Mastering Essay Organization: Patterns and Punctuation for Effective Writing

1. Review • - There are four common patterns of essay organization in English you should have learned: • Chronological order • Logical division of ideas • Cause and effect • Comparison and contrast. • With each pattern you use special transition signals and structure words. • There are still other ways of essay organization. • For long essay or term papers , you may need to use a combination of patterns.

2. Quiz • Write an essay on one of the following topics using a suitable • Generation Gap • University of Palestine • Learning English as a Foreign Language • Communication Revolution • How to write an essay • Internet in the 21st Century • You are required to show all steps on paper. -

3. Punctuation

4. Punctuation (p. 253- p. 261) • 1. Commas • 2. Semicolons • 3. Colons • 4. Quotation marks

5. Punctuation1. Commas • Commas functions as: • 1. Introducers • 2. Co-ordinators • 3. inserters • 4. linkers

6. Punctuation1. Commas • Commas functions as: • 1. Introducers: • e.g. Recently, the legislature banned smoking in public places. • _______, (main clause). • 2. Coordinator • Many people opposed the new law, but it finally passed. • Main clause___ (coordinating conjunction)__ Main clause

7. Punctuation1. Commas • Commas functions as: • 3. Inserter: Smallpox, once a widespread disease, is under control. Main ----------------------------------------clause • 4. Linkers: • e.g. (1): The word color is spelled colour in British English, for example. • Main Clause-----------------------------, ----------------. • e.g. (2): Cecile speaks English, French, Spanish, and Italian. • -----------, ---------, ---------,

8. Punctuation1. Commas See p. 254 & 256 for words used for different kinds of commas See practice I, p. 255

9. Punctuation semi - colons • The semi-colon is more like a period than a comma. • It is used between: • 1. Between two sentences that are closely connected in idea. e.g. Alice is going to Harvard; she isn’t going to M. I. T.

10. Punctuation semi - colons • It is used between: • 2. Before conjunctive adverbs and some traditional phrases. • Skiing is dangerous; nevertheless, hundreds of people ski.

11. Punctuation semi - colons • 3. Between items in a series if the items already contain commas. • See p. 257

12. Colons: • 1. Lists • 2. Long quotations • 3. Subtitles • 4. Time • 5. Formal salutations

13. Quotation marks

14. Parallelism(p. 168) • Using similar grammatical structures to balance your writing. • If the first structure is a noun, make all the others nouns; if it is an infinitive verb phrase, make all of the others infinitive verb phrases; if it is a dependent clause, make all of the others dependent clauses. • with conjunctions (And, Or, But) • Correlative conjunctions

15. Sentence Problems • 1. Sentence Fragments • 2. Choppy Sentences • 3. Run-On sentences and Comma Splices • 4. Stringy Sentences

16. Sentence Problems: Sentence fragments (p. 171) • Sentence fragments are incomplete sentences or parts of sentences. • (A complete sentence must contain at least one main or independent clause) • See p. 171

17. Sentence Problems:Choppy Sentence • Choppy sentences are sentences that are too short. They are the result for using too many simple sentences. • Although simple sentences are quite effective sometimes, overuse of them is considered poor style in academic writing. • See, p. 173.

18. Sentence Problems:Run-On Sentences and Comma Splices (p, 175) • A run-on sentence is a sentence in which two or more independent clauses are written one after another with no punctuation. • A similar error happens when two independent clauses are incorrectly joined by a comma without a coordinating conjunction • N.B This kind of error is also called a comma splice. • Comma Splice means joining end to end.