When Jon Stewart interviewed Christopher Walken on The Daily Show recently, he asked Walken if he’d ever had to give one of those fake 555 phone numbers while acting in a film. Stewart’s point was that every time a character uses one of those numbers, it pulls viewers out of the movie. These aren’t real…
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As another round of student papers (the final set for this year) gets ready to come at me, I’m gearing up for looking at more careless mistakes: seemingly random uses of their, there, and they’re; sloppy pronoun references; uses of “now and days” or “now in days” instead of nowadays. Then there are the students…
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When I was about 5 years old, my favorite book was Captain Kitty. And by favorite, I mean I had my mother read it to me so many times that 35 years later I was still able to recite the first several pages even though my copy of the book was long gone, probably in…
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During the last few weeks, the concept of cultural literacy has come up in some of my classes. My students–mostly 18-20 year olds in college writing classes–insist that they’re getting along just fine without knowing where Aberdeen is or who invented the cotton gin. Their defense is that if they need to know something, they…
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