On posses and possession: minding your own esses

There are a few spelling errors too minor to be worth their own Reminder among the 44 but yet sufficiently common to merit a short post. They have in common the difference in how American pronounce the letter “s” and how the words we have inherited from England use that same letter.

The most frequent problem is that associated with the possessive.

Let us say that Borges had a cat. He seems like the kind of writer likely to have had a cat, after all.

That cat is Borges’s cat—not, in conventional usage, “Borges’ cat.”

Likewise, the pen with which Dickens wrote Great Expectations is not Dickens’ pen nor, heaven forfend, Dicken’s pen; instead, the quill in question is Dickens’s pen.

There is one major exception to this rule that tends to flummox readers. For historical reasons I have never fully understood, classical figures—most famously Jesus—tend to form their possessive without the additional “s.” Ergo: Jesus’ hairdo; Socrates’ mustache.

(I hope Socrates didn’t have a mustache, though it must have been a nuisance to shave every morning with a straight razor.)

This problem tends to compound itself with Frederick Douglass.

Poor Frederick Douglass! He struggled for decades to teach himself to read and write and thereby to undermine the slave-holding system that was his life’s work to destroy, only to have the men and women who read his autobiography write about Douglass’ life or Douglas’s life (ick).

It is—it really is—Douglass’s life, and what a life it is!

One last note, and the one that set me off here. More than one of the essays I have had the opportunity to read this weekend use “posses” for “possess.” As in “This shoe is the finest that I possess.”

A posse is a gaggle of vigilantes set out to avenge some wrong, real or imagined. Remember the torch-and-pitchfork mob in Beauty and the Beast? Totally a posse.

If you have more than one posse you have 1) bad, bad news, and 2) posses.

If, on the other hand, you own something—a prized Pez dispenser, let’s say—that Pez dispenser is something you possess. If someone else owns it, that is an heirloom dispenser that she or he possesses.

Written in the style of a 44 Reminders quiz question, the appropriate sentence would go something like this:

“Douglass’s posse possesses Pez dispensers aplenty.”

Citing Dickens

As your quote or paraphrase passages from Great Expectations, please be careful to cite the appropriate page number. Citations should be formatted in this way:

Sleeping for the first time at Satis House, Pip dreams that his expectations have evaporated and that he must, instead, marry Herbert Pocket’s betrothed Clara (258).

Note that the citation needs no further information—we know who the author is—and that it is fully contained within the sentence.

The whoness of people, the whatness of things

Although it is not one of the Big 44, attend to your personal pronouns: write the person who said… and the thing that fell….

Reminder 45

Here’s an example of the sort of sentence structure I’ve seen unusually frequently this summer:

For the story “Mumu,” it would fit under the Social Critique heading…

Did you catch the grammatical slip there?

The sentence begins with a fragment—”For the story”—in which the noun (“the story”) is the object of a preposition (“For”). The sentence that follows the comma—”it would fit under…”—forgets that the noun “story” is the object of the preposition and pretends that it is the subject of the fragment by associating the word with the pronoun “it.”

A more correct way to craft that sentence would be to write

For the story “Mumu,” the most appropriate category would be “Stories Related to Dog Ownership in Tsarist Russia”…

That sentence is at least grammatically correct; it is, however, a bit inelegant and a bit indirect. My preference would be for a sentence comme ça:

I group “Mumu” and Great Expectations as stories partially concerning deranged older women.

Note the structure there: subject (“I”) + verb (“group”) + direct object (“story X and novel Y”) + prepositional object (“as Z”). This is the simplest grammatical structure in English, and is the appropriate sentence structure in which to express complicated ideas.

Short notes on the pre-essay

There are no grades for the pre-essays, of course, there is something to be said for the impression they have given me of your power and skill as writers. The average hypothetical grade for the pre-essays was a high C, which is a wonderful place to start this course.

By now you should have received a link to a Google document with my comments about your pre-essay. There are three issues that didn’t make it into those notes because they applied to nearly everybody. I wanted to write about them here.

Issue 1: titles

The title is there for you to demonstrate that you can distill the core argument of your essay down to one line.

The most common style of essay title you’ll see in the higher levels of academia follows something like this:

“Quotation from the text”: Key analytical argument about Name of Text

For example, if Larry were to write an essay about today’s movie his title might go something like this:

“We better not alarm the girls”: Sexist colonialism in William Berke’s Jungle Jim

Issue 2: pronouns

Oh, those wily pronouns!

I am a bit startled by the number of pre-essays that deploy pronouns in unclear or confusing ways. If your essay ranks among this number, then here are three notes:

1. Pronouns should fit their antecedents tightly: A student should do her or his homework, and so on. Check out #42 of the 44 Reminders and Problem 38 in The Editing Book (page 55).
2. Avoid those infamous “it” phrases that aren’t attached to a specific noun—most infamously it seems and it appears. This is Problem 39 in The Editing Book (pages 56–7).
3. Pronouns do not carry across paragraph breaks. It’s kind of like crossing a river to escape a pack of hunting dogs: pronouns can’t smell their antecedents if there’s a paragraph break in between.

Issue 3: formatting

This is the easiest, and the pickiest.

Please do follow Larry’s formatting suggestions for these essays:

• 1-inch margins (Word defaults to 1.25-inch margins, so you’ll have to change them)
• 12-point Times New Roman (the new Word defaults to some bizarre sans-serif font; do, please, change it to TNR)
• Type your name, the date, and my name (not Larry’s) in the upper left-hand corner—this is a change from Larry’s request that you put identifying information in the upper right-hand corner: I’m sorry that I have to be difficult, but there you are. This information should be single-spaced; everything else in the essay should be double-spaced.

In addition, please include page numbers on any essay longer than one page.

Three tools on the sidebar

A thrilling blog tour! If you scroll up and look to the right you’ll see three points of interest:

1. The course calendar

This is a Google calendar of class meetings and due dates. If you have a Google account you can just add this calendar to yours; if you don’t have one, you can set one up for free.

Not included on the calendar: the reading schedule. If you have your own Google calendar, though, you can add the readings as individual tasks.

2. Course materials

Lose your copy of the syllabus? Want a shorter version of the 44 Reminders? We can solve that.

3. Resources

These are tools we might not talk about in class but that can really help you push forward this summer. The big ones are the Writing Center and the librarians.

The Writing Center is an extraordinary writing instruction service, completely free. You schedule an appointment to meet with a writing instructor—all Ph.D. students in English—where you can brainstorm possible answers to an essay question, review a completed draft of your essay, or anything in between. The Writing Fellows with whom you will be working this summer are affiliated with the Writing Center.

Although there aren’t a lot of occasions for scholarly research this summer, the UW librarians are unqualifiedly amazing researchers and are eager to help you figure out how to answer your questions. I use their Ask a Librarian service all the time.

Midterm: part VI (44 Reminders)

From Larry:

To prepare, go over the essays you’ve written for this class. List your editing errors and make sure you understand what you missed so you don’t make the same mistakes on the midterm.

Before you start, read Part VI out loud. Listen for problems. Then open up the 44 Reminders (pp. 162-9, WHAT WE OWE THE READER), and begin editing—frequently consulting pp. 162-9.

When you’re done, read out loud again. Then read it lout loud again.

What I’ll be looking for is the following:

1. Every mistake fixed.
2. Each sentence corrected within the sentence (apostrophes inserted, etc.)
3. The rule written above the mistake
4. No sentences rewritten unless you have dangling modifiers

44 Reminders quiz grading: some notes

You may pick up your 44 Reminders quiz at tomorrow’s movie, if you would like.

The average grade was 39/50, a BC.

The most common errors were the omission of F,S commas in questions that were mainly about other editing issues. Take question #19, for example:

When you’re done you can read, “Big Top;” its good. I read, “Big Top:” have you?

Because the absurd punctuation of those sentences draws so much attention, most of you missed the comparatively more subtle absence of a comma after the introductory “When you’re done.”

Likewise the absence of a question mark in #25:

I read the article Relief in Somalia in The New York Times, I saw a show about Somalia called Will There Be Relief on 60 Minutes.

Those titles just screamed out for acknowledgment, but the absence of a question mark at the end of the title of the 60 Minutes feature was harder to catch.

There were also several cases in which I could not award full credit to those of you who simply deleted the offending parts of a sentence. In nearly every case the deletion was the superior editing choice—if your reader knows what Helen C. White Hall is, s/he surely knows that it is across the street—but the only way to get full credit was to explain how to correctly combine the elements of the sentence, even if that ended up producing an ugly sentence.

By Larry’s count, there were 164 errors to correct. Your score was determined by this equation: (164 – # of errors missed) * (50 / 164)

When you get your quiz back, please spend some time looking over the areas where you lost points: you will continue to lose points on your essays, on the midterm, and on the final exam unless you master those rules.

Email from Larry: 44 Reminders quiz answer key

The quiz will take place next Tuesday, July 15.

You’ll find the quiz on pp. 215 through 220 of WHAT WE OWE THE READER. That will be the exact quiz that we’ll hand out in class. I’ve attached the answer key. All you have to do to get an A is memorize the answer key.

Next Monday afternoon I’ll hold a review session to go over material for the quiz (which is worth 50 points). I’ll let you know the time/place as soon as possible.

Translating my comments on your essays

(Updated 7/2)

When I write numbers on parts of your essays, those numbers refer to the 44 Reminders. Here are quick sheets of the Reminders ordered numerically and by concept (structure, commas, etc.).

I tend to use certain abbreviations to help speed up the commenting process; unfortunately, this can have the effect of making my comments even less comprehensible than usual. Here’s a key to my abbreviations:

• ¶ = paragraph (this symbol is called a pilcrow or alinea)
• abt = about
• b/c = because
• BMS = be more specific
• cd = could
• dif’ce = difference
• dif’t = different
• esp = especially
• GWB = Pres. George W. Bush
• impt = important
• R = repetition (that is, you have already communicated this idea)
• RB = Renana Brooks
• rep = repetition (that is, you have already communicated this idea)
• S = Shakespeare
• TWE = to what end (that is, why is such-and-such a thing important?)
• undstg = understanding
• w/ = with
• w/o = without
• WC = word choice (that is, choose a different word)
• wd = would
• shd = should