^ Uh oh, English teacher moment: remember, parenthetical remarks don't require the punctuation mark known as parentheses. They can be inserted (and often in a seamless way) using commas and dashes too! I think what I'm referring to as a parenthetical remarks may be more properly called the rhetorical device of parenthesis. Here's Ralph Ellison hamming it up with several different types of parenthesis:
“Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard) which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang.” --Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Second English teacher moment/irony of the day: Among my department colleagues, I am known as the "creativity killer." We do ZERO creative writing in my class because I inherit juniors who have never written analytical response to literature, a research paper, or a persuasive/argument paper. (To my knowledge, however, I'm the only one in the department with any creative writing aspirations). The first writing skill I coach across the board is being CONCISE. Many kids have gotten smiley faces on their unread writing from lazy teachers simply because they filled a page, while others have such poor vocabularies that they talk around everything, so it's a big job I have to do. The paradox I've discovered is that my poorest writers/thinkers often physically produce the most words although they tend to say the least.
In short, I would kill you for cramming your sentences full of words in my class (but only if they were useless space fillers).
