Feedback on Student Blogs

This week I used lab time to meet with students to give individual feedback on the blogs. Most students are doing fine. But it's really important to re-read your posts, ideally a day later, to check them for typos and errors.

Here are some common errors and things to watch for

i: The first person is always upper case. Even when it's not at the start of a sentence.

': Many people struggle with the apostrophe rule  in English. This site might help. Punctuation makes the difference knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.

s/he: English is inherently sexist. Most attempts to address this problem have been clumsy. S/he is just ugly. Saying he or she and his or hers (interestingly it's never hers or his) is tedious. Saying he or saying she is fine. It might be an idea to switch the sex from time to time, so long as you don't change any individual's sex mid paragraph. Using the non-gender specific plural, when a singular is required, is wrong too. More dangerous is real sexism. When writing don't assume that all brain surgeons and athletes are male, and all primary school teachers are female.

Proper nouns: All proper nouns in English are capitalized. e.g. Google

Singular vs. Plural: Apple is a company. It has policies. It has products and services. It is singular.

Copyright is usually singular. Copyrights is probably wrong. I'm not sure.

Avoid "me" "you" "we" "the author" "the reader"

Any errors in this post are obviously here for irony.