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Content and Format of Harper's On-Line Writing Lab (HOWL)
This section of Harper's On-Line Writing Laboratory, or HOWL, is intended to outline the general purpose of HOWL's grammar handbook, the audience to whom the grammar handbook is addressed, the content of the handbook, and the formatting conventions that are used in the handbook. Accordingly, this section is divided into four parts: Purpose, Who Should Use This Handbook, Selection of Content, and Format.
Purpose
The primary purpose of HOWL's grammar handbook is to serve as an on-line reference for students, faculty, and staff of Harper College. Accordingly, HOWL's grammar handbook will focus mainly on grammatical tendencies that are encountered in The Writing Center, the Tutoring Center, the English Department, and to a lesser extent the ESL Department of Harper College. In this way, we hope that Harper students, faculty, and staff will be able to refer to the handbook for help with aspects of grammar that they have encountered in class and questioned in their own writing.
A secondary purpose of HOWL's grammar handbook is to join the increasing community of grammar references available on the World Wide Web. Thus, HOWL's grammar handbook is designed to be consistent with other grammar handbooks, electronic and printed, in both form and content. Naturally, this means that the topic areas in HOWL's grammar handbook will overlap with other grammar texts; nonetheless, we hope this overlap will serve to reinforce grammatical skills.
Finally, HOWL's grammar handbook is solely informational. It is not intended to be a grammar tutorial or the text of a grammar course.
Who Should Use This Handbook
At some point in time, everyone needs help with grammar. This handbook is intended for all of those people and all of those times. Moreover, grammatical structures and techniques figure in all types of writing: formal and informal writing; writing for business, pleasure, or school; and writing for employment or publication, just to name a few. Hence, we encourage people to use this handbook for information directed at a specific problem, such as whether a semicolon is appropriate in a particular sentence, as well as for more general information about how, for example, a subject pronoun differs from an object pronoun.
Selection of Content
In keeping with the purpose of HOWL, the content of HOWL's grammar handbook in no way purports to be comprehensive. Instead, it focuses on the most common grammatical problems of students who come into Harper College's Writing Center.
This parochial nature means a couple of things. For one thing, it means that the example sentences in the handbook are creations of The Writing Center staff and are not borrowed from previously-published texts. These example sentences are based on typical sentence patterns and errors that The Writing Center staff sees in the work of student writers who visit The Writing Center. Any similarity to other published patterns or errors of any type is purely coincidental. For another thing, it invariably means that the handbook will not address everyone's grammar problems. And a third implication of the parochial scope of HOWL's grammar handbook is that the areas it covers may be modified periodically.
Format
All pages in HOWL's grammar handbook are arranged similarly. Each page discusses and illustrates a different aspect of grammar using the following format:
- The page begins with an explanation of the grammatical principle and the problems commonly associated with its use.
- In pages concerning sentence construction and sentence errors, grammatical units are displayed in the following format:
- Punctuation that illustrates usage appears in red.
Copyright © William Rainey Harper College, 1996
Last Revised: 25 April 1996