October 15, 2007 ASSistance needed

Meegs to Me: 12:34 PM

"Okay, miss english - I need your ASSistance (as courtney would say).

I'm an assistant editor for a communication journal and currently, I'm editing one of my professor's papers!! Its a bit intimidating. He's Chinese and so the language is a bit awkward. I'm having SUPER trouble with these two different sentences. Can you help?

Here we go:
1. "The Chinese as well are reluctant to talk about death; they tend to believe that talking about death may lead it to come soon." (this one, the 'may lead it to come soon' i think is awkward. i can't change the language TOO much, but need it to make sense.)

2. "Since its establishment in 1996, Tzu Chi Body Donation Center’s, located at the Medical School of Tzu Chi University, campaigning for body donation has become one of Tzu Chi’s on-going endeavors." (this one is giving me EXTRA difficulty, for whatever reason.)

So...whaddya think?"

Me to Meegs 1:37 PM

"Original Sentences
1. "The Chinese as well are reluctant to talk about death; they tend to believe that talking about death may lead it to come soon."

2. "Since its establishment in 1996, Tzu Chi Body Donation Center’s, located at the Medical School of Tzu Chi University, campaigning for body donation has become one of Tzu Chi’s on-going endeavors."

What I Says:
1. is actually okay, even though I understand where you get the awk feeling... but if you want to change it, I suggest one of these endings (or something similar):
'The Chinese as well are reluctant to talk about death; they tend to believe that talking about death' encourages it to arrive/appear/etc--OR-- draws its inevitable appearance [somehow] closer.

2. this sentence is over crowded. It needs to be either split up into two sentences, or re-subordinated somehow:

'Since the establishment in 1996 of Tzu Chi Body Donation Center, located at the Medical School of Tzu Chi University, campaigning for body donation has become one of Tzu Chi's on-going endeavors.'---but this even feels redundant (of course this would be one of it's on-going endeavors; it is the main objective of the organization, or so says the name, right?). Or, did he mean this last clause to be first, kind of a cause of the Center's existence, that this Tzu Chi means business about body donation, which is why it started the center in 1996??

sorry if my comments are just as confusing as your own thoughts on the matter of these.
ugh. editing is fun."

Big Girls Don't Use Plural Pronouns Where Singular Ones Belong

Okay. I can't stand it. Not only do I destest the saccharine tone of Fergi's voice and veiling the infantalization of the feminine with something that tries to show "independence"---and this is the benefit of the doubt---but the lyrics actually saying "I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket" making me want to sharpen my battle axe. I think we can all agree that when one uses the article "a" with a singular noun behind it, like "child," that we must keep refering to it (notice the singular pronoun) as a singular noun. It does not suddenly spasm like a Gizmo into multiple beings. A child stays a child, or should. Fergi, I don't know if I'm spelling your name correctly, and frankly if I did know better, I'd misspell it on purpose. Someone like you doesn't reserve my respect. Not after this.

If you or someone you love has problems with pronoun-antecedent agreement, please, get help.

i want one of these to cheer me up

Complaint Mode

Had a 10am appointment downtown at the research center today. It's Day 4 of the Dengue Vaccine Study for which I'm volunteering. Barb, the so-new-she's-horrible nurse at the JHU research center down in Foggy Bottom, is doing her post-grad work and needs help with her writing/grammar. She wants to know if I can give her the title of some very ESL user friendly grammar and composition books, so she can try to teach herself. I want to tell her that she would benefit more from seeking tutoring along side the harder books she already owns instead of purchasing a book that talks down to her, but I hold my tongue and promise to bring in some titles. I do this because 1) I wouldn't want to unwittingly embarrass/insult her since she was asking me in front of four other staff members, and some people think "tutoring" is a bad word, and 2) I'm kind of still holding the tiniest grudge against her from earlier in the fall.

Backstory #1: The first blood and urine screening, coupled with consent form signing, for this study had actually taken place in September. The study, which only started on Halloween last week, had originally been scheduled for at late Sept start date. I was tight on time, as I usually am since this place is not convenient to where I live or work and isn't open when I get off in the evenings. When I arrived, for some reason which I couldn't understand, they were running twenty or so minutes behind schedule, yet no other patients were in the center at the time. When someone finally saw me, it was Barb. She was bubbly and had a thick accent, perhaps of Korean dissent. She announced unnecessarily that she was new here, and then proceeded to run through the 8 pages of health history I had just filled out with the pace of a refrigerator magnet. She then left me with a ten question True/False quiz over the study logistics which took me seventy seconds to complete, for 15 minutes. When she came back in, she didn't just check my Ts and Fs with her answer sheet. She went through and read each question aloud, told me what I had chosen as the answer, and then read the correct (and same) answer from the key. Finally, once she had wasted my time to her best ability, I was sent back for HIV and pregnancy testing, controlled by a nurse who knew what she was doing. All told, my 30 minute appointment last nearly an hour and a half. Ugh.

Backstory #2: They had needed me in for a half-hour Re-screening appointment, once my original tests were no longer current for the new study start time, on a morning that I needed to be up in German town by 10ish. So I scheduled the appointment for 8.3am, as early as they could make it. But when I got there at 8.20am, I had to wait on her to finish a loud, personal phone call until 9.15. She was laughing and discussing her school work and lord knows what. At least I had brought in some grading. At 9.45 I scrapped my dreams of getting to school early and grumbled out of there.

I have never taught an ESL course, but I've tutored hundreds of ESL students, and my regular composition classes are heavily peppered with ESL course graduates. What I've seen is that the ESL student who is past ESL specific instruction needs to grapple with the non-ESL texts. Of course, I'm not advocating doing this blindly; the student needs someone else to help transition her into understanding the text, so that the student doesn't always feel like texts
are "above" her.

So, I am going to offer her this book, which I've taught to basic/developmental students. And, I guess I'll also perhaps contact the goddess of ESL at school tomorrow and ask her what she recommends.

What On Earth?

I'm about to have a birthday.

Well, it's more like 6 weeks away, but that doesn't mean that my ever-pending doom to be a professional part-timer and die a grossly indebted teacher isn't weighing on my mind. Birthdays, from default of their annual occurrence, have a way of tricking us. By forcing us to ponder time and its relatively morbid fascination with our truculent growth, birthdays make us believe we are what we are not, or, that we can be what we want. It's been too long since I've been a writer, so I've decided to be a blogger instead. I intend to do the same things I've been doing in gmail, on myspace, and elsewhere in the 3d world--talk about writing and the teaching of writing and answer grammar or editing questions--but we'll see how long that lasts before I'm off on a tangent.