My Goals

For this assignment, I studied the paper that we peer-reviewed in class and various papers that had been handed back to me from other writing courses. I read through them all to find common mistakes and to identify what my goals should be for this assignment. In the end, I did not choose any of issues presented to me by my 326 classmates. I set one goal on a personal spelling misunderstanding that I’ve had my entire career as a student. I set another goal on comments that one specific teacher made on every paper I wrote in her class. My third goal was brought to my attention only a few days ago, and rather than dealing with formal writing, it is an issue that reflects mostly in my creative writing.

My first grammar problem, which feels silly, is that I have never been able to spell the words “necessary” and “succeed” correctly. Of course, the spell checker on my computer fixes these superficial mistakes for me and no one ever knows that I have difficulties with these words. In fact, I believe that this may be why I have not learned how to spell them. As long as I know that it will be underlined in red and I can right-click to fix it, I never need to spell it right in the first place. For this goal, I would just like to be able to spell these words by myself without the help of a spell-checker. These words are not mentioned in my copy of A Writer’s Reference, however I did find them both listed in the Student’s Book of College English, an old classroom textbook, in a list of some of the most commonly misspelled words.

My second grammar issue is that I do not understand the difference between active and passive voice. In a literature class I took last semester, we turned in three papers and on every one, my professor noted my use of passive voice and it resulted in the loss of points on the essays. Before this class, I had never even heard of passive voice and at first was dumbfounded that I had no grasp on such an apparently important part of writing. Then, I chose to ignore her, because, after all, if it had been true wouldn’t other instructors have brought it to my attention? If I have never learned some of the conventions that are necessities for “good” writers, I would have to say it’s because I’ve had many English classes in which the teachers have put greater emphasis on ideas and content and less on grammar. In classes such as these, it was easy for me to put together a well thought-out paper and use that to hide my sketchy knowledge of conventions. For this goal, I would actually just like to understand what passive voice means and how I can avoid using it in my writing. Here’s what A Writers’ Reference says about active and passive voice:

“Active verbs express meaning more emphatically and vigorously
than their weaker counterparts—forms of the verb be or verbs in
passive voice. Verbs in the passive voice lack strength because
their subjects receive the action instead of doing it” (142).

My third grammar concern has to do with a poetry class I am taking. While I had no intentions of delving into my creative writing for this assignment, I was recently handed back a poem about which the teacher commented “get rid of all the words and phrases that don’t have to be here…these words mean nothing.” Of course, to me the words did mean something, but the instructor insisted I be “rough on my language” and cut out all of the meaningless and colorless words. So, I had to look back through the piece and be honest about some of the words I had chosen—so, some, to, the. I have to ask myself why I have chosen to write like this and the truth is that I’ve always considered that to be “just the way I write.” It has to do with being stubborn and not wanting to accept that my personal writing style might need a tweak here and there. For this goal, I am not strictly saying that I will change this, but I would like to explore the issue. Here’s what A Writer’s Reference says about unimportant words:

“An empty phrase can be cut with little or no loss of meaning” (140).
“Inflated phrases can be reduced to a word or two without loss of meaning” (140).
“The colorless verbs is, are, was, and were frequently generate excess words” (141).