The 11th Secret: a Hoarder's Guide

My 11^th secret is fairly simple: write everything down. By everything I mean everything. I learned this from having a memory that's scattered at the best of times. I'll assure myself that something useful or vitally important will remain securely bolted into my creative memory, but before I started using this trick I lost a lot of good material. If you're accustomed to writing longhand and find that your ideas flow more freely with a pen on a physical page, make sure there's a substantial margin for side scribbles. If, like me, you're much more adept at typing, keep a second word processor window open. Even on the first hasty scribble, there are sentences and ideas that end up on the proverbial cutting room floor. My suggestion is to keep the scraps. Ideas or passages that are discarded during your rough draft or the first stages of revision might turn out to be pure gold later on or work much more effectively in a different context than the one for which you originally conceived them. Obviously this can result in a jumbled mess, but just like the actual piece you're writing it can be pared down as you go along. This can also apply the organization and planning stage; try taking a collage approach to your outline. Keep the pieces that have potential but alter the structure. In my experience making heavy use of the cut, copy, and paste functions universal to even the most basic word processors has been extremely helpful.

Verb/subject agreement

This example was taken from an online discussion that was part of one of my other classes in which the offending classmate was referring to the recent shift in the U.S. Army's recruiting strategies.

“. . . their business goals was to recruit people. . .” and later in the same post, “They gave you the basic rundown of what you was enlisting into. . .” In the first case there's a superfluous “s” and in the second an erroneous conjugation.

Confusing plurals and possessives

Taken from another part of that same discussion:

“. . . create content of interest to WSU demographic's.”

This particular grammatical faux pas is one of my greater pet peeves and is disturbingly pervasive. Plurals do not need apostrophes.

Confusing “who” and “whom”

This was taken from a similar discussion but a different class:

“...one cannot fully understand who to vote for...”

In this case “whom” would be more appropriate (on a side note, she also ended the phrase with a preposition).