stovellp

What a friendly little community this is!

My name is Paul Stovell, and I'm not really a grammar-holic. In fact, I am quite the opposite. I am a 17 year old student from South Australia, currently studying year 12. I have a passion for programming and software development, and I am a bit of a nerd in the maths/science department. But my communication skills leave much to be desired, especially when it comes to formal documents.

So I would like to join your wonderful little community in order to bask in all your knowledge, and hopefully learn a thing or two, if you'll have me.

The area I am most worried about in my English is how I structure documents when I am writing. I'll usually start with an introduction, but I have a habbit of going off topic rather quickly (as I have probably done in this post). There seems to be no real focus in my writing unless I polish it for hours, which I think is simply unnacceptable. So I am here to learn, to improve myself, and to gain a better score for this terms english report!

At the moment I am reading Elements of Style, but only the E-Book version online, which was suggested to me on another forum. Are there any other places online with this sort of a guide to english?

Nice to meet you all!

Paul Stovell

PS: Thanks for pointing me here pyko![/url]

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Kat

I don't know about online but there were a few books that were mandatory in my first college writing class.

1) Bedford Handbook- really helpfull and well laidout. It lists all proper uses for punctuation and basic grammer. It also has a section of the most common mistakes.

2)Writing Reasearch Papers by Weidnborner and Caruso. - I still have this book but I don't think I've ever read it but the teacher seemed to think it was important.

Welcome and hope this helps a little.

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Leapord

Welcome to the forums.

Wow. I could describe myself in exactly the same way

As for your communication skills, it's wonderful that your realize their importance. So many technology students wonder why they need to take writing classes; I'm glad you do not fall into this category. I don't know of any good books on the topic, but I do have one bit of advice. First, decide what you want to say before hand (outline, or even just a list of the points you will cover). Then write your introduction, which will only be a description of what you are going to say. Then write one paragraph for each point you listed earlier. Then write your conclusion, which recaps the different points you covered. If you do get off topic as you write, go back and edit it out.

Hope that helps

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Spudley

Hello! It's good to meet you. Let me welcome you to our little community

There's lots of books and other sources of information for this - Elements of Style is certainly one of the most well known, and probably one of the best.

I would also say that the best way to improve your writing is practice practice practice. Get other people to read what you've written; comments by other writers on your own writing can be much more helpful than any book could ever be.

Another good way to improve your own writing is to read other people's with a critical eye. Learning to spot other people's mistakes is also really helpful with learning to spot your own.

Combine those two points together, and you'll see why a forum like this is so good for writers.

We'd love to see you post some of your writing here, or on the forum's sister site Lit.org - you can be pretty sure of getting some good comments on your writing, especially if you read and comment on some others too.

And that's how we build our community

Hope to see you around.

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Leapord

Hm, I just bought that since I thought it looked good. Haven't had a chance to start reading it yet though.

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Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.
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stovellp

Haha, thanks for such a warm welcome guys! I am a member on a lot of forums, but I must say I have never seen a board with the sole purpose of just introducing yourself!

I guess what I want to learn most, is to be able to look at a piece of text like a computer program. Instead of just looking at what the text is talking about (what the application does), I want to take a closer look at the writing style (code) behind it. I want to be able to apply the rules of english and grammar to my writing, the way I apply syntax rules to my code. I want to be able to structure my writing the way I structure my code. There may not be such thing as Object Oriented Writing, but maybe I'll find something close.

I picked up a book from the library today about structuring essays, and I plan to have a little read of it when I have finished my homework. We have an english assignment due next week, so I might be able to apply the book to this assignment, and if possible I'll try and post it on here to seek your comments.

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Pawn

It is perfectly possible to write in such a way. Many talentless individuals have made good writing careers out of it!

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