| KEY to Correction Symbols/Abbrevs. I Commonly Use on Your Essays: | |
|---|---|
| ! | great (or hilarious) point |
| > | good point; "yeh, I'm followin' yu'" |
| ? | unclear; suspect point; "yu' lost me here" |
| cs | comma splice: Subject+Predicate , Subject+Predicate |
| awk | awkward grammatical/sentence structure |
| ww | wrong word (denotation) |
| wc | word choice (connotation) |
| / | space needed here; especially between the "dots" in ellipses:
NOT: "I came...I conquered...." INSTEAD: "I came . . . I conquered. . . ." (If MS WORD auto-removes your spaces, I think you can turn off that reprehensible function in the "Auto-Correct" Preferences [or somethin' like that–sounded good to a Bill-Gates-o-phobe like me].) |
| ¶ | paragraph break needed |
| trans | transition needed |
| cohe | cohesion problem ("jumbled" or "abrupt" thoughts/sentences/paragraphing) |
| [others:] | I can't reproduce here the "insert" and "delete" symbols that I also commonly use, but they should be intuitively obvious in their context. |
| Note on the DASH: | A dash is not a single hyphen; use two hyphens, or a real "em" dash, with no spaces
before or after:
NOT: "I - uh - love you." INSTEAD: "I--uh--love you." OR: use a real "em" dash ("I–uh–love you"): option/shift/hyphen on a Mac ("Windoz, I know nuttin'.") |
| Note on Lit./Media TITLES: | The general rule is that works that are a "whole" (book titles, etc.) are italicized or underlined (e.g., Moby Dick) and works that are "part" of a whole (e.g., individual poems from a collection, etc.) are put within quot. marks (e.g., "Dover Beach"). The former–that is, italicized–include books, plays, magazine and journal titles (e.g., Newsweek), movies, CDs, and TV shows. The latter–that is, in quots.–include book chapter titles, essays, poems, songs, and TV episodes. (You may underline book titles, etc., rather than italicize them, but do one or the other throughout your essay.) Finally, your OWN essay title should be neither underlined or in quots.; emphasize it instead via bold type and/or caps if you so desire. |
| Finally: | I have a bad habit of grading papers while standing up or pacing the floor, so if you can't read any of my comments, please ask me. . . . Further note: the "substandard" representation of dashes and ellipses (in isolation) probably won't cost yu' even a single point in my evaluation of your grammar/mechanix. But I'd think of the bigger picture: doing these little things right in your later academic and business writing will let your peers & superiors know that, yes, you know the fine points of that "grand game" called a college education. |