Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda; Nov 25 Prompt

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

Tutoring in the Writing Center has definitely affected my other schoolwork. A plethora of examples comes to my mind, the first example being the use of contractions in papers. Before this semester, I used contractions all the time in my essays. No one had ever told me that I should not use them. Actually, I take that back. No one ever explicitly told, as much as I can remember, not to use contractions, but most of the time I tried to stay away from them.

Another example I can think of is ending a sentence in a preposition. Unlike contractions, I was told never to end a sentence with a preposition. I had a hard time accepting that principle, but I soon worked to adopt it. While it is not an emphatic rule not to end a sentence with a preposition, it has helped me be more aware of my writing and my use of prepositions. In one of my English classes, we watched a video Revising Prose, which really helped me understand the need to limit prepositions, or at least use prepositions effectively instead of throwing them all over the paper, hiding my meaning.

Along with prepositions and contractions, the use of commas was reemphasized to me this semester from tutoring. While I had a pretty firm grasp of comma rules, there were a few that I was unsure of. However, this semester, teaching the workshops and tutoring students, has really solidified the comma rules in my mind. I will admit this much, there are some that I do not follow all the time, but usually that is for semantic issues or I am trying to force my audience to read a particular sentence the way I want it read instead of how they would read it. Perhaps I just enjoy pushing people around.