A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: March 10. All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Jennifer Brooks, student correspondent; Mae Nguyen, special contributor; Siulan Thomas, special contributor; Amy Lenhart, special contributor; Nick Young, photographer; layout by public relations.
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The Write Way
This month’s column continues emphasizing correct usage, for, as we note frequently here, the most efficiently organized essay is worthless if its diction leaves readers scratching their heads. As we also note in many of these columns, hundreds of word pairs appearing similar in meaning are actually dissimilar. Test your hand by selecting the correct usage from the underlined words in the following sentences:
1. "Although we were eager to hear a lecture (entitled / titled) 'Making Better Use of Time,' we waited too long to reserve seats."
2. "Her best friend's (harebrained / hairbrained) ideas often resulted in surprisingly delightful adventures."
3. "(Hopefully / We hope) that nothing will interfere with our plans to travel to Europe this summer."
• The correct choice in the first sentence is "titled": "Although we were eager to hear a lecture titled 'Making Better Use of Time,' we waited too long to reserve seats." The word "entitled," by contrast, means one has a right of ownership to something ("We were entitled to a refund for the broken item"). Of course, the word can also indicate giving a title to a work: "The lecturer entitled his lecture long before he recorded a word of it." Similarly, the word can indicate the conferring of a title: "Queen Elizabeth entitled Sir Sean Connery."
• Sentence #2 presents us with the preferred word "harebrained" (meaning "silly as a hare") and the common term "hairbrained." Although increasingly accepted as standard usage, "hairbrained" should rest permanently in the throwaway sack of useless hairbrushes.
• Sentence #3 should read this way: "We hope that nothing will interfere with our plans to travel to Europe this summer." The word "hopefully"—an adverb meaning "with hope"—is nonstandard if used to mean "we hope" or "it is hoped that" or a similar expression. Used at the beginning of a sentence, it usually sets up a dangling modifier, a serious structural error, because it fails to make a clear connection to a verb, adjective, or another adverb, the only three parts of speech it can modify. Like the word "hairbrained," however, the word "hopefully" has moved into the commonly accepted (but not preferred) column in some academic circles. In the following sentence, the word "hopefully" functions as it should because it modifies in a meaningful way the verb "walked": "The bride and groom walked hopefully down the aisle" (i.e., walked with hope).
This month's standard comma placement rules illustrate the correct "setting off" of places and dates with the use of commas. Examples of correct and incorrect placement follow:
Example 1, correct: "Sherry Smith was born January 16, 1975, in Memphis, Tennessee 38118, and achieved national prominence on her 20th birthday." Because the following sentence isn't setting off dates and places, its punctuation is correct: "Sherry Smith was born in 1975 in Memphis and achieved national prominence on her 20th birthday."
Example 2, correct: "She will hold a meeting at Collin College on May 15, 2007, in Room G238 to discuss the role of technology in elementary schools." Equally correct if certain dates and places are irrelevant: "She will hold a meeting at Collin on May 15 in Room G238 to discuss the role of technology in elementary schools."
Example 3, incorrect: The following sentence illustrates two common errors, namely: the omission of a comma after the year if a day of the month precedes it and the omission of a comma after the state if a city precedes it: "She will hold a meeting at Collin College in Plano, Texas on May 15, 2007 in Room G238 to discuss the role of technology in elementary schools."
Next month, we'll wrap up our comma rules with a discussion of parenthetical expressions.
As always, I welcome suggestions from students, staff, and faculty for these monthly columns and shall try to use their contributions in future columns. Should you have a topic you’d like discussed here, please write me at jmiller@ccccd.edu . You may also telephone me at 972.881.5981. Students wishing improved writing skills will find useful links to a dozen or so English grammar sites at http://iws.ccccd.edu/jmiller/jmiller.htm .
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