Effective educators embrace and encourage
by eradicating errors entwining eminent and imminent in every context.
These two words are easily confused because they sound so much
alike. Eminent means prominent or famous; “The eminent scholar
easily defeated the upstart politician in the debate.” One
common use of this word describes the government’s power to
confiscate private property for public good.   The term
“eminent domain,” refers to the government’s eminent
status in society.   Imminent means impending, most commonly
used to describe a threat as in “you are in imminent danger.”
Happy and potentially beneficial events can also be imminent, as long as
they are going to happen soon, as in, “after I hand in my paper, a
good grade is imminent.”

Jim Zuercher
Staff Writing Tutor

This comes to you from Library Services at Morningside College …
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Back on March 5th of last year, I featured The Encyclopedia of Life as a Wrap-up. At the time, I described it as a work in process and suggested frequent visits to the site. This week’s WWW again features this online reference database. Since March of 2008, thousands of entries have been added as well as more interactive features. An example of a typical entry, the goldfish can be viewed here >>> http://www.eol.org/pages/1298984. As you visit each entry, you’ll want to note the many links that accompany the article, including the one that links to the original source of the information.

Bookmark this biological sciences reference database by clicking here >>> http://www.eol.org/.

Jim Fisk
Student Academic Services Coordinator and Librarian

Tuesday Tutoring Tip for October 13, 2009

Always annunciate and articulate all the Ss in asterisk; avoiding the aft S assembles asterik, an absurd abomination that advertises anti-awareness. Some people pronounce (and spell) this word without its second S. These people do themselves a disservice. The word itself comes from the Greek word asteriskos, which means little star. It is both a mark of punctuation meaning refer to something else, and a way of saying additional circumstances apply, as in Barry Bonds’ home run record should have an asterisk by it because of his alleged involvement with steroids.
Remember: the asterisk is worth the risk.

WEDNESDAY WEB WRAP-UP for October 7, 2009

Politifact.com, an offering of the St Petersburg Times and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for National Reporting is this week’s Wrap-up. As a service to their readers, the writers at Politifact report on and rate the “truthiness” (Colbert) of statements, promises and pronouncements of politicians, pundits and bloggers. Ratings range from “Pants on Fire” to “True”. The site is relatively easy to navigate and is searchable by subject, persons or by “rulings” of the Politifact writers.

Click here to see whose “Pants are on Fire” today . >>> http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

Jim Fisk
Student Academic Services Coordinator and Librarian

Confusing compliment and complement can compromise credibility and crush chances to convince colleagues of cognizance. Saying something nice about something or someone is a “compliment,” but not all compliments have to be verbal. For example, “Jane paid me a compliment by ravenously gorging on the food I had prepared.” “Complement,” is not as common, and its meaning is associated with matching or completing. Complements are different elements that somehow work together, each adding something not possessed by the others. In this sense the word is a noun, but it can also be used as a verb. For example, “My work experience and college education complement each other and enhance my overall ability to complete the task.” Remember the “i” in nice when differentiating between the two.

October is National Information Literacy Month!

“All together,” always alludes to an assembly of anything; “Altogether” is an adverb articulated as all. These two terms are often confused and misused. “All together,” is a phrase denoting “in a group.” For example: “The party guests were gathered all together in the kitchen.” “Altogether,” means completely, or entirely. For example: Fritz was altogether baffled by the combination of intense light and noise.

WEDNESDAY WEB WRAP-UP for September 30, 2009

Next Tuesday evening, Lavonne Mueller, an award winning playwright and poet will begin her five-day visit to our campus.  During her time here, she will discuss her work, present workshops on creativity in the classroom and play-writing and stage a reading of her work, Voice 9/11.

This week’s Wrap-up promotes her Morningside visit.  To learn more about Ms. Mueller, click >>> http://lavonnemueller.net/index.htm. Here, you can read a brief biography, view her complete vitae and download a number of her plays. For a schedule of her campus activities, click here >>> http://webs.morningside.edu/womensstudies/events.htm.

Jim Fisk

Student Academic Services Coordinator and Librarian

WEDNESDAY WEB WRAP-UP for September 23, 2009

MLA is an acronym for the Modern Language Association. In addition to being a scholarly group whose interest is literature, the MLA establishes the publication ‘rules’ for writers in the humanities.  Several copies of the recently released seventh edition of the MLA Handbook, which documents the standards, are now in the library.  There are a number of changes relative to the documentation of sources at the end of a research paper that should be noted.

Today’s Wrap-up comes from OWL, the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University; it identifies those changes. Actually two links may be found here.  An MLA update page with sample citations may viewed by clicking here >>> http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/15/.  A full set of MLA resources may be found here >>> http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/.

Jim Fisk

Student Academic Services Coordinator and Librarian