Aside from a few months in middle
school when I decided that I was going to write everything, poems, novels, short
stories etc. (which you can image did not pan out very well) all the writing I have
done has been academic writing for classes. Thorough out the years I have
noticed that most of my teachers have had the same comments upon returning my
edited papers; I do not use enough commas. Nor do I use the active voice. (start a sentence with "Nor")
I have been fully aware of my comma
underuse for years, yet for some reason I have neglected to do anything about
it. I continued to write sentences, pause to look over them, realize that my
comma use had to be far to infrequent, and then instead of fixing them I just
moved on. Because it was easier to do than actually bother to look up where to
properly place them. (start a sentence with a "Because" clause) Looking back over the English classes that I have taken
through my life I am slightly shocked to realize that I do not remember being
instructed on commas since 6th grade. Not that I can use this as an
excuse for my resistance to taking the time out of my day to find the answers
that my education was not providing, however I feel that there are a lot of
misconceptions regarding commas and more English teachers should take time to
address them. Then maybe I would not find sentences in my writing such as:
“While Lovelace
praises the action of fighting Owen condemns it because unlike Lovelace he had
actually seen combat. (end a sentence with a "because" clause) He realizes that regardless of hundreds of years of
literature glorifying the actions of soldiers, there is nothing pleasant about
war”.
Looking back on
this is realize that it is a run on sentence without commas; yet this is a
final draft. (a compound sentence using a semicolon) For this reason I plan on
making sure that I use the proper number of them when I am writing in the
future. This way my academic papers in the future will be more grammatically correct
and clear and professional.
My
relationship with the passive voice is significantly more complicated then
commas. I can trace it back to my Junior year of high school, when, despite
years of English classes this is the first time I had even heard the term. I remember a teacher actually
explaining what the passive voice was and why we should avoid it when writing; The only problem was I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. (a compound sentence using a semicolon) I
got that the active voice was what I should be using in essays, and based on
several papers I received graded from that same teacher I knew I was using the
passive voice. And when she pointed it out in my writing I could recognize it, though
I could not stop myself from using it once or twice in every paper. (though, to interrupt a main sentence as a kind of aside) Now
when proofreading my own papers I can generally catch myself and change my
sentences to the active voice. Yet it is still a struggle for me
to recognize what I am using as I am writing. This year and I want to become
better at identifying the difference between the two and I can stop myself and
change my sentence structure before I write it down the first time. This way I
will be avoiding turning in papers with sentences such as “The action of
fighting is praised by Lovelace…”. By taking more care the omit the passive
voice from my writing it will be come a lot more straightforward.
