, ourselves. And maybe each of us, as students, can look at our own work and say, “This is my work which I am proud to submit.”

So this blog post might not be the most academic of writing, but it’s mine, of which I’m proud to submit. 

xoxo

Ian Angeles, Writing Center intern

• Starting with a Strong Beginning! All good works of fiction strive to capture a reader’s imagination and transport them to a new world. To effectively hook your reader, you’re going to need a strong opening! Some things you’ll need to consider are:
• • • Introducing your character(s) - you’ll want to show the reader right away who is in the story to help capture their interest.
    • Establish the conflict - What’s going on in your story? What is the problem or predicament? To hook a reader, you’ll want to show them even a glimpse of the conflict pretty early on. 
    • Present the setting and point of view - Where is the action happening? On a pleasant, warm beach? In a dark and rainy graveyard? Setting is important if you want to inspire the mood and appropriate reactions in your reader! Point of view is also a very important aspect of your beginning. Try not to switch your speaker too much, especially not in the beginning, or your reader will likely be very confused.

• Building Relatable Characters! Most all stories have characters in them, especially works of creative fiction! To create a good story, you’ll want to be sure your character is relatable and believable.
  
• • • Actions Speak Louder than Words! - A character usually shows their intentions through the things that they do. Keeping a character’s mannerisms consistent and believable to the circumstances are important to the reader’s ability to understand them and relate to them.
    • Appearance is Everything! - The way your character dresses and accessorizes is, in fact, important to their reputation in the reader’s eyes. Do they dress in glamorous dresses and sparkling jewels? What does this mean for your character’s personality or background? Keep these things in mind when trying to create a believably human character.

• Plotting Your Story!

• • • Plan Ahead! - It may be helpful to start out with an outline. Even for writers who write chronologically, (straight ahead) it’s incredibly important to keep in mind your beginning, middle and end. You’ll probably have specific ideas in mind for particular parts, but being able to map out what you want for each part of your story is incredibly important for the fluidity and cohesiveness to your paper as a whole.

• • • Relax! - A lot of writers get stressed when they don’t have every nook and cranny of their story figured out. It’s OK to not know your ending right away. It’s also OK to not know what you’re planning for the start of your biggest climax. Relax and let that creativity flow. Experiment and work through your drafts, and don’t worry if you don’t know everything yet - it will come to you eventually.

• Editing Away!

• • • Don’t be Afraid to Delete! - Often, a writer can get stuck up on the specifics of a paragraph and not want to delete it, even with the criticism of their peers and mentors. It’s OK to delete and revise your work, it may be that your next version is even better than the first!

• • • Save your Work! - When deleting, make sure you save that first draft in a separate folder! Don’t forget to save regularly as well. You don’t want to lose all that hard work!

That’s all I’ve got for you for now! So pick up those pencils, turn on that laptop and get to writing!

Contributed by: Alex Schobitz, Writing Center intern

In the wake of a global pandemic that has halted the world, all of my emotions are heightened. Feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and concern have occupied every single second of existence as I move through life at a languid pace. Though I have been infinitely blessed with my health, there are few things as disorientating as daily routines being turned on their heads after pleas from health and government officials echo louder and louder. Clicking through television channels and scrolling through Twitter unleashes a flood of panicked headlines and harrowing statistics, and it is no doubt overwhelming to listen to the world fall around you as you sit alone in a room unsure of what comes next. This is a time like no other. And so, it calls on us to rise to the occasion. Those who are healthy alter their timetables for the sake of the ill and those who are wealthy take care of the disenfranchised and the poor. As we spend the next few weeks unified in our uncertainty, I implore you to take advantage of writing as a means of escape, as a step towards healing, and as an effort to stop the feeling of your world ending.

Having an unprecedented amount of time due to social distancing measures enacted to decrease the spread of the virus may increase feelings of unproductivity. This can often trigger emotions of discontent and unease which fuel anxiety and self-deprecation. Creating lists of tasks that you want to complete not only keeps you organized but produces a sense of accomplishment that fills your need to be ‘active’. This is a subtle opportunity for writing that can be expounded to cultivate additional opportunities to be more creative. If drawing a line through a completed assignment is somehow not fulfilling enough, challenge yourself to create more intricate spreads in a bullet journal or another medium. As we move to virtual classrooms, this will also help combat a lack of motivation and accountability, and set you up to be the best possible student you can be during this time of turmoil.

Taking it one step further, journaling or dabbling in other creative writing prompts such as poetry is another significant way to express your feelings, especially when the doors of communication seem limited. Alone in our rooms means being alone with our thoughts which is not always an easy reality to face. Mental health issues will likely spike during these few months for a variety of reasons, and though writing is not a cure to any diagnosed illness, it can provide a momentary relief from the hardships of life. Being honest with yourself and engaging in self-reflection is essential to your growth as a person. Blossoming in this time of darkness can only be done by having another source of light. It may help to dedicate a few minutes of your day to understanding and appreciating the complexity of thoughts and emotions you are experiencing.

Even if you do not think of yourself as a creative writer, set aside a few minutes before bed to unpack the occurrences of the day. If you are happy, write down how you feel so you will remember the ecstasy of joy when you are upset. Write in free verse or write in rhyme, it does not matter so long as you are recognizing the whirling thoughts in your brain. If you are angry, perhaps at the way institutions are handling this pandemic, write a letter. Maybe you can even send it in the morning. If you feel lonesome, revel in the idea that thousands of people are understanding of your circumstance because they too are living it. If you want to write but do not know where to start, start there. Write about how desperately you want to commit words to paper. Write a love poem between two inanimate objects. Write a haiku about what you see outside your window. Write about what you miss or what you look forward to. If you need more ideas, UMBC Retriever Poets will be holding online meetings on Tuesdays from 5-6:30pm (email them for more information at retrieverpoets@umbc.edu).

Your resilience and kindness during this time are inspiring. I hope that these moments of confusion and chaos are short-lived, and that you are prioritizing your health and happiness.

Contributed by: Ilsa Mir, Writing Center intern

Autocorrect: I don’t think I’d remember how to spell “February” without it, but every time that it corrects my more anger-driven messages to “ducking hell,” I want to light autocorrect on fire. I have a love-hate relationship with spell- and grammar-check as well. These systems aren’t always right, and as helpful as they can be, sometimes they end up keeping the words from flowing by debating instead if there really should be a comma there. That little red or blue squiggly line always stops me dead in the track of writing. Sometimes, it’s a quick fix – a typo or a switched “i before e” – but sometimes it’s a stylistic choice. Maybe I want to write “omg” in lowercase, but autocorrect thinks it should be capitalized. This decision is one that the author should be able to make themselves, but when an anonymous check system is telling you it has to be one way, it’s very easy to doubt your own knowledge.

Not only are these inept at determining stylistic choices from real errors, they enforce outdated notions of “correct” language and “slow down natural linguistic evolution” (McColloch 46). Language changes according to how it is used; it is not static. However, when our search engines are programmed with one version of English, that becomes the standard, and shoves out other variants and dialects. It is the decisions we make about our writing that brings the power; correcting and check tools are dampening our written voices.

My suggestion for you is not to turn off these tools – I know my papers would be riddled with spelling errors if I did that – but make the conscious decision to accept or deny the suggestion. Don’t allow a pre-programmed system to decide how you speak.

Contributed by: Natalie Neale-Lorello, Writing Center tutor

Over the course of my writing career I’ve noticed a trend. Writing is hard because it’s as frightening as a rollercoaster. There are even models, on the internet, for how to plot a story with a rollercoaster-like method. However, I like to view the process of writing as a rollercoaster, not just a story-plot rollercoaster with a climax and a resolution. I had a recent Writing Center appointment that helped me to brainstorm this idea. I gave one student my tip to view writing their papers as different stages in a rollercoaster. I mentioned how, most often, the writer doesn’t want to start off after they have hit the peak of a story because then the main idea is lost. The idea is to view their writing as different stages of moving up and down. Writing words has a certain rhythm to it, just like when one speaks to a crowd of people. The tone of a piece of writing matters. 

Here is an example of how this method of writing would work. Imagine you write the first paragraph of your paper and it reads, “The experimenters learned so much with this lab, after they learned how to connect it to their research.” Now notice how the second half of this sentence takes the reader backwards. The rollercoaster is no longer forward moving. The ideas aren’t easy to understand because the writer has written the content of their paper going downwards, rather than upwards. It’s like getting on a rollercoaster that’s already rolled to a stop. Essentially there is not take off. However, this sentence can be quickly fixed, like so, “The experimenters connected their research to their lab and gained a lot of information.” With this revised sentence, the reader is able to move forward with the topic a lot quicker. Making the subject of a work of writing come first is always helpful when trying to clarify one’s main ideas. If the reader reads too quickly they may slip over the fact that the research was important, along with the lab. Therefore, the reader will be less confused if the writer begins at the start of their writing rollercoaster. 

Another way to view this rollercoaster idea is with the organization of a paper. Every single sentence must work to make the paper better, or else it can be considered a loose track for the rollercoaster cart to slip off. To prevent from any scary instances in one’s writing, an individual must try to work on every paragraph and breakdown what they mean to say. Is this the part where the reader goes upside down and sees a new viewpoint? Or is this the part where the reader is climbing a hill to understand all the work that was done to formulate this argument or topic of this paper? Whatever part of the writing process a writer is in, they must try to keep the rollercoaster running smoothly. After all, writing is just another form of engineering.   

Contributed by: Edith Torres, Writing Center tutor

Editing and proofreading our own essays can be the most annoying process after writing a paper. This burden can often lead us to bypass that process and leave our writing with a bunch of mistakes. However, there are several useful tips you can use to ease the editing process.

• Give yourself enough time and do not rush over it

It is important to allow ourselves to take some time away from a paper after writing it.  Giving our minds the time to rest after writing a paper before editing allows to increase concentration during the editing time. This would increase the number of mistakes caught and allow you to find sentences that need to be re-formulated.

• Have a friend read it aloud to you

Getting help from someone is a good way to see how others would understand the ideas you are trying to communicate based on the way you wrote them. Having a friend or someone else read your paper aloud to you might help you catch up on sentences that do not reflect the idea you wanted to communicate. This process is an easy way to find sentences that might be removed from your paper, or sentences that could be said in a better way. 

• Read aloud backward

When I started taking English classes and writing papers, I usually went to tutors in order to get help fixing my mistakes and get some grammar tips. One of the tutors I worked with suggested reading my paper backward, from the last sentence to the first one. When reading our papers, it easily makes sense to us because we wrote the story. Therefore, we are more likely to just skim over it and pass over some mistakes. However, reading backwards removes that automatism. It forces you to pay more attention to sentence structure and punctuation. 

• Get someone else’s opinion

Having someone else read your paper offers the opportunity to have fresh eyes with different perspective than the one you might have. Even though you might sometimes disagree with their opinion on certain aspects of your paper, it is worth a try especially when you feel like you need help with grammar and other aspects of writing style.

Finally, for many people it is difficult to accept criticism from others. However, it is important to be open-minded. In a case where you do not agree with someone’s correction, just take it into consideration and you can search it up later, or ask for a professional opinion like writing tutors or professors. Editing a paper doesn’t have to be a boring process. Get some rest,  grab a snack and choose whatever technique suits you best.