Week nine: My Choice

Grammar, spelling and punctuation, are they really the key to great writing?  Isn’t it frustrating when someone is reading to you without following the punctuation?  As part of my Speech therapy major, I am required to have field experience in two different elementary grades.  A couple of weeks back I went into a third grade class and one of the duties the teacher asked me to help with was listening to the kids read. Oh boy! If you have ever listened to a bunch of eight year olds read it wears you out.  Half the time I was lost trying to figure out what the story was actually about.  The kids just read straight through without stopping at the periods.  It was so frustrating to me and I tried to explain to several of the kids that it is hard to understand them because they don’t follow the punctuation.

So with that experience still fresh in my mind, I found our class very interesting on Wednesday October 18^th, because learning to use the proper punctuation is so important.  I find that I still run into trouble with commas quite often.  I rely a lot on Microsoft Word to save my bacon with spelling and punctuation. Oops! Apparently that is not a wise thing to do.  I knew that spell check wouldn’t find all the mistakes and that the grammar check would probably be about the same.  But when Ms. Smith mentioned that it really shouldn’t be trusted, I was a bit surprised because I am so guilty of just trusting these tools.

At work, part of my job is to write documents for employees and clients.  I depend on Microsoft Word to find most of the errors because I usually don’t have a lot of time to get them finished.   I find, as I am writing these papers, I need to proof read and use the various tools to make sure that everything is correct.  However, I usually just run the spelling and grammar check and leave it alone unless it marks the word or sentence.

I have high hopes that by the end of this semester, I will have improved my writing skills.  Sometimes it is so difficult to find a half hour to work on my assignments, but I really try to keep up on them because I can’t wait to see how my writing has changed since I started school.

Week #7 The Nicotine Factor

 

In “A Silence That Kills” published in the American Journal of Public Health Lyndon Haviland shares her concerns regarding the tobacco epidemic facing the United States. She tells us that the production and sale of products containing nicotine (a highly addictive drug found in tobacco) are not regulated by the FDA. Haviland accuses the government of not educating the American people of the dangers of smoking through anti-tobacco campaigns. She wants the public health community as well as tobacco control activists to take a stand by putting a voice to the seriousness of tobacco use. Just like the AIDS activists put a voice to their cause. Haviland explains that an average of 1,200 tobacco related deaths occur daily, 178,000 of those deaths yearly are women suffering from tobacco related diseases.

 

Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., not automobile accidents, suicide, murders or AIDS. Who would have thought? I think that Lyndon Haviland writes a great article here giving insight to this very serious problem facing our communities, even bigger, our country. Young people are very impressionable, for instance, if a character in a movie is smoking and she looks cool, that sends a message that if you smoke you will be cool too. If our youth are educated in the seriousness of tobacco use prior to being influenced by the media, they may not be so inclined to want to emulate what they see in movies.

 

Haviland is right when she states that we aren’t educated. I am 36 years old and thought that AIDS took more lives then smoking does. This especially struck home to me because when I was a great deal younger, I smoked a lot. While reading this article I tried to remember why I started smoking. I think I tried it because my friends were going to try it. It didn’t come natural to me; in fact, if I would have just walked away after I vomited, I probably wouldn’t have continued smoking. However, I wanted to be able to inhale that flavor like the veteran smokers could, and I eventually did. After that, thanks to the addictiveness of nicotine I couldn’t stop smoking for 4 years. Luckily, I did and I haven’t smoked in over 15 years. However, my older sister smokes, thanks to me. I tell her all the time that she needs to stop smoking and she really tries to, but she has been smoking for over 20 years. Fortunately I have no health problems from my short smoking career; however, I’m sure the day is near that I will learn that my sister isn’t so lucky.

 

I agree whole heartedly with Lyndon Haviland that we do need to act now and do something to educate and protect others from the dangers of smoking. We need to force our government to take the effects of smoking serious and help us make a difference. If we do, the day may soon come that we can stand proudly and know that we have silenced this saga of disease, suffering and death.

 

Works cited

 

Haviland, Lyndon. “A Silence That Kills .” The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing. John D. Ramage, John C. Bean and June Johnson. 4^th ed. New York: Longman, 2006. 150-153.