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Wanted: Doctors of English to Cure Verbose-Grandiosis
By Alex Katsaros

Newsflash! An epidemic plagues the UCF campus as we speak, and it may be permeating your esteemed writing habits. Have people been looking at you funny as you articulate your verbiage? Has your writing professor made your essay look like an impressionist collage of red ink? The symptoms of wordiness have likely begun to infect your command of the English language, yet fear not. A nurse may not be able to help you, but a dedicated grammarian can! (Read this essay and call me in the morning.)

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Advice to other UWC visitors:
"Bring two copies of paper -- one for the consultant and one for the writer to mark comments on."

Read more about Tim's experiences with the UWC.

Commas, Dashes, or Parentheses-That is the Question
By Georgianna O. Miller

Punctuation is the bane of many a student's existence. Where do you put it, and why do you put it there at all? Trying to unravel the mysteries of mechanics can be a pain. So why make the attempt? The answer is this: for your reader. If you punctuate your paper well, your readers can concentrate their effort on understanding your ideas, rather than trying to figure out what your ideas are. An accurately punctuated paper reads much as a well-prepared speech sounds--all the inflection is in the proper place to convey exactly what you intend.

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The Secret Nature of Nicknames
By Darren Crovitz

I was speaking about random nothings with a friend not long ago when the topic of nicknames came up. It seemed that we both knew a few people who had them, and we pondered for a bit about exactly why, and what those names might represent. But just as the topic was about to move on to something else, I was overcome by a sudden gust of rascality.

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In our last installment, I talked about the "Third Person Plague," and promised to offer gentle readers an article about choosing point of view. However, that's not what I want to talk about. Today I wish to speak about language--more specifically, the ability to spell. To put it bluntly, what the hell has happened to everyone?

I used to think that spelling errors were meaningless, that people "just didn't know better" or didn't have the resources to look up the correct word. Indeed, to some people, spelling correctly may seem unimportant or inconvenient--one of those little nagging things in life that you hate to do, like returning videos or bringing in the recycling bins from the curb. When I started teaching English Composition, however, I started to think differently--I began to notice a pattern. Oftentimes the students whose essays had the most egregious spelling errors were the ones who also had the biggest structural problems within their papers. These were the students, it seemed, who had a hard time grasping the material, or just didn't care to grasp the material. Through essay after essay, I noticed that the spelling deficient students were weaker in their critical thinking skills than those who were proficient. A big leap, you might say? Well, consider this.

Students who take the time to look up words (and no, Spell Check doesn't count) often have a larger vocabulary and know how to use it more effectively. Liken this to looking in your sock drawer: You don't see just one sock when you go in there--there are all kinds surrounding the pair you choose. There's the brown ones that you never wear, the dress socks, the argyle ones your aunt gave you last Christmas. Likewise, students who open a dictionary are exposed to more words by default. Moreover, there are ideas behind those other words. Etymologies. Histories. Especially with English--we're the Borg of the language world. Just try looking up "reform," for example. According to Merriam-Webster, its etymology is Middle English, from the Middle French reformer, which is from the Latin reformare. Now, think of everything that had to have happened in the world for that one word to eventually come to us--the human race had to evolve to the point where we moved past verbal histories to a written mode of communication. Then, technology had to evolve to a point where humans could travel to other continents. We had to learn to understand other languages. Multiple cultures had to intermingle to the point where these languages started to intertwine and form new words. And so on. Now alter the word slightly to form "reformation" and you've opened up a whole new world of ideas. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? This is exactly why students who use a dictionary tend to have better critical thinking skills: They, in fact, think. They're exposed to a larger world, a history behind the seemingly benign word they choose to put in the introduction of their Core 2 essay. They realize that there's a larger picture behind those little black marks on the page. They're interested in choosing a word that best expresses the ideas that they're trying to get across, and they're thinking critically about how they should choose that word.

So what about those who aren't such great spellers? Well, it depends: There's a difference between students who occasionally make a mistake and those who aren't concerned with what they put on the paper. We might postulate that the latter of these folks are unwilling to accept their own shortcomings by consulting a dictionary--perhaps they feel they know enough already. Or perhaps they're just lazy. Whatever the case, students who don't bother with the "unimportant" aspect of spelling say a lot about their personalities: They don't care if they look dumb, and they don't have any respect for their audience. Does this seem strong? Consider all the business signs I've seen around town recently--the "Open Seven Day's" on a restaurant, the "Sign's For Sale" on a shop on Edgewater Drive, the "Fourth of July Bokays" on a florist in Longwood. All these errors say one thing, loud and clear: "We don't care enough about you to spell it correctly. Don't like it? Tough noogies."

Many of you may think that I'm going off the deep end here, but we can't deny that people, in the United States in particular, don't really know their own language well. This is problematic, especially considering education is available to everyone. Couple this with the violent struggle for civil rights and women's rights, and you would assume that everyone would have taken advantage of the opportunity for education. Indeed, until relatively recently, the general populace didn't even have the chance to read and write. Education was reserved for members of the upper class and the more "common people," including blacks and women, were prohibited from learning. The reason? It was thought that education would give power to this lower stratum, thus throwing the social balance out of whack. Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, discusses this very problem. After he was sold to a new home, he talks about how the new owner's wife

Commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy" . . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man.

This, then, is the central issue: Power. If you don't know how to use words, and ultimately language, correctly, then you are giving away your power. Don't agree? Consider the issue of car repair. If you don't know how to fix your own car, and your mechanic does, then who wields the power? If he tells you that your freemflamer is calibrated at a -40 degree angle, thus causing the conduits to blanche, then how can you say if he's right or not? You can't, and you won't be able to control what choices he makes, choices that will affect you. Misuse of language functions in the same way: If you don't know which word to use in a situation, or you spell the word incorrectly, then you're giving away your power as a writer. You're allowing the audience to misinterpret your writing, your ideas, or make assumptions about your intelligence or education. Essentially you're taking everything that's you--all the components that have gone into shaping you as a person--and allowing someone else to take the wheel, while simultaneously insulting the new driver's abilities. I don't know about you, but I hate letting anyone else drive my car, let alone my ideas. They never get the seat back in the right position.