Becky Burckmyer, author of Awesome Grammar (Career Press, 2008, shares the “top 10” grammar errors she has seen in her 20-year career as a copywriter, writing coach and seminar leader:
1. Incorrect placement of quotation marks. Note that quotation marks go OUTside periods and commas, whether the little marks are part of the quoted material or not:
Archie has written a song, “Green Christmas,” which I think you should hear.
The classroom is a crucible for textbook development, said geography author Robert Christopherson, and that’s why publishers are looking for people who love to teach to write textbooks. “The development of the sequences of topics and the text outline is done through experimentation, he said, which is best done in the classroom using the author’s own students. Student questions in the classroom, for example, may be an indication of where a figure label is needed in the textbook.”
Former journal editor Gerald Stone said an article isn’t dead until you as an author decides to bury it. Some authors, he said, don’t know that the letter they receive is an acceptance letter — the editor only wants the author to make revisions and resubmit. Instead, strangely, they take it as rejection.
For this reason, Stone said, when you get a letter from a journal that will tell you whether your article has been accepted or not, follow this procedure:
Most books come out of experience. Authors find a need in the field. They discover the existing texts have weaknesses, miss important topics, or simply do not excite their students. It may very well be there is no book on the particular topic they are teaching, or that the author is on the developing edge of an emerging area in a discipline.
Betty Azar, author of Understanding and Using English Grammar, said: “Experience tells me that first an author should see a need in the field. If the book you want to write fills a need you have in your own teaching, you can be fairly sure it will do the same for other teachers. Some of the best books have come from teachers like myself who develop their own materials for their classes because there was nothing available in the marketplace to meet their teaching needs, and then turned these materials into texts.”
Here are some ways to get started in textbook publishing:
Academic presses invest a lot of effort in the peer review process. While most academics understand the process — either from personal experience or tales shared at conferences — less understood is how editors and publishers view peer review.
“The primary reason for peer reviewing manuscripts is to reinforce the publisher’s reputation as serious and professional,” said Jessica Gribble, an acquisitions editor at Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Individual editors also value peer review, she said: “We can’t be experts in every subject we acquire, so we rely on reviews to help us know whether the content of the manuscript is high quality.” Another goal of the peer review process is to confirm what the press believes to be the market for the book. “We’re getting both a content analysis and a market analysis,” said Gribble.
Experiential learning, a four-stage cycle that accommodates four distinct types of learners, is the ideal way for people to learn. While each person will prefer one part of the cycle over others, it is important for educators to guide their students through each stage in order to achieve the best possible learning experience.
According to Dr. Alice Kolb, president of Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc., textbook authors can use the following ideas to incorporate all four stages of the experiential learning cycle and maximize the educational potential of their books:
First Stage: Concrete Experience. Vignettes or quotes can help students identify with the content of a chapter, or you can provide introductory exercises to give students an initial experience with your topic.
