ASK PROFESSOR

Dear professor, I always have troubles with my compositions in class. How can I overcome writer's block?

You might find consolation in the knowledge that you are not alone. This is a common problem, even for very famous authors. Usually the difficulty stems from anxiety about not being able to produce truly outstanding text. Remember that creative output does not have to be absolutely perfect in order to qualify as very, very good.  Discovering what you are capable of doing only takes practice.

It is usually helpful to establish a set of strategies prior to actually writing, especially when a deadline or time limit is a worrisome factor.  An effective preliminary tactic to overcome the fear of writing is to take a few old sheets of paper, preferably recycled or used ones, and randomly scribble words related to the topic you have been assigned. Do not put them down in any particular order; just freely associate, without rejecting any ideas, until your anxiety diminishes.

Visualize a friendly audience for your writing. Imagine explaining one of your concepts to a curious 9-year-old child. Which examples would you use? Select one of the ideas that you wrote down, and then quickly draft a few points that would help this kind receptive reader understand the basic substance of what you want to express. Anticipate questions from this fantasy reader, too; consider possible confusion you think the imaginary reader may have about your statements; add clarifying details to your notes.

Read what you have written. Decide which elements you could include in the assigned composition, and then generalize from them to produce a “working” (provisional) thesis statement. Start a fresh list of related sub-topics, including ideas from the old scratch paper. You will feel much more prepared to actually begin drafting an essay.  If you feel “blocked” again, go back to the rough list of ideas for more inspiration. Encourage yourself by recalling that writing is a process of exploration, not a final destination.     

By Professor Penmanship.

Morphosyntax I: From Myth to Reality

Morphosyntax I: From Myth to Reality

The Cult News| March 2015

By Prof. Héctor Alvarado

For those who are about to start their third year of the major, there is one subject that has become a sort of a mythical beast: Morphosyntax I. In fact, for some people it is the “math” of the grammar courses. However, it turns out that it is not such a monster and, on the contrary, it is a very useful class, just like the previous two grammar courses, for what is to come as professionals of the English language. There are two main components of Morphosyntax I, therefore, that I would like to point out for every student who is about to take this course: Morphemes and verbs.

First, Morphosyntax I deals with the essence of words; how they are formed and how they are used in a sentence or within a given context. In this sense, it is more like a game where you have morphemes (basic units of meaning) put together to create words. For instance, if you take a greek root such as chrono (time) and you add a prefix (syn) and suffix (ize), you can have a word such as synchronize that works as a verb. Moreover, you can also take that word working as a verb (synchronize) and add another suffix like ion and create a noun such as synchronization. In this case, you changed the category of the word for it went from being a verb to a noun. This type of change is known as  morphological derivation for the word changed its essence. The opposite of a morphological derivation is the change known as morphological inflection in which a word remains within the same category. To illustrate this type of change, let’s take the same word derivation and add the inflectional suffix “s” that stands for the plural form of a word, then the new word is derivations; the word changed from singular to plural, but it is still a noun. In a word, the change did not create a new category. To know this is extremely important because it allows you to master the language in a proper way.

There is one key element, moreover, that every student has to pay attention to when taking Morphosyntax I, and that is the verb; for it tells you all you need to know about the sentence you are reading or analyzing. A verb is the DNA of a sentence. Once you have identified it, you can see what the sentence is about: transitive, intransitive, types of complements it can take, inner structure, and the type of sentence it is.  Verbs are the heart of every sentence; they turn a group of words into a living idea, bringing life to any language. Of course, there are other important components of Morphosyntax I such as the form and function of words but they all come into action as part of a cluster of elements within a sentence that enrich and expand it.

At the end of the day, a language is just a colorful means through which humans are able to communicate, and Morphosyntax I gives us the opportunity of learning how to elaborate our ideas and feelings into bridges of words that are full of life and color. So all you have to do is just be ready to discover it, for it goes beyond the myth to be part of our reality.