What I have learned from the Topical Guide

One lesson I have learned so far from the Topical Guide of our text is the difference in the meaning of the words of anxious and eager and how to appropriately use each word. Though I used the word anxious most of the time to convey a sense of worry I think I occasionally also used it when I should have used the word eager. It’s an easy editing mistake to make, as the two emotions or moods are fairly similar, but when you take a moment to contemplate the differences in meaning it makes sense why the two words are not interchangeable.

A second lesson I have learned from the Topical Guide is discerning when to use “as if” versus “like”. Once again, I think I viewed these two as interchangeable sometimes. Perhaps, this comes from today’s youth and their love of the word like, like you know what I mean. The use of the word like in my previous sentence would be incorrect, as I was using it as a conjunction to introduce a clause, and I should have used “as if” instead.

Finally, a third lesson I have learned from the Topical Guide is discerning when to use the word lay versus the word lie. The key difference in the use of these two words lies in what type of verbs they are and what type of object they introduce. Lay is a transitive verb that introduces a direct object and lie is a intransitive verb that never takes a direct object.

Editing Error

The editing error I found this week actually came from our textbook:

“They are writers who remain committed their audiences.” (Kessler & McDonald 50)

I did a double-take when I first saw this sentence, and wondered why the final phrase had not been written as: “…committed to their audiences."