A last piece of advice, and your grades are posted.

A recent blog post from lifehack.ogr on how to improve one's resume had the follow point:

3. Proofread past spell check.

Just about everyone runs a spell check on their resume. But I’ve seen so many typos that a computer can’t catch: misused words, misspelled business names — I’ve even seen a resume with the applicant’s name misspelled! You should always read over documents to double check them, and if you can get a friend to read over your resume, go for it.

After reading portfolios for the past week, the advice to read past the spell check hit home. Let me offer an example I encountered on a more or less regular basis. A student would claim they had learned to improve their proofreading technique or to start work on critical texts earlier, giving the writing process time to help them produce more polished documents. In the next paragraph, I would encounter a word like "sue," as in, "I have learned to start work well before it was sue." The student had obviously hit the "s" when they intended to hit the "d" in "due." It was equally obvious, the student never read a final copy of their work out loud; instead, they continued to trust spell check to mark each and every word which was miss used or miss spelled. By claiming to proofread more carefully but not including reading out loud on such a critical document, like the cover essay to the portfolio, the student's credibility nose-dived.

So, here is my last piece of advice for the semester, "In critical documents, 'Proofread past spell check.'"

Have a good break. Grades are now up and posted. I will be happy to answer questions after I am back from break on 5 January.

Steve