Pus List

What is Pus?

• Pus is caseous necrotic white blood cells.
  • Necrotic means dead
  • Caseous means "cheeselike"
  • If you are unsure what pus is, here are some pictures from the CDC
  • Yeeeaaah, there's gotta be a word for when we coil away from not wanting to see something but we cannot help ourselves and look anyway.
• Pus is an indicator of fighting infection
• For our purposes, pus words are an indicator that your writing is infected with simple connections.

The Pus Words

1. be
2. is
3. am
4. are
5. was
6. were
7. been
• These first seven are the "to-be" verbs and cause many errors
8. it
9. thing and things
• Numbers 8 and 9 create an ambiguity that never should occur in a paper.
10. get
11. gets
12. got
13. goes
• People use these last four as an easy fall back from not using the first nine. Also, they sound unprofessional, and one aim of an education is to professionalize, which in this class means helping you form a bilingualism of both your everyday-speak and your ability to use a professional language.

Why take those words away

• We'll cover that in Live Online
• But here's the gist of it:
  1. Your brain is smarter and thinks harder than you ever will.
  2. Your brain does not care about communicating with others; that's you, your ego wants that.
  3. Brain will dumb down your language because it would rather think about interesting concepts and ideas than about your desperate attempts to connect with other people through language.
  4. Summation: Your brain screws you over; you end up thinking like an academic, but writing like a third grader.

The Penalty

• For Composition 1 students
  • After mini research 1, even one pus word is an automatic redo/rewrite on any assignment.
• For Composition 2 students
  • Small theory papers can use two per paper.
• For Philosophy and Intro to Humanities
  • Free use of them unless I indicate otherwise for a specific assignment.
• For Literature and Themes courses
  • Just...

Avoid the word Becomes

• Be careful of the word becomes such as in the following example:
• Every day becomes a different challenge.
• The word becomes means "something morphs or grows into something elses," such as a boy becoming (morphing into) a man or a caterpillar becoming (morphing into) a butterfly.
• Here the word is awkward because days do not morph into a different challenge. A day may have, during its course, a different challenge, or the whole day may seem challenging.
• If a DAY could morph into a DIFFERENT CHALLENGE, we would no longer need the term "day," and instead we could say Different Challenge:
1. Every day different challenge, I wake up and go to work
2. Unless clouds hang in the sky, the sun comes up every day different challenge.

Ways to fix Pus words

• To easily fix pus, begin the sentence with the last part of the sentence.
• Everyday is a different challenge.
• Different challenges rise every day.
• Different challenges confront us everyday.
• Different challenges enter our lives daily.

WARNING: Pus can hide under the skin/paper

• A sentence is infected with a "hidden pus" if one of my peers' quickest fixes of your sentence is to add pus:
  • "hidden pus" counts as if you had written the pus.
• Beware of contractions, such as isn't, they're, and she's, etc.

Why not use those pus words?

• You can learn more about why not to use to-be verbs by googling "e-prime" or "e-priming."
• I, however, deny the use of those words to force your brain to consider every word you use.