The Unit of Construction

The adroit writer knows his building blocks.  The building blocks to every piece of writing is the paragraph.  In poetry, we call it the stanza.  In narrative, informative and persuasive writing it is basically known as the paragraph:  the inevitable building block we all come to when we build our written edifices.  Strunk and White were the first to note in The Elements of Style that this was the lean, crisp, incisive structural piece that all good writing danced upon.  A good rule of thumb is you should be able to create as many sentences in your paragraphs as the grade you've reached (if you're in 3rd grade, 3 sentence paragraphs; 5 for 5th; etc.).  Jane Schaeffer discovered that the essays that best helped teenagers get into the colleges of their choice had the most Concrete Details (CD) coupled with comments on said CDs.  Concrete Details are facts, incidences, examples, pieces of evidence coughed up in sentences.  For every topic sentence of a paragraph, she found the good writers could come up with 3 to 4 concrete details and ten to twelve comments per CD.  Paragraphs morph into elastic blocks when used for different purposes.  For poetry, they are stanzas of description.  For informative writing, they are receptacles of facts.  For Narrative writing, they are purveyors of actions, conversations and incidences.  For persuasive essays, they are cogent arguments.  The paragraph is the play-dough we all need to become good at modeling.

Etymology or Entomology

Fairly the same thing.  The study of words (etymology) is very much like the study of bugs (entomology).  Let's take the word Fredonia.  There are several United States cities and a municipality of Columbia with the name "Fredonia."  Most surveyors of popular culture will recognize Fredonia as the country Groucho Marx tries to ludicrously defend in Duck Soup.  When Texas tried to secede from Mexico in 1826, they wanted to call their new country Fredonia.  But the true origin of the word dates back to a smear that the British intended to bring upon the newly formed independent colonies, the United States of America.  They thought to give us the back of the hand with the appellation and we received it with pride.  Fredonia, land of the free.  Today, one can read Dr. Diane Ravitch use it as an example in her article Multiculturalism:  E Pluribus Plures.  Words have a way of crawling up inside of things and staying there.

Apostrophes, hyphens and dashes

Apostrophes

Take the word boy.  Add an 's'.  You have the plural 'boys', meaning more than one boy.  Put an apostrophe between the y and the s, and you form the possessive.  'The boy's ball' meaning the ball that belongs to the boy (singular).  Sounds the same as 'boys' but an entirely different meaning.  Put an apostrophe at the end of boys:  "boys'" and you have one ball that belongs to many boys.


Hyphens

Ever get that red line on a word that you know is right like "toolbox" or "holdout"  or "neoevangelical"?  Try a hyphen:  tool-box, hold-out, neo-evangelical and watch the red line magically disappear.


Dashes

The great writer C. S. Lewis found the need for a form of stop somewhere between a period and a comma.  He took to using a dash.  Word processing programs know when you're trying to use one, just hit two hyphens in a row.  For example, "Joe--the fine postman of our street--always came up to our door with a smile."  Most programs will automatically turn this double hyphen into a long dash.  Also, if you hit "space, hyphen, space" you'll usually get a version of the long dash.

Punctuation

Diacritical marks are the obvious remnants , the jots and the tittles, that prove the symbolic nature of language.

Power Writing (click on it)

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AT6WENugVwwBZGc2dHh4c2ZfMGZqcXpmOGdr&hl=en_US&authkey=CLnCosoH

Charting the Waters of Communication

       Term               Definition                   Mechanics          Purpose

Communication	Idea transfer	Source, message, channel, receiver	Connection
English	A collection of sounds and symbols agreed upon to communicate with	Vocabulary and Grammar	Communion—having a language in common
Writing	Symbol manipulation	Stylus (and sometimes ink) and a medium	Clarity

The Mechanics of Communication

Sounds, symbols, letters

Humans have many senses beyond the five that are hardwired to actual organs (see, hear, smell, touch, taste).  One of those is the sense of communication.  Obviously, this particular sense has a lot to do with the hard-wired five as well.  What you see is "communicated" to your brain where it triggers memories and often responses (positive, negative or otherwise).  Hearing is a huge part of the mechanics of communication.  Without a clear path of communication to the brain, how does one know what one smells is offensive or pleasant?  Touch and taste communicate in very much the same way.  Brain studies show us that the throat and intellect of the human appears actually "designed" for communication.

Another sense well-developed in the human psyche is the association of symbols with sounds and memories.  This gives humans a visual short-hand for communicating ideas.  In languages, these symbols have become role specific in that they represent particular sounds.  In English, we call them letters.  Saying and using letters follow particular patterns.  For example, to say the letter "A" one must begin, hold it for a moment and then end.  Aayyyeee (to exaggerate).  This portends a basic quality of all communication:  begin, hold, end.  Take the word CAT---made up of the letters C--A--T.  To communicate this word, one must start with the initial hard sound of "kuh."  Then one must hold for a moment the medial sound of "Aa."  Finally, one must end with the final sound of "tuh."  Communication by it's nature has a beginning, middle and end.

Therefore, if one's goal is to get a message clearly across to another, they must keep this fact about each piece of communication in mind---it has a beginning, a middle and an end.  How successful we are or how short we fall in communication depends on how well we follow this first rule (among others as our understanding expands).

The Flow

sounds
letters
symbols

the symbolic nature of communication takes sounds we form and uses them to represent agreed upon variabes (letters)

ideas
words

ideation: nearly impossible to think the word "elephant" and not get a picture of one in your head

sentences
thoughts

the sentence is a complete unit of thought

paragraphs
arguments

the paragraph is the unit of construction for writers--a series of statements that begins with a proposition and ends with a conclusion

case
essay
story

the essay takes a series of arguments that support a case and arranges them in a pleasing manner with an overall introduction and an overall conclusion