Renaissance Girl

I just had the best session ever at work. It was so fabulous! We worked with an essay for sociology, and it was already a good piece of work; the guy obviously knew what he was talking about, and what was even better was that he came in with an idea of what he wanted to work on. And he was really present--not really talky, but very responsive; and after we read through the paper he had a couple more points that he noticed, & I love it when that happens. And we worked really easily through an after-fact outline to make sure he had all his body-paragraph points covered in his intro & conclusion, which was part of the original agenda. & about the only thing I had to dig into was the very first sentence, which was more like a second sentence. This happens a lot in essays--people, including me, tend to jump right into a topic without quite introducing it enough so that readers coming to it fresh are a little lost. So I went into a brief explaination of old/new contract, which was made easy by the fact that I could point to two sentences at the bottom of the page where he'd used it beautifully, and then extrapolate to the entire paper. And then I asked, So how would you explain this, since I'm confused here? And he tells me exactly what I need to know--a definition of the intellectual concept he starts out with. Which gave me the best and pithiest explanation I may have ever given about how to write a clear intro sentence: you have to tell me what your concept is before you can tell me what it does. Bang, kids--got it in one.

MAN I love it when I love working.

I'm correcting the editing exams for Writing Center hiring this morning; one section is to choose correct pronoun case.

Question 22: Martha told (he and I/him and me) to do the work.
My favorite answer so far: Martha told us to do the work.

Way to get around the question! I like this one.