Alfredo Deambrosi

Today, I invited my En 100 students to create Christmas PowerPoint themes. If they email them to me, I will decide among the best themes and use them for class periods after Thanksgiving Break. I told them that whatever they send me must be their own work and must not include any copyrighted material. I also said that if they choose to email their PowerPoint themes to me, they agree that I may use them for any class that I teach during this semester or during a future semester.

The contest reward, small though it may be, is a Snack Shop milkshake certificate and my acknowledging the theme creator every time I use the theme throughout the duration of my one-hundred-year teaching career.

Today, I saw a newspaper headline that one can easily misinterpret.  The headline appears in a major West-coast newspaper that published the article today.

“Palin Smears Hurt McCain”

When I first saw this article, I thought, “Why is John McCain feeling hurt, and why is Sarah Palin smearing him?” The four words for that kind of interpretation would be noun, verb, adjective, and noun.

It turns out that the article asserts that smears against Sarah Palin are hurting John McCain. Thus, the four words are adjective, noun, verb, noun.

Someone once sent me a list of several newspaper headlines that one could easily misinterpret. (I cannot verify whether these were actual headlines, though.) Misplaced modifiers cause possible confusion in these two headlines:

“L.A. Voters Approve Urban Renewal By Landslide”

“Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years”

The confusion of gerunds and participles (Is the -ing word a noun or an adjective?) can cause confusion in these two headlines:

“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”

“Fund Set Up for Beating Victim’s Kin”

Writers of newspaper headlines need to be especially careful about clear wording since headlines often omit determiners. But who knows? Maybe newspapers can boost their sales through unintended humor.

A few conservative bloggers have helped to shape my perspective on the election of a President that I did not vote for. Below each title is an excerpt from that blog post.

Bob Bixby, Pastor of Morningside Baptist Church (Rockford, IL)
“Why I Am Rejoicing with the Obama Supporters”

I did not vote for Obama. I am grieved by the blind adoration countless people are giving to a man who has committed himself to Alinksy’s model, but I am sincerely rejoicing that God has made it very easy for me to celebrate something with the citizens of this foreign country where I serve as His ambassador. It’s easy to rejoice that forty years after a Jim Crow society when little black girls feared to walk out of their church on Sunday there will now be two little black girls playing in the halls of the White House.

Steve Bruss, associate editor, Greenville News editorial page (Greenville, SC)
“Proud Moment for America”

There will be an appropriate time to critique the decisions Obama makes as president. This republic relies upon the ability and duty of its citizens to appropriately question the actions of its elected leaders. For the time being, though, Obama, as every president before him, deserves an opportunity to prove himself.

Kevin Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN)
“What Next?”

We must resurrect the lost notion that was once called “loyal opposition.” We will no doubt oppose certain policies, perhaps vigorously. But opposition to the policy must not be turned into opposition to the man or opposition to the office. The president has to be left with the ability to govern. If he loses that ability, then the entire country loses, including Christian conservatives.

Voting is a privilege.

But it can lead to other privileges.

Right now, I’m enjoying my free cup of coffee. The Starbucks intersection of East North Street and Pleasantburg had only two other drive-through cars in front of me.

Praying for the election, voting, and drinking free coffee make for a good start to election day.

Last week, I redeemed an electronic gift certificate to audible.com and bought a short-fiction collection, which I am listening to as I commute.

The stories remind me of last semester, the first semester that I taught an introductory college literature course: En 103 Composition and Literature. I assigned eleven short stories in this order.

• Appointment with Love (Kishor)
• Miss Brill (Mansfield)
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Thurber)
• Cat in the Rain (Hemingway)
• Araby (Joyce)
• The Son from America (Singer)
• Blues Ain’t No Mockin’ Bird (Bambara)
• Paul’s Case (Cather)
• The Most Dangerous Game (Connell)
• Pigeon Feathers (Updike)
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Doyle)

After the unit on short fiction, I asked my students to respond anonymously to eleven questions (for the eleven stories), each beginning with “I liked the short story” and ending with the title of one of the above short stories.

Which stories do you think ranked near the top? Near the bottom? I was surprised by some of the results, which I’ll share here soon.

Among these stories, are there any that stand out to you as stories that you especially enjoyed or didn’t especially enjoy?

(posted in Facebook, also)

You and I have seen athletes so desperate for victory that they start playing unfairly. The same thing happens in politics, and not just among politicians. Voters can be worse.

I’m planning to vote for McCain/Palin. But I have been disappointed by the tactics that many conservatives have used against the opposing ticket.

I am glad for friends and acquaintances who argue strongly against Obama’s pro-choice record. However, I have seen or heard some of the same people forward, copy-paste, or speak the claims that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama’s cousin is a Marxist prime minister of Kenya, or that Obama was not born in the United States (and thus not eligible to run for President).

There is no solid proof for any of these ideas. When I talk to those who bring up these kinds of assertions, they are also the voters who sound the most panicky, the most stressed, the most desperate. In the final minutes of the game, they are making some plays that are simply unfair.

One of the results is that we are alienating many of the voters that we are trying to win. Another is that we do further harm to the reputation of political or religious conservatism. The worst perhaps is the damage to personal integrity. In what other ways will we repeat outlandish statements or proclaim something as true only because we want it to be true?

I am not saying that some Obama/Biden supporters do not also make outlandish claims about McCain or Palin. But we need to use our free-speech privilege responsibly. We need to check our facts. Even when discussing politics, even when opposing pro-choice candidates, our obligation to the truth continues.

I hear now and then about a Christian who has chosen a life verse. It is a verse that serves as a brief statement of his or her life purpose. In the chapel service on campus today, Matt Herbster shared Psalm 78:4, 6-7, which are verses that he has claimed as driving his purpose for ministry at the Wilds Christian Camp.

I believe that all Christian school teachers could also refer to these verses as reminders of the reason for their ministry. When I heard these verses today in connection to ministry to young people, I realized their importance to my role in Christian education.

Here are the portions of Psalm 78 that Matt Herbster shared this morning:

4b Shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.

6 That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children:

7 That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments.

As my students learn grammar, they often ask, how is this stuff supposed to help my writing? This week, as I teach parts of speech, I am planning to give some tips about how knowledge of the parts of speech can directly help one’s writing.

One area of help is parallelism. Readers prefer sentences that are parallel (coordinate). When joining elements within a sentence, join similar elements. The sentence below is understandable but does not show complete parallelism.

He is an actor, a poet, and plays the violin.

The next two show better parallelism.

He is an actor, a poet, and a violinist.
He acts, composes poetry, and plays the violin.

These two sentences are more pleasant to read than the first, even if the reader does not know the reason for the difference. What actually happened in the last two sentences is that they connected words that represented the same parts of speech. “Actor,” “poet,” and “violinist” are all nouns. “Acts,” “composes,” and “plays” are all verbs. (The example sentences above come from sentences on pages 103-104 in College Writing by Ronald Horton).

Think of bad parallelism as uneven asphalt. Nobody likes potholes. They make drivers slow down unnecessarily. Similarly, incomplete parallelism can delay and distract your reader unnecessarily.

I look forward to displaying for my students how learning other elements of grammar (phrases, clauses, and so forth) can benefit writing.

Lynn Gaertner-Johnston says that a common problem within corporations is failing to target information to the right audiences.  As a result, the sender can create hostility unintentionally.  My experience with reading group emails within my organization is that senders often do a very good job with channeling communication to the correct groups.  Click here to read Lynn’s blog post about common problems and to read my response that explains how BJU targets specific audiences.

By running the Flesh-Kincaid Readability Test, Microsoft Word allows users to identify how readable their writing is. Apparently, the Flesh-Kincaid Reading Grade Level uses a formula that is based on the average number of syllables in each word and the average length of the sentences.

When I learned about this feature, my first thought was that this tool provides us with a quick and convenient way to make sure that our writing is not overly complex. My second thought was that the tool must have limitations. The only way such a test can measure how difficult certain words are is to count its number of syllables. Certainly, some words can have fewer syllables but be less familiar. For example, “disadvantage” has more syllables than “detriment” but is probably familiar to more readers.

I decided, however, to run my first four blog posts through the test to see how it ranks them. My two posts that were clearly more technical in nature reflected a higher grade level.

• Talking About Books – 7.9 grade level
• Using a Birthday Reminder Service – 10.5 grade level
• “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” – A Prayer for Lasting Deliverance – 10.6 grade level
• Knowing My Students 9.1 – grade level

I am convinced that writers still need to revise their work through careful readings. As they proofread, they should check for word choice, clarity, emphasis, and coherence among other things. There may be limitations to the test besides the one that I mentioned earlier, but I’m glad that I have some evidence that my posts may be readable.