Did you see what I did there . . . in the title? Used lots of punctuation?

Trying to add a little humor to what appears to be an overwhelming next few months. One final semester where I play two main roles–I’m a student and I’m a teacher.

As a student, I am working to finish my master’s degree in December. I’m taking a class in research where I can finally officially learn how to navigate all of the electronic sources online. I learned a little along the way to get through some of my other courses, but I’m thrilled to get some real training (my last big research paper would have been written on an electric typewriter after doing research in the card catalog).

My second class is on Shakespeare, and here’s my reading pile for this class:

AND, I’m finishing my research paper where I’m working to prove the importance of Literary Citizenship in university creative writing programs.

Then, I’m also teaching my Editing class at Taylor U. This is the first time I’ve had the class twice a week, so that meant revamping my syllabus. There’s so much I want to teach . . . and I soon found myself frustrated trying to lay out all of the pieces in logical order to fill all the class periods. I kept crossing out and erasing on my notepad, and then I remembered that we had a whiteboard in our basement. I pulled it out from behind some boxes, located dry erase pens and an eraser, and set about writing up my syllabus. Here’s what it looked like:

Green for class activities, red for papers that need to be prepped and photocopied, black for homework and notes to myself. Basically we’re doing content editing in September, copyediting in October, and proofreading in November.

So the middle of October we work on proofreader marks (which certainly come in handy in copyediting), and they get a chance to learn about the Chicago Manual of Style and house style guides (I know–this is beyond exciting for you).

And I show them this clip of “phonetic punctuation” by the amazing Victor Borge, a pianist who was also a comedian. We lost him in 2000, but his brilliance lives on.

You see, punctuation can be fun! And that’s just what I hope I can teach my students!

(Now if only Victor had done something on library research . . . )