My 11th Rule

My 11th secret to writing is well is to read your work out loud to yourself. Yes, you might feel insane when you do this, but it really helps. I know when I read things in my head too many times, I start to feel foggy and I might not notice that something sounds weird. If you read it out loud and it feels awkward to say, you know you have a problem. This is a trick I've learned from the wonderful Jean Norman, adviser of The Signpost. She encourages all the reporters do this, and though I'm not a reporter, I've still started doing it with my academic writing. It really is very helpful to hear words, not just read them. 

A lot of errors I have been seeing recently have appeared in online discussion posts from some of my classmates. Like this one:

I find myself following a lot of different brands in social media like facebook, twitter, Linked In, and many other social media brands, and always find myself looking at a lot of the content, but focusing on certain things that I am interested in. I many follow a lot of these different brands because I am following sports or trying to keep up with all my favorite teams from professional sports through college. I like being kept up to speed with all my sports or world news happinings, but I like following them to findoit any extra information on sales for sports stuff like cloths or other items. And learning about new things that come out to buy or discounts for things I can use for my own team in marketing styles, and also staying in touch with others and like on facebook, always copying or sharing your favorite news feeds to your page to help or draw others to your page or a business page. 

First of all, AP style says that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter need to be capitalized. This person has not done that. He also spells 'happenings' wrong and also adds an unnecessary 's' at the end of it. Then there's that strange 'findoit' which was probably an overlooked typo, but it's certainly distracting because other students are expected to comment on these posts. There is also a sentence starting with 'and' when it clearly needed to a coordinating conjunction for the previous sentence. There are several unnecessary 'ands' placed into this post and a lot of sentences that run on and make no sense.

Another thing I notice a lot in daily life is the it's and its debacle, especially in text messaging. It bothers me so much when someone says "its happening at 6 p.m." instead of "It's happening at 6 p.m." because I really don't think this is a difficult rule. I just want to drill it into everyone's head: IT IS EQUALS IT'S.