How to Succeed in College, Lesson #4: Control, Purpose, & Deep Work Equal Happiness
Essay #1 One: So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Two Essay Options
Essay Option A. Support or refute Cal Newport’s claim that the Passion Hypothesis is both a misguided and dangerous idea.
Essay Option B. In context of Cal Newport’s craftsman mindset manifesto and other essays we’ve read about career building for college students, develop an argumentative thesis about what college students need to do to remain relevant in a changing economy.
Study Questions
One. What is the appeal of Red Fire Farm?
Newport wants to explore someone who has total control of his business and chose to move to the country rather than work in a cubicle and be part of the rat race. Ryan and his wife Sarah can define life on their own terms.
But Ryan had collected career capital before he made his move.
Newport concludes that giving people more control gives them more happiness and purpose in their work environment.
Leveraging Control
Control is achieved by having career capital. The more career capital you have the more control you can leverage for at the workplace.
If you do IT (Information Technology) at a college campus or some other workplace, you are invaluable and are often deemed as irreplaceable. This gives you leverage.
Two. What is the First Control Trap?
A Control Trap is the desire to find a job that gives you control when you haven’t acquired sufficient career capital. You jumped the gun, so to speak.
You have to develop career capital (develop rare and valuable skill) to do work you love.
Three. What is the Second Control Trap?
Once you gain career capital that makes you valuable at work, your desire for control is met with resistance to change because your employer doesn’t want to lose you to a new career that allows for more control. Your boss may up the ante to keep you around, offering you something you can’t refuse.
Newport warns that we should not be seduced by “courage culture” that tells us to run away from the pack and carve our own niche. This can often fail if we have insufficient career capital.
Common Sense?
You have to balance your desire for freedom with your need for practicality. This is common sense. I’m not sure Cal Newport had to write a whole chapter on this.
Four. What is “Mission Work”?
When you have a job that embodies your life mission, you are more happy, but to have such a purpose-driven job requires a lot of career capital.
My friend and colleague has taught English with me for over 20 years. He got bored about 7 years ago and decided to get a law degree. Then he started helping people with immigration problems. The work snowballed and he is retiring early from his teaching job to devote his life to what has become his mission: to be a full-time immigration attorney.
His life narrative encapsulates all of Newport’s principles: He didn’t have a pre-existing passion to be an immigration attorney. It was an opportunity. He has career capital. He speaks fluent Spanish, he has a law degree, and he has a partner who already works in immigration law.
He has more freedom working for himself as an attorney, but he has to deal with more headaches, including crazy clients, to name one example.
Review:
What is the power of control and how does control result in job happiness?
Giving people more control at work increases their happiness, fulfillment, and engagement.
But you cannot earn safe control without career capital. Think of the lady who quit her job to run yoga studios. She had to go on food stamps.
Philosophical Argument for Deep Work
For centuries, educated humans knew there were two kinds of time: sacred and profane time and the two time zones should never mix.
A caveman telling a fable about the meaning of life to other cavemen around the campfire would be in sacred time.
A man and a woman contemplating the idea of spending the rest of their life with each other are in sacred time.
The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a story about sacred time.
The story of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise is a story about leaving sacred time and entering profane time.
Listening to music at a concert is entering sacred time.
Watching a movie is entering sacred time.
Walking along the beach with your children and pointing at the waves is sacred time.
Sitting at the table with your family and discussing how your daughter spoke her first words is sacred time.
Getting a speeding ticket from a cop is profane time.
Playing a computer game is profane time.
Chatting on social media is profane time.
Doing deep work and improving your craft so that you can be a master of what you do is entering sacred time.
We Are Elevated as Human Beings When We Keep Sacred and Profane Time Separated
But in the technopoly, we’ve worshipped technology above all else and we’ve lost sight of the very notion of sacred time.
We live in profane time, shallow work, and rude interruptions of sacred events. People text inside churches and at funerals.
People take selfies at concerts.
Deep Work is a return to sacred time.
Shallow Work is to live in profane time and suffer the nihilism of a shallow, empty, meaningless existence.
Newport’s Conclusion
We don’t become happy because we find some amazing “rarified” job. We become happy because we establish a “rarified approach” to our work. We value the sacred time of deep work and find meaning from becoming master craftsmen.
We transform from Opium-Drip Smartphone Zombies to “Homo Sapiens Deepensis.”
Study Questions
One. How do we reach eudaimonia (our state of full potential)?
Since being in prolonged states of intense focus on meaningful goals gives us deep happiness and helps us achieve our potential, we should learn how to create a Deep Work Station.
We must be “a disciple of depth in a shallow world.”
We achieve this by creating rituals and routines because we cannot rely on willpower alone.
The more we use our willpower the more our willpower diminishes in strength. The solution is to rely on routines and rituals that cut down on our need to use willpower.
An example of a routine is adhering to a daily time block to your deep work.
Two. What is a Depth Philosophy?
You create rituals and routines that suit your life.
Creating a Depth Philosophy is Rule #1.
For example, you may choose a Monastic Philosophy in which you eliminate non-deep work activities from your life. You “minimize shallow obligations” like returning marginal emails and social media comments, or you eliminate social media accounts altogether.
Newport points to novelists who don’t answer emails because if they did, they wouldn’t have time to write their novels.
You shun shallow work. Monasticism may work for some, but not all.
Most people would probably be more suited to a rhythmic strategy in which one carves a daily time block of 3-4 hours of deep work.
Jerry Seinfeld told a comedian to write a joke every day and put it on a calendar so that he was making a “chain” of jokes throughout the year. This rhythmic philosophy is about creating a daily ritual of time blocks devoted to deep work.
A bimodal philosophy means you divide your time in the bustle of society but find a retreat for your deep work, as did Carl Jung.
Rituals are the rule, not “inspiration.” If you wait for inspiration, you’re doomed to a life outside the world of deep work.
To have an effective deep work ritual, you must have a set time and place with set rules to avoid distraction.
Make Grand Gestures
J.K. Rowling stayed in an expensive hotel to write her last novel.
Another Grand Gesture could be to delete your Facebook account, as I did. Or remove social media apps from your smartphone.
Three. What are the 4 Disciplines of Execution?
To achieve deep work, Newport quotes Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen who came up with the 4 Disciplines of Execution.
Discipline #1 Focus on the Wildly Important
You can only focus on so many things. If you try to do too much, you’ll engage in shallow work. Deep work results in finding what you’re wildly passionate about.
Discipline #2 Focus on Lead Measures, Not Lag Measures
Lag measures are areas you’re trying to improve. By the time you work on your lag measures, it’s too late to change your behavior.
For example, working on student evaluation scores is based on my past behavior.
Instead, I should work on lead measures, behaviors that will create success from my lag measures. I should focus on doing deep work on things I’m wildly passionate about, not go into the past and see what I did that rendered my performance scores at that time.
Discipline #3 Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
This means keep measurable goals or objectives. For example, if I’m playing piano for two hours, I must complete the major and minor harmonic scales without looking at the piano three times in succession, and I must write at least part of a song composition.
Or you must learn X amount of computer code every day if you’re a computer science major.
Discipline #4 Create a Cadence of Accountability
This means you regularly meet with peers or a mentor (or boss) to get feedback from the performance of your deep work.
When You’re Not in a Deep Work Time Block, Shut Everything Down
Shut everything down.
“Be lazy.”
Ideas grow while you’re on shut down.
Newport says you gain insights during your downtime.
Downtime helps recharge energy for the next day of deep work.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
Undistracted focus becomes a habit like flossing one’s teeth.
Suppose you’re reading a book for class, and some of it’s interesting, but then you hit a boring passage. You’re tempted to check your email or social media “activity.” Big mistake. You just broke your concentration and the myelin “muscle” in your brain isn’t getting stronger. It’s getting weaker.
Newport compares deep work to being an athlete. An athlete must be consistent with getting his or her “reps” in whether it be doing squats in the gym or running around the track. Failure to get in these “reps” results in atrophy and general breakdown. You need to build up your “mental muscle” with time block reps of uninterrupted focus on your deep work.
“Attention switching” makes you “a sucker for irrelevancy” and shallow work. Attention switching and distraction make you a bottom-feeder, not an apex predator at the top of the food chain.
To improve your focus, make huge offline blocks. Learn to be comfortable staying off the grid.
Too many people, seduced by the lies of technology, fear that unless they’re connected to social media and internet they won’t remain visible and relevant. They’ll experience a death, so to speak.
But the opposite is true. When you become dependent on the internet, THAT is the death, that is the condition of someone who got manipulated by the lies of technology.
Learn to stay off the grid for longer and longer amounts of time as you find your happiness and fulfilled potential in deep work.
Rule #3 Quit Social Media
Newport observes Baratunde Thurston’s experiment called “#UnPlugged” in which he goes off the grid. At first, it’s scary, but over time he feels less addicted to news and other people’s shares and he’s less addicted to sharing to feel relevant and alive.
He experiences life more deeply with more focus. He becomes happier.
Newport makes the case that the alleged benefits of social media are far outweighed by the liabilities.
Newport argues that network tools, like any tools, should be evaluated from the point of view of a craftsman, a person who cultivates his or her craft through deep work.
We should only use online internet tools if they are in service to our deep work.
Sharing on Facebook is shallow work.
Maintaining contact with your fans or followers will take away your time blocks to achieve deep work and be the person who created a fan base in the first place.
Newport proposes the Quit Social Media for 30 Days Test and see if you’re life isn’t better. He predicts your life will be better after 30 days and that you will be compelled to delete your social media accounts.
When You Do Deep Work, You Realize How Limited Your Time Is
That’s why people who go on Internet to be entertained go down a rabbit hole of wasted time. Newport argues you should not go to Internet for entertainment. It’s a time suck that steals from your deep work.
Rule #4 Drain the Shallows
A 4-day work week of 32 hours engaged in deep work is far more productive than a 5-day work week of 40 hours largely consisting of shallow work.
Deep work is exhausting, so it’s more suited to 4 days of 32 hours total.
This lesson teaches us to “drain the shallows.” You drain the shallows by scheduling every minute of your day. Too many people spend their day on autopilot, meaning that they are mindlessly wasting hours of their day.
Conquer your mindless autopilot default setting by time-blocking your daily schedule. Know what you’re going to do every hour.
Time Blocking Helps Us Quantify Depth [and Shallowness] of Every Activity
We can know how much of our day is wasted on shallow work only by time blocking our daily schedule.
Review of Shallow Work Definition:
Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts don’t create value and they are easily replicated.
These tasks are not unique or high-quality; therefore, if we define ourselves by shallow work, we are replaceable in our career occupations.
Drain the shallows by becoming less available online and on social media.
Sources and Signal Phrases:
You need only one source, Henderson’s book, but you must use at least 6 different signal phrases for using in-text citations in the form of quotations, paraphrase and summary.
Signal Phrases Used for In-Text Citations
About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.
4 Steps of MLA In-Text Citations
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase.
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Verbs in Signal Phrases
According to . . . (very common)
Ha Jin writes . . . (very common)
Panbin laments . . .
Dan rages . . .
Dan seethes . . .
Signal Phrase Templates
In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”
As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”
Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”
“…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”
“…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.
Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument: “…”
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
Comma Splices
A comma splice is joining two sentences with a comma when you should separate them with a period or a semicolon.
Incorrect
People love Facebook, however, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
People love Facebook. However, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
Though people love Facebook, they fail to realize Facebook is sucking all their energy.
Incorrect
Patience is difficult to cultivate, it grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Patience is difficult to cultivate. It grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Because patience grows within us so slowly, patience is extremely difficult to cultivate.
You can use a comma between two complete sentences when you join them with a FANBOYS word or coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Correct
People love Facebook, but they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Student Comma Splices Part One (the second sentence feels like a continuation of thought from the first sentence, which it is, but it still requires a period before it)
- My department decided to set up another office for me to do my work, I was no longer sitting out front like the permanent receptionist.
- The permanent receptionist never spoke to anyone in the offices, he just answered phones.
- He said, “You have a few choices, they need a coordinator at the new jobsite or working the business side as a coordinator.”
- I was lucky, many opportunities came to me and now I had the required experience to get the job I wanted.
- There was no stopping me, all my achievements were completed on my own.
- I was promoted quickly, I went from coordinator to senior executive within a few months.
- The drug dealing lifestyle was insatiable to Jeff Henderson, he believed he could elude the feds.
- Our methods paralleled, my method was legal, his was illegal.
- Jeff Henderson rose to the top of his game, he had established his fortune.
10. Jeff Henderson had no choice, it was either work or stay confined in his prison cell.
11. She was going to marry her high school sweetheart, what better way to spend the rest of your life in bliss?
12. He asked me to marry him, he was a Marine after all stationed in Japan.
13. Her life was finally beginning, she could leave Los Angeles.
14. This was her life, she did what she wanted.
15. Now she had nothing, she had given up her job to move overseas.
16. Life was too much of a challenge, she accepted that fact.
To Avoid Comma Splices, Know the Difference Between Coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS) and Conjunctive Adverbs
Examples
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week. Nonetheless, he remained skinny.
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week, but he remained skinny.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW. Instead, she bought the Acura.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW, yet she did buy the Acura.
Steve wasn't interested in college. Moreover, he didn't want to work full-time.
Steve wasn't interested in college, and he didn't want to work full-time.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me. However, I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do, however, want you to help me do my taxes.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid. Consequently, I think we should break up.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid, so I think we should break up.
Students hate reading. Therefore, they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Students hate reading, so they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons
Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
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