Below are some tips that the teacher of this course has written over the years and assembled here for your instruction.
Punctuation
Punctuation is a system of marks and characters used in writing or printing to clarify the relationships between sentences, phrases, words, and characters within words. It is a subset of mechanics, which is everything that you see on the page, including spelling, spacing, capitalization, and styles (such as bold, italics, and sub/superscript).
Punctuation is independent of grammar. That is, grammar governs speech, and written language represents speech. In speech, there is no comma. However, there are inflections and pauses in speech that roughly correlate to punctuation.
Punctuation is a relatively late development in the history of written language. During the heyday of the Roman Empire, the text in Roman books and tablets contained no punctuation, no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, and no word separation. Here is how the previous sentence would appear in Roman text:
DURINGTHEHEYDAYOFTHEROMANEMPIRETHE
TEXTINROMANBOOKSANDTABLETSCONTAINEDNO
PUNCTUATIONNODISTINCTIONBETWEENUPPERCASE
ANDLOWERCASELETTERSANDNOWORDSEPARATION
One anecdote illustrates the strong bond between speech (especially audible speech) and reading. In the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great silently read a letter from his mother to the bewilderment of his soldiers. Why were they bewildered? Because reading was part of a powerful oral tradition, and silent reading was centuries away from a wide embrace. In Alexander’s day, everything was read aloud, even when privacy was certain. That oral tradition lives on in the form of silent speech, which is automatically engaged during the process of fluid reading.
Human Factors
The study of designing equipment, devices, and language that fit the human body and its cognitive abilities.
Difficult Words
“Difficult words” are not necessarily words that pose a difficulty for the author. Rather, difficult words pose a difficulty for the reader who blunders upon them. Difficult words are not the words omitted from your active vocabulary. They are terms that you know and frequently use, perhaps in faulty way. In fact, you certainly have misused a term at least once in your life and may have been indiscriminately misusing a term and frustrating your readers for years. Misusage happens to everyone. In some cases, the “right” way to use a term is in controversy. This is a complication that cannot be readily resolved by referring to an authority. After all, you don’t really know on which side your reader falls. One example is the use of the word “data.” This term can be reasonably used as a singular noun. It can also be reasonably used as a plural noun. Context helps, and so does consistency established by a style guide (pick one, any one).
Word Order (Syntax)
Syntax is the arrangement of words within a sentence. English is roughly a “word-order” language, meaning that the order in which words appear expresses their functions in a sentence (for example, an “object” follows a preposition—thus the “pre” in “preposition”). Some languages permit words to be spread around a sentence (often for artistic effect) because the words include “case markers” that identify the words’ functions within a sentence. In English, word order is highly constrained (subject-verb-object, for example), but there are many opportunities to improve things or foul them up by strategically arranging your words.
Mechanics
The mechanics of writing is everything you see: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, symbols, signs, and so on.
Composition
Combining linguistic and visual parts or elements (sentences, pargraphs, chapters, illustrations, tables) to form a whole document.