Kia ora, I’m teaching a novel class for Whitireia while Mandy Hager’s away and as part of the course we do editing. Sunday was to end in a test.
You might think this doesn’t sound like an exhilarating way to spend a Sunday but you’d be quite wrong.
I sat among the students and we tackled apostrophes, commas, semi-colons, colons, got into the serious subject of filtering by working on a chapter of either our own work or someone else’s.
I wasn’t a particularly good student – If you’d thought no-one could get excited and argumentative over apostrophes you would be wrong. I did. I do. I wasn’t the only one. Yes, yes, there are two main reasons for using apostrophes – we all knew that, and then there’s the its, depending on whether its a pronoun or a contraction of it is. I have deliberately eschewed apostrophes here so you can argue among yourselves where I should have put one.
Two of us argued on behalf of dashes. Some of us are for frugality where adverbs and adjectives are concerned and veto exclamation marks – others not so hardline.
And I won’t go into the Oxford comma…that way lies madness (to misquote King Lear).
We dived into filtering (taking out the filtering words/phrases that smudge clarity) and it was so exciting to see the difference between the work before and how it changed after the removal of filtering words and phrases. Made me want to go through everything I ever wrote and filter it.
I got 29 & 1/2 out of 30. I argued but it was no good. Our teacher was adamant. Quite right.
Renée
