Little things are important

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In 2010 I first wrote a blog on what I call "the little things." I noticed my Chinese friends often neglect to use good capitalization, punctuation, and spacing when they write English. I've found this blog very useful in helping them understand the importance of these "little things." My 2012 "little things" blog will be the first I post on my own website.

This is the "short version" of my Little Things are Important blog. Many of my Chinese friends cannot read English well. So, first, I will write the blog very simply.

The "little things" are capitalization, punctuation, and spacing.

Start each sentence with a capital letter and remember to capitalize the first letter of what we call “proper nouns.”

Use a space after a period. Do not put a space before a period. Use only one space between each word (not two). I prefer two spaces after a period (older style). Today, many people use only one. That's ok. Use a space after other punctuation such as a question mark or exclamation point.

The correct use of capitalization, punctuation, and spacing is very important. How important? I earn several hundred dollars each month correcting these little things. But more importantly those little things are important to you. If you write a letter for a company, if you prepare your resume, or if you apply for college or take the written portion of the graduate record exam (GRE) these things will suddenly become very important to you.

We consider the use of the little things very basic to writing good English. Your writing will look childish without good punctuation, spacing, and capitalization.

If you search the internet you can find many of my blogs on several sites under Sedgehead, or my real name, Philip E. Hyatt.

What is the problem? And why is it a problem? I find many of my Chinese friends, when they write English, often do not use spacing and punctuation correctly. Specifically here are the problems and examples.

What are “The Little Things?” To say it very simply they are capitalization, punctuation, and spacing. Why are they important to my Chinese friends? First, Chinese teachers of English spend their time concentrating on other things. Some of them don't take the time needed to emphasize these little things. Second, native speakers find them very important. I will explain more below.

Simple! The misuse of spacing and capital letters is something Americans simply to not accept. Even the worst American writers rarely do this. Our teachers in school teach us these things at a very early age. By the fourth to sixth grade, they are completely unacceptable. If you write and misuse capitalization, punctuation, and spacing, your American friends will think you are childish. They will not want to read what you write. Why? It is hard to read. I have used this example before and will use it here. If I drop all spaces, you cannot read my sentence easily. Example: Canyoureadthissentence?Ifyoudonotspacecorrectly,Americans willnotlikewhatyouwritelikeyoudonotlikethis. Actually, most Americans can read that easily, but it drives my Chinese friends nuts!

I have noticed that when I change my computer to write in Chinese, the font changes to a Chinese font called 宋体 or SimSun. This is the default font used for writing in Chinese using a Microsoft Windows operating system. SimSun makes Chinese writers of English lazy because if you type "你好。我很好。你呢？" it automatically adds a little extra space after the period. So, when you type in Chinese, you do not have to use the space bar. But in English using the space bar is very important.

My first attempt at correcting English was a technical paper. One of my Fayetteville friends is a molecular biologist. Even though I am a biologist, I am not very familiar with the techniques and jargon (=technical terms) of molecular biology. My friend continues to send me scientific papers to review. It is a real challenge because I am not familiar with his field of expertise. One thing that is extremely frustrating? He started in Chinese and modified into English. This screwed up his paper, because he would sometimes use a Chinese font, SimSum, for a comma and an English font for the rest of the paper. The Chinese font messed up his spacing. Professional editors would throw up their hands at this. They are not familiar with using Chinese fonts, and would be extremely confused. To make matters worse, in the literature cited section, like many Chinese writers, his spacing and punctuation was very poorly done. No editor in a journal is going to correct this for him. They will simply reject the paper and ask him to resubmit it after he has fixed it. My friend is extremely lucky I have the patience to help him with this. But even now, I am starting to force him to make those corrections rather than correcting literally hundreds of tiny mistakes. This is why I tell my Chinese friends to pay strict attention to spacing and punctuation.

If people submit something with these errors for the first time, I will not be surprised. But I will refer them to this page. If they choose to continue to not correct the simple errors, I will again refer them to this page. I will not continue to make other suggestions after they refuse to fix simple errors after a few reminders. I may refer someone to this blog a few times, but after that I will give up! So if you quit hearing from me and receiving help, this is why. I don't want to be mean. I just don't have two hours every day to correct the same simple errors repeatedly for different people.

I don't mean to be harsh. My friends know I try to be very friendly.

The correct use of capitalization, punctuation, and spacing is very important. How important? I earn several hundred dollars each month correcting these little things for Chinese, Japanese, and other non-native speakers of English. But more importantly those little things are important to you. If you write a letter for a company, if you prepare your resume, or if you apply for college or take the written portion of the graduate record exam (GRE) these things will suddenly become very important to you.

Put yourself in the place of an American working for a corporation in China. You want to hire a salesman, but you want to hire and native speaker of Chinese who can also contact other businesses for your company using both English and Chinese. You receive 11 resumes from highly qualified candidates. Any one of them could probably do the job well. Seven of those applicants have resumes consistently use spaces incorrectly. Four of those applicants pay attention to the little things very carefully. Your next decision is very simple. You place the seven resumes aside and do not consider them for the job. You now have four resumes from people who will write good English.

When I was in third and fourth grade, after I had mastered the alphabet and basic words my teachers began to look at my writing more closely. They suddenly emphasized good capitalization, punctuation, and spacing. After that, my teachers assumed I knew how to use these little things correctly. At the college level, if I made three or more errors with these little things on a paper I wrote for my English teacher I would get a failing grade. Yes, we do consider this very important. American teachers teach the little things had a very young age. I suspect you’re an adult or close to it. When I read your blogs I expect you to know about these very simple little things. If you neglect them consistently I won’t keep editing your blogs. Why? It is simply a matter of time. I have added nearly one hundred new friends on this web site this week. I will refer some of you to this blog. But I need to spend my time correcting blogs of people who show a strong desire to improve. I’m a work with a few of your blogs, but if you continue to ignore the little things I will move on to help other people.

Some people will want to know other ways to contact me. This bit of text will give you that information.

Skype: headsedge (Note: another Sedgehead, a Canadian botanist who study sedges like me uses the name Sedgehead on Skype. She had wondered why she suddenly had many Chinese people trying to contact her. My name on Skype is Headsedge)

QQ 2563613199

If you search the internet you can find many of my blogs on several sites under Sedgehead, or my real name, Philip E. Hyatt.

I am a professional writer, editor, botanist, and ecologist.

Here are some specific things to work on.

Failure to capitalize when needed. Please use an upper case or capital letter at the start of a sentence, for the word "I", or for a proper noun. A proper noun is a particular person, place, or thing such as Julian, China, English, or New York.

Examples: i wrote this poorly on purpose. julian and i choke when we see writing like this. sometimes it makes me think teachers in china cannot teach good english, or that chinese students just don't care. Even a first grade teacher in america would gasp if her students wrote like this or made these errors. this type of writing is used by americans for internet chat, but not for anything else such as informal email. at work it is completely not acceptable even in email. AT LEAST CHINESE PEOPLE DO NOT SHOUT! using ONLY capital letters is called shouting on the internet. MAYBE I NEED TO SHOUT. PLEASE FIX THESE ERRORS! ha!

Let me say it quickly at first so that if you have difficulty reading English you can capture my meaning quickly. First, I will discuss capitalization. Start each sentence with a capital letter and remember to capitalize the first letter of what we call “proper nouns.” I will illustrate with two groups of words.

Common nouns (not usually capitalized)

Proper nouns (first letter capitalized)

a house; a building; a city; state

The White House; The Emperor’s Palace; New York; New York

Exception: when referring to a specific noun the common form is still capitalized because it represents the proper form. Examples: When I was in New York I spent two weeks in that City.

a province; a country; an organization

Sichuan Province; The People’s Republic of China; the Boston Celtics

Note: please note that I capitalize the word province if it refers to a specific province. Example: He lives in Hunan Province but he was born in another province. He has been living in the Province for 14 years.

a ship; a storm; a religion

The Starship Enterprise; Hurricane Sheila; Buddhism

Also, use "I" as a word and not "i." When you say, "i did something" it looks very strange to me!

As an editor I often have to correct the punctuation a Chinese writers of English. I will explain why this is frustrating below. For now, let’s look at some good and bad examples.

A correctly punctuated (and true) paragraph: I woke up early this morning and checked my e-mail, chatted with a few friends on QQ, and waited for my cousins to arrive. At 8:00, they drove up. They spent the day working in my yard, planting plants, cutting down trees, and trimming shrubs. Why did I leave at 2:00 p.m.? I had to see a physical therapist.

An INCORRECTLY punctuated (and true) paragraph: I woke up early this morning and checked my e –mail ,chatted with a few friends on QQ , and waited for my cousins to arrive .At 8:00 ,they drove up . They spent the day working in my yard ,planting plants,cutting down trees, and trimming shrubs.Why did I leave at 2:00 p .m. ? I had to see a physical therapist .

What is the difference? The first paragraph has a correct use of punctuation and spacing. In the second paragraph a variety of spacing methods are used with the punctuation none of which are correct.

Failure to add a space after a period, comma, or other punctuation

Examples: I wrote this poorly, and did it on purpose.I have not used the space bar correctly.It drives me nuts.My Chinese friends write like this.They're not realizing how funny it looks to me,or they don't care.

That is, add a space after a period, comma, or appropriate punctuation (do not add a space after ' in a contraction).

Adding a space in the wrong place

Examples: I wrote this poorly , and did it on purpose .I have not used the space bar correctly . It drives me nuts .My Chinese friends write like this . They 're not realizing how funny it looks to me ,or they don ' t care.

That is, do not randomly add spaces.

I wrote here earlier about the "little things" and have decided to write again. What are the little things? They are the little things that Chinese writers of English often neglect, capitalization, punctuation, and spacing.

In English, you could say, "I'm trying to work myself out of a job." That is, if I teach you about the little things, I won't have work! Why? Because my job is editing. I work by improving the writing of Chinese writers of English. If everyone in China was fluent in English, I would not have a job. So, please allow me to work myself out of a job! If you learn this lesson well, I may not find more work!

I'm still surprised by how many Chinese writers of English neglect the little things. Even Chinese teachers of tell me, "It is not important." I think, "That's crazy!" I get paid thousands of dollars every year to work with capitalization, punctuation, and spacing.

So, let's discuss the little things.

Look at this paragraph, to me it has all the errors of a chinese writer of english .in fact , it is hard for me to type this way.Why?Because it is so abnormal .i find it really hard to do

Now let me write a better paragraph.

Look at this paragraph. There are no spaces before the commas and periods. There are spaces after commas and periods. Words like Chinese and English start with capital letters. This looks much more professional.

1) start each sentence with a capital letter,

2) end each sentence with a period or other punctuation,

3) capitalize the first letter of any proprer nounds,

4) use spaces carefully, and

5) avoid using only commas in a paragraph; use some periods!

Imagine you are an American business man. You receive the following paragraph on a resume. "My name is gao li .I passed cet-6 in college, i have a degree in english and am very fluent in english , I can write english very well and led my class,earning the highest score in my universitys' history in english.i am very confident when I speak english with foreigners."

What is wrong? The paragraph may say the person writes good English. But i can see at least 12 errors in the paragraph. The English may be good, but the person seems to know nothing about what I call "the little things." Little things are very important. If I hired that person to translate for me, I would know I have to teach them about English before they could write letters for my business.

If you want to stand out from the crowd and make your English look professional, use good capitalization, punctuation, and spacing.

I use this page for quick links to my Email and related sites. I use it for my homepage, so I can have quick access to editing and translation tools.

Here's an expanding 中文 (Chinese version) of this website

This Introduction to life at the University of Arkansas is designed for students from China new to the state.

Many of my Chinese friends as me Why are you studying Chinese? Do you like China? How did you get started?

Click here for information about my FREE ENGLISH LESSONS!

Click here for information about my new English for biologists class.

Click here to read about the little things you can do to improve your use of English quickly!

Trails of Baxter County, North Central Arkansas.

Sedge links.

Arkansas sedges, Phil's summary of the status of Arkansas sedges.

Arkansas sedges in the genera Bolboschoenus and Bulbostylis .

Arkansas Carex sedges.

Carex Section Laxiflorae.

Carex Section Helioglochin.

Arkansas Cyperus sedges.

Arkansas sedges in genera starting with D and E.

Arkansas sedges in genera starting with F and L. (Note: this page has not yet been created.)

Arkansas Rhynchospora. (Note: this page has not yet been created.)

Arkansas sedges in genera starting with S.

Introduction to Arkansas Carex.

Extra info related to what I do.

Need a resume or research paper edited to improve the English? You've come to the right place! I'm a professional field ecologist and botanist specializing in the genus Carex who has years of experience as a writer and editor. If you can write English, but journals are not satisfied with the quality, I can improve it for you. If you can prepare a resume, but you're worried about the quality of your English, we can polish it off for you. Even if you only write in Chinese, we work with a network of translators in mainland China and can translate your Chinese to fluent English. Our colleagues work with a wide variety of clients, so we can handle contracts, business letters, and a wide variety of documents. We can quote rates on request.

Resumes? RMB100-150 and infrequently higher. Complex scientific English research papers? From RMB100 for 250 words, more or less depending on the quality of the original English. Easier or more difficult work including translation? We can quote you a firm price before you commit to using our services.

Feel free to send me an email to ask me about my prices and rates for translation and editing work. I work with a network of native Chinese speakers who are professional editors. With their skills and mine, we can do both translation and editing work. Contact me at sedgeheadxyz<@>gmailxyz.com but delete the xyz and the <> symbols when you email me.

In the past two years, my use of Chinese has improved. Currently, I'm a full time writer and editor. I work for several companies in China as well as independently. My specialty, botany and ecology, gives me the opportunity to edit the research papers of many Chinese and Japanese scientists. My job is to improve their use of English.