What grammar and
punctuation issues do you, as a writer, want to focus on this semester?
I have two
different issues that I would like to delve into this semester. They are quite
different because they involve different aspects of my writing. The first
focuses on my formal writing, while the second is more centered on my interest
in recreational creative writing. They are important for different reasons, but
I am equally interested in both of them.
Getting an
endorsement in history as well as English requires me to write a substantial
amount of papers. Because of this, I would like to make my writing as formally
presentable as possible. While I would like to focus on all aspects of writing
a formal paper, I have consistently been told that I need to avoid “passive
voice”. This topic has always been somewhat clouded in confusion because, even
after multiple explanations, I’m not quite sure what passive voice is. At one
point in time last year I felt like I had a solid, or at least reasonable,
understanding of what it was, but I was still unable to eliminate it from my
writing. In all honesty, I’m not even sure if passive voice falls under the
banner of grammar and punctuation, but if it does I would like to be able to
finally understand what it is and how to avoid it.
On a
different note, I have another issue I’d like to focus on. While passive voice
is important because it involves my school work, I enjoy writing for pleasure
as well. With that in mind, there has always been an aspect of creative writing
that I have never fully grasped: how to write dialogue.
I think
the reason this is so confusing for me is because it’s never focused on in
school. When learning grammar and punctuation in school the focus is on being
able to write a good paper, and writing a good paper does not require a firm
understanding of how to structure dialogue. Because of this, I often feel lost
when trying to structure long conversations in my writing. Do I indent when
someone speaks? Can I connect a line of dialogue to the beginning or end of a
paragraph? How many times do I have to state “he/she said” before I can drop it
completely? If the character states a full sentence do I end it with a period
or a comma before capping the quotes and adding the additional “he/she said”?
These are just a few questions I have when dealing with dialogue. Take this
example from a short story I wrote awhile back:
“Wait,” I stammered, stumbling backwards, “you want
me… I mean I will be…”
Should I have capitalized “you”? Is the “stumbling
backwards” formatted correctly? There are just so many questions that I have
that have never been answered by traditional grammar classes. I hope this
semester I can learn a little more about how to correctly punctuate dialogue as well as avoid passive voice.
Tim,
ReplyDeleteGreat questions. We will definitely cover active and passive voice, so I hope that will reduce your confusion. However, I actually think there are good reasons to use the passive voice, so we'll discuss those. Since you're in history, we'll also be sure to discuss how active and passive voice is used in history textbooks--in ways that are both good and not-so-good.
As for dialogue, I've never had a student ask for help with that before, so none of my lessons currently focus on dialogue (admittedly, writing dialogue is not my strength, although I think I understand the basics of formatting dialogue). I have several suggestions to address this gap. One, at the end of the semester I ask all the students to teach a mini-lesson on something we haven't covered in depth--dialogue would be a great topic for this lesson. Also, there are multiple times throughout the semester where I'll ask you to look at writing from authentic contexts. You should certainly bring in texts with dialogue in them so you start to learn the patterns. But I'll also try to remember to include some dialogue examples during relevant lessons.
Thanks,
Beth