Submission Guidelines Composition

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

English Composition (ESL)

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

Thank you for your interest in English Composition (ESL). Please submit your request, e.g. "Please read the attached document and let me know what you think," your name, email address, local mailing address and telephone number, a registration form, and your Apple TextEdit or Microsoft Word document, not to exceed three (3) double-spaced pages per submission, via email to

johnbrucecantrell@verizon.net

I will read and mark your paper very carefully and return it to you with my comments within five working day. If there are many problems, I may mark only the most serious errors, for the time being, and ask that you correct these problems first, before moving on to less serious problems. To avoid partial reading of your work and/or unnecessary delays, please limit your submissions to one three-page, double-spaced document per week

Put aside time each day to work on your writing; then, weekly, on a regular schedule, revise and resubmit your papers, or submit new papers, something required at school or work: for example, research proposals, literature reviews, autobiographical information, applications for financial aid, requests for grants and fellowships, narrative laboratory reports, scholarly articles, etc., keeping in mind that we can deal with bits and pieces, only, of longer documents, per individual submission.

Avoid carelessness! Always do the best you can. Submit the very best papers you are capable of writing. Otherwise, you will waste your time, and your teacher's as well, and end up spending money on lessons you have already learned. Try to improve as a writer with each submission and avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Carelessness wastes valuabe resources.

THE PROCESS OF WRITING

"Grasp the subject; the words will follow." Cato the Elder

Invention

Remember that writing is a process that begins with invention (coming up with something to say), proceeds to arrangement (putting your thoughts in some kind of logical order), and ends, finally, with style (grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, diction, spelling, punctuation, and mechanics). Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t worry about arrangement and style until you are more or less certain of what it is you want to say. Do some brainstorming and perhaps some outlining to get an idea of how the paper might shape up, but don’t worry at the outset about getting the sentences exactly right, the spelling exactly right, the punctuation exactly right, etc. Otherwise, you’ll never figure out what it is you really want to say.

Give yourself plenty of time. Writing in English is not difficult, not if you give yourself plenty of time. But it is time-consuming. Even native speakers and native writers of English require a lot of time in order to write well. Start with brainstorming, note-taking, scribbling ideas down on paper without worrying about how they might fit together in a well-organized paper. Some of the ideas you will actually use, some you will discard or put aside for use in some other paper. The main thing, at first, is to come up with as many ideas as you can in the time you have to work on the paper.

Arrangement

Once you have come up with a page or two or more of ideas, rough notes, outlines, etc., then (and only then) think about arranging these ideas in a paper with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Write a sentence in which you express the main idea of the paper. Put this sentence, sometimes called the “thesis statement,” in the opening paragraph of your paper. Write three sentences, or more, in support of your main idea, three sentences, or more, in which you attempt to prove that your main idea is sound, intelligent, valid, true, or probably true, to the best of your knowledge. Put these sentences, sometimes called “topic sentences,” into each of three, or more, paragraphs comprising the middle, or “body,” of your paper. In each of these paragraphs develop ideas and write sentences that support each “topic sentence.” Once you have finished writing the introductory paragraph, with its “thesis statement,” and the three, or more, supporting paragraphs (in support of the “thesis statement,” each paragraph with its own “topic sentence” and sentences proving the validity of the “topic sentences”), then try to write a final paragraph, sometimes called the “conclusion,” in which you sum up what you have written in the introduction and body of the paper, giving perhaps some indication of where you might want to go from there, what you might want to write about next, or what perhaps logically follows from what you have written already.

Style

Now that you have a rough draft of your paper (rough notes expressing good ideas in a more or less logical order) with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, review in your mind all of the things that you know about English grammar: for example, the parts of speech (noun, pronoun, etc.), word, phrase, and clause, basic sentence patterns (noun+action verb, noun+action verb+direct object, etc.), independent and dependent clauses, basic sentence types (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex). If you require help with grammar, or just want to go over a few things with me, to refresh your memory, make an appointment with me so that we can discuss the basics together, put some things on the board, look at some of the more serious (and egregious, unforgivable) writing errors, and come up with strategies for avoiding them.

Finally, and not until the very end of the writing process of invention, arrangement, and style, we will look at spelling (spell-checking on the computer) and diction, sometimes called “word choice” (thesaurus-checking on the computer), and last of all capitalization, punctuation, word and line spacing, paragraph indention, quotation marks, footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, and other mechanical considerations.

CLOSING REMARKS

This is the process I would like for you to follow in trying to improve your writing. It is a time-consuming process, as I have said, and to improve noticeably you must be honest with yourself, make a commitment to yourself to improve your writing, and plan in advance to devote time and effort to each revision I ask you to make. If you do this, you will succeed. You will become a better writer. In time, should you continue to take your writing seriously, you will become an excellent writer, with full knowledge of the writing process and of what it takes to write all kind of documents extremely well under the most stressful circumstances.

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