The best endorsement

I’m sitting on pins and needles, waiting to receive the published copy of Writing Matters. I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, I am beta-testing select chapters in my own first-year writing course. We’ve worked with the chapters on avoiding plagiarism and organizing an essay, for example, and those class sessions have gone well.

I also devoted part of a class session to using hyphens. I explained to the class that hyphen use is not an issue that most faculty mark up a paper for, but that correct hyphen use is a mark of advanced literacy. I said that if when student writers use hyphens correctly, vanguard readers notice, and their esteem of the writer rises. Correct hyphen use, I said, is a small but not insignificant way of enhancing one’s writerly ethos.

So we spent about half an hour on hyphen use, working through the explanations in Chapter 57 of Writing Matters. (My students were wildly impressed, by the way, that I had written a 57-chapter book. That was a funny part of the conversation.) We did some of the exercises collaboratively, and then they checked their own work in progress for hyphen use. They seemed mildly interested and engaged in all this, and then class ended and off they went.

Then yesterday I was conferencing with one of the students, and as she packed up her paper and got up to leave, she said, “I really liked that chapter on hyphens; that was really useful. Do you have a chapter on semicolons? I want to know how to use those better.”

As you might imagine, I have happily sent her the PDF for the semicolons chapter.

Many colleagues have conducted enormously helpful and supportive reviews of Writing Matters; the book simply would not be what it is without all that help. And the words of praise have made this writer very happy.

And now I have my first student endorsement. That makes yesterday a special day.