Blogging Pedagogy

The University of Texas, of course, has fantastic online writing resources available through the UWC, but other university writing centers also offer sites worth a look. Undergraduates might find The Writer’s Handbook for the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/index.html) particularly useful.

This week I've been taking a look at printed grammar handbooks available for free online. One of the best I've come across so far is William J. Strunk's The Elements of Style, available from Bartleby.com.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

I’ve known many professors who think highly of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. This is actually an earlier version (before E.B. White got involved), but students can get the full text for free. Though definitely dated, the handbook provides basic writing information still essential for students today.

In my search for useful grammar websites, I've also explored those not specifically designed for classroom use.

I'm pretty laid back when it comes to grammatical errors. I fear not to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before. A student stumbling over "they're," "there" and "their" isn't worth a blink.

But there's one in particular that makes me grind my teeth and wish I were unkind enough to use red ink on student essays: putting an apostrophe in a simple plural. When a student says "artist's" meaning "artists" my hair gets a little grayer.

There ought to be some sort of mnemonic for this. If we have "I before E except after C, or when in AY as in Neighbor and Weigh," why don't we have some similarly memorable mnemonic for apostrophes?

So I appeal to you, colleagues: do any of you know a suitable mnemonic for this most vexing of errors? If you have any other mnemonics, those would be interesting to hear too. Say on!