Woe is I

The book that I chose for my report was 'Woe is I' by Patricia T. O'Conner. It was a surprisingly entertaining book! I feel like such a nerd saying it, but I really liked it and the information it gave. The author was a very clever writer and used lots of play on words and creative puns to get her ideas across. Not only did this make it an entertaining read, but it also made it a lot easier to remember the grammar tips that she gave, which I greatly appreciated! One example is a rhyme that she gave to help remember when to use which and when to use that: "Commas, which cut out the fat, Go with which, never with that." She had lots of little things like that. The whole book was a lot like our textbook, but I found it a little easier to understand, and a lot more fun to read. She also had a whole chapter that was dedicated to words that are often misused on mistaken for different words, such as 'hopefully' (which I had never realized I was using wrong!) and affect/effect. This was really helpful to me, and showed me where my (and other people's) most common mistakes are.
I was also glad that we got to practice more with headlines this week. I'm still very bad at them, but I was able to work a little bit faster this time. After a while it became kind of fun, even though it was hard, to come up with different ways of saying the same thing so that it would fit different headline needs.
I was going to take some pictures of the editing mistakes that I found this week, but my camera is on the fritz, so I'll just explain them. For one of my other classes I'm reading 'The Lathe of Heaven' which is a classic sci fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. I highly recommend the book, but I'm very surprised by all the editing mistakes I'm finding in it! Especially because it has been reprinted many times! I spotted a couple spelling errors, one on page 33 of my edition: "Orr sat up, feeling rather dizy." Dizzy needs to be spelled with two z's. There's also another one on page 34: "We're geeting somewhere, George!" The word here should be 'getting,' not 'geeting.' There were several other small editing mistakes throughout the book, although I can't remember the page numbers. The mistakes were small, but the fact that there were so many of them really drew my attention to them, and I think it would have even if I wasn't taking an editing class. It just goes to show, it's important to make sure even little mistakes get corrected so that they don't buil up.