Why This Book?

Community college students are the most ambitious, hard-working, honest people I know, and I think they deserve a readable, friendly textbook. I hope I can deliver one.

I know what courage college requires if your parents weren’t professors, if you didn’t grow up hearing poetry recited at the dinner table, if you didn’t have enrichment programs and tutors and summer Shakespeare camp. But I also know, from many years of teaching writing, and from my own background, that all you really need is someone to help you build confidence, someone who can explain the rules of the game in plain language, someone to believe in you until you can believe in yourself.

If it helps with the fear factor, you should know that you aren’t alone—far from it! There is a whole tidal wave of newcomers and latecomers to college, as traditional working class jobs evaporate and folks have to get educated in a different way, or sometimes have to apply for financial aid and go to college simply because they can’t find any other way to feed their families.

By the time this book is in your hands, you’ve probably managed to survive the gauntlet of placement testing; to fill out a FAFSA online, which for some people means figuring out what the hell “online” even means, and how to get there; to find childcare, secure transportation, and get a nightshift job. Maybe you’ve also gotten that restraining order against the person who said you were too stupid and worthless to go to college. By hook or crook, you’ve psyched yourself up to make it to the New World, despite whatever incredibly difficult combination of #$%@ you had to work through to get this far in your journey. Even though you’re terrified that you’ll fail, you tell yourself that college language is just a variation on the English you already know, a different dialect that you can learn to understand and even imitate, given time—as if you were Irish, immigrating to New York.

When new students finally get to their first college class and start listening to how the teacher talks, though, or trying to interpret the assignments and textbooks bulging in their backpacks, they feel more like they’ve landed in Japan, where there are three alphabets to learn—which might be doable, except that they have a paper due, like next week. In fact, several papers are due next week. In Japanese.

This book is your translation guide.

I am going to help you write those papers.

You can do it.

Who’s Writing This Book?

At age fifty-six, during a very bloody divorce, I went through the Women in Transition program at Lane Community College—the same place where I now have a job myself, teaching writing.

When I went back to school, I thought I would be lucky to land a fast food gig, but didn’t think I would be able remember an order long enough to make change, because before the divorce calamity, I had been a stay-at-home mom for twenty-five years, majoring in caretaking. I had taken care of my older son’s father while he died inch-by-inch of Parkinson’s disease; then taken care of my mother, who introduced herself in diabetes management class by saying emphatically, “I don’t have diabetes!”; taken care of my new husband, who turned out to be a case study in a book about narcissistic personality disorder (yes, I mean a real book); and taken care of my two brilliant sons, who by age four could have argued their way out of a maximum security facility: “I wasn’t reading under the covers after bedtime, Mom, I was just passing my eyes over the material and comprehending it.”

God help me.

Most of my education has thus happened outside of school, and without the aid of a textbook. But I have been a reader all of my life, even when there were no books around. When I was a kid and my mother was going through her own divorce, I was sent off to live with various relatives who were not exactly intellectuals, so I read Copenhagen snuff tins, the ingredients on Wonder Bread wrappers, and the old newspapers that insulated the general store in the town of Windom, Texas, where my granddaddy barbered on Saturdays. I don’t remember how I learned to read—no one ever taught me anything formally—but I remember that the grade school principal noticed me reading a Double Bubble comic when I started school, and put me into second grade.

Because I was a reader, I had access to a world much bigger than that of the dirt-poor farmers I grew up with (I was fourteen before my grandparents got indoor plumbing) and much different than the world that the women in my family had so far inhabited. My grandmother had fallen in love with my granddaddy when she was nine, and had never even learned to drive. Not that theirs was a bad life; growing cotton and pigs and corn on a few acres of black Texas soil, my family fed their children all through the Great Depression, which was no mean feat.

But it was a limited life, with no window on the world other than the glorious black-and-white television on which my grandmother watched The Guiding Light while she shelled black-eyed peas into a white enamel pan. Applying her version of critical thinking, she would comment “Lordy,” and shake her head as the Bauer family worked their way through decades of astonishing infidelity and alcohol. I don’t remember her ever writing anything other than the birthday cards she sent to Papa Bauer, to buck him up, as if he were real instead of a character on a soap opera.

I don’t know how I learned to write, given such circumstances, but I see from an early letter that I had invented my own system, putting little dots between the words because no one had explained spaces to me. Maybe I was driven to teach myself because I thought that if I could write a letter to my mother, she might write me back. Reading was easier for me than writing, because it was about escaping reality, not recording it.

My love of reading eventually took me away from the farm into really foreign territory, including academia—possibly the strangest land of all, if I don’t count Hollywood. (In one of my several former lives, I was married to Cowboy Bob from The Blues Brothers movies—yes, really—but that’s another story, one that, believe me, has nothing to do with succeeding in college.) If you’re having trouble keeping my husbands straight, don’t even bother trying. Just know that I’m in no position to be passing judgment on anyone, which is one thing that has made me a pretty good teacher.

 

 

How to Use This Book

First, take a couple of minutes to look over the Table of Contents at the front of the book.

You should do this with any book you have to get for college, because the Table of Contents will give you some idea of what’s in it and where you can find the material you need at three o’clock in the morning when you don’t remember (for example) whether you’re supposed to put your first name in an MLA style header.

We’ll get to what MLA style means later, and I’ll show you how to master its nit-picky, often arbitrary rules so that you can get an A on your paper. Of course we’re all supposed to want a profound, transformative, enlightening educational experience—but let’s face it: good grades are what will get you a scholarship, a reference letter, a reputation, and a degree that results in a job somewhere other than Burger King. So I want to show you how to get good grades. (It has nothing to do with how smart you are, by the way, so quit worrying about that right now.)

Then take a couple more minutes to look over the Index, which is at the end of the book. It’s an alphabetical listing of everything in the book. So to solve your three o’clock header problem, you could try looking up “header” or “MLA style” in the index. If it’s a well-written index, you’ll find both entries.

Crap. I realize I’ve just set myself the task of writing a good index!* (see footnote)

Then feel free to skip around. You don’t have to read this book in sequence, or cover-to-cover. Nobody has time to read everything, especially in college, where teachers often seem to forget that you might be taking other classes. It’s not uncommon to find yourself with two or three books to read over the weekend!

In order to survive, you need to learn how to scan. Pretend you’re shopping, and looking to see which aisles (or chapters) have the items you need right now. If you have lots of time, you can slow down and take it all in—but if not, you can grab what you need and get out of the store.

Here’s an overview of the three main “aisles” in this book:

The first section is about dealing with psychological stuff that can freeze you up or set you free as a writer. You might want to start there, if you already know that anxiety or perfectionism, for example, are problems for you. Or just take note that those sections exist, in case such things become problems anywhere down the line.

The second section is about the academic stuff. If I were you, I’d avoid this section as long as possible, even though that stuff is why you bought the book—but maybe you’re a better man than I am. I keep books like this in the bathroom or on my nightstand so that I’m reminded on a regular basis that I should be reading them, and to insure that when I do, it will be in small, manageable doses, or that they put me to sleep when I’m already in bed.

The good news is that you don’t have to actually remember any of the rules I will be explaining in the second section; that’s why you bought this reference book that can remember them for you! All you need to do is wrap your mind around the reality that the academic world has its own language, which you can practice over time. These words and concepts are how educated people recognize each other, kind of like gang hand signals. (As an experiment in power, you might try learning an intellectually fashionable word like hegemony, flash it in class, and watch your teacher’s reaction.)

The third section is a short guide to grammar and punctuation. Such guides are known as handbooks, and there are a whole lot of good ones already written. In the handbook section of this text, I’m only going to include an explanation of common errors, because understanding those will prevent about 90% of the problems you’re likely to have with college writing, and because you can get a more complete guide elsewhere, if you really want to know the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive.

(Relax—you don’t really need to. I can barely tell a verb from a noun, and I’ve edited books that have earned six-figure advances!) You can find handbooks in the reference section of your college library, in used bookstores, or online. If you want to buy one, just be sure it’s got the latest version of MLA and APA rules; these change infrequently, but significantly.

That’s it! Now put this book on your nightstand and go do something nice for yourself, because you deserve it. When you pick this up again, start with whatever section sounds most useful for what you need—or just start with the next topic, Self-Doubt, which I put first because every new-to-college student I’ve ever met has struggled with it.

__________

*You wouldn’t use a line like this in an academic essay because “crap” is not Standard Written English, and because the thought is just an irrelevant comment from writer to self—but I left it in here because I want to model the writing process for you. In a first draft, anything goes! You need to allow yourself to be yourself on the page so you don’t freeze up. You can always go through in revision and clean up words like “crap”—or maybe you’ll decide to leave them in because you have a teacher who swears in class and has a sense of humor; sizing up situations like this is called audience awareness.

Note: in the published book, you will be able to find all these blue words defined in the Glossary.  (In the e-book version, vocabulary and other content will be hyperlinked.) When you encounter a blue word you don’t know, you can check it out: building your academic vocabulary is like putting money into a savings account that pays interest–and this version pays a whole lot more than a bank does.