progress. Once you graduate you’ll learn that the

workplace requires Standard English, the language of prestige and power in much

of the world. We acknowledge the tremendous pressure that

many of the students enrolled in this MOOC are under to write as well as those whose

first language is English.

It is clear that English is the world’s lingua franca. It is used all over the planet.

You need to use Standard English in academic, corporate, and government communication.

Many employers react strongly against non-standard English because they believe that errors inspire

undesirable reactions in readers and erode the credibility of the organisation.

You’ll exponentially enhance your employment prospects if you write well.

English has no protector of language such as the 400-year-old body of revered experts

who protect the French language.

Standard English is the set of standards that professional experts have agreed upon,

while acknowledging how language constantly changes.

The rules for Standard English are defined by how educated people use it.

There are two tribes of grammarians.

That are known as descriptivists and prescriptivists. Descriptivists describe how language is used

and how it changes. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought

to be used.

Professor Geoffrey Pullum, a world authority on grammar as the co-author of The Cambridge

Grammar of the English Language, who blogs regularly on Lingua Franca on The

Chronicle of Higher Education site, resists this dichotomy. He says that grammarians

who study the language are not all ‘bow-tie-wearing martinets’,

nor are they ‘flaming liberals’ who think that everything should be allowed, that ‘anything

goes’.

He stands on the sensible middle ground, where the rules of Standard English are based on

the way that expert native speakers use the language.

And so do we. In this MOOC, we aim to give you good grammatical guidance because,

in any formal written context, only standard English is regarded as acceptable and correct.

Language scholars have argued that humans find meaning in the world by exploring it

through their own language. When people write about something, they understand

and learn it better; it’s called the writing-thinking-learning connection and you should exploit it.

Many creative writers testify that they don’t know what they’re thinking until they start

writing about it. This is what the novelist E. M. Forster had

to say: ‘How do I know what I think until I’ve seen what I’ve said?’

Many professionals keep a writing journal. In her Christmas Day message in 2013, even

Queen Elizabeth of England advocated keeping a journal.

Keeping a journal is valuable for you as student writers, because it will enhance your writing-thinking-learning

processes. We’d like you to create and maintain a writing

journal that will allow you to practise writing, to experiment with different styles,

and to develop a sourcebook of materials from which you can extract material to share with

others as blog posts for your writing assignments.

A double-entry journal, that is, a journal in which you reflect upon what you have written

previously, is particularly valuable.

We’d like you to keep a journal as you progress through this MOOC and you may well keep it

going after the MOOC has finished.

For week 2, we want you to think about your writing process and prepare a 300-word blog

post to submit for your first writing assignment. In what ways is writing like running or cooking

or dancing or boxing or painting or any other activity that you can think of?

Jot down some points, then write a few sentences describing your process.

Haruki Murakami has written about writing and running. Neil Gaiman has written about

how writing is like cooking. You might like to Google them to see what

they have to say. Ferris Jarbr has a wonderful essay in the

New Yorker about why walking helps us think.

In an essay ‘Cooking Dumb, Eating Dumb’, Nahum Waxman, who has a fabulous cookbook

shop on the Upper East side of Manhattan called Kitchen Arts and Letters,

says that he dreads being asked by his customers if the recipes in a book ‘work’.

He tells them that it is they who must work. He says that his customers

‘must think, must apply their intelligence and judgment to ideas and to the materials

that will be turned into a dish’. He could well be talking about writing when

he goes on to say that ‘they need to bring their own good sense

to cooking - their ability to understand variability in ingredients,

to recognise error in a written text, to acknowledge their own tastes and preferences,

to not let themselves be intimidated by the food arbiters into dreary cooking-by-numbers’.

An alternative blog post could describe your response to something that you learn in week

1 of this MOOC that made you change your way of thinking-writing-learning.

If you watch Professor D’Agostino’s video presentation,

you might like to comment on what you have learnt from his powerfully evocative talk.

Fans of Bob Dylan will particularly love it.

We’ll also ask you to contribute a blog post in weeks 4, 6, & 8.

The final one in week 8 will reflect on your earlier posts, and this is where your double-entry

journal could come in handy.

Here are the criteria to aim for when writing blog posts and for judging the quality of

other students’ blog posts: Content that’s interesting, engaging, and

appropriate for readers. Be aware of cultural differences.

Be careful about using humour because it may offend readers who don’t share your sense

of humour. Content that speculates, poses problems, raises questions,

challenges, informs, and that’s based on research that’s authentic, credible,

and authoritative. Structure that’s logical, coherent, cohesive,

and focused. Style that’s energetic, compelling, and

concise. And of course, correct grammar and punctuation.

As guidance, we have posted in our course

resources a couple of exemplars of blog posts written by students in the on-campus Grammar

class here at The University of Queensland. We’ll also choose a few early posts that

students in this MOOC write and post. We’ll comment on and grade them as guidance

for self and peer assessing and post these mark-ups on the discussion board as soon as

possible after the posts are due.

You’ll find all of the assessment details, including details of the rubric, in your course

assessment folder.

So far, we have discussed the importance of standard English and introduced you to your

first writing assignment. Now we’ll move on to show you how to create

credibility for your writing at the word level.