Hello, dear reader.

Tonight, I spent a good hour crafting a post for you. Then I read it and decided that (A) it would most likely bore you to death, (B) it may have violated copyright laws, and (C) I just plain didn’t like it.

Therefore, since it is very late at night, I have much work to do this week, and I am dealing with a personal issue, I regret to inform you that there will be no blog post this week. I plan to return a week from now.

In the meantime, I wish you a good and safe week.

When I was a senior in high school back in the early 1990s, my family did not have a personal computer. Many families did not. I attended a rather wealthy school and some of the students did have computers in their homes. These students wrote their assigned papers on word processing platforms that seem primitive today: WordPerfect and WordStar, to name two.

So what did I do?

I wrote my papers on a Smith Corona electronic typewriter with which my parents gifted me the summer before my senior year. And, more than 30 years later, I am highly grateful to them for doing so.

I loved my typewriter. It hammered the characters on the paper in what was then called Pica type (similar to what Courier New is on MS Word today). I could set it to either single space or double space the lines. The ribbon cartridge was easy enough to replace that my all-thumbs self could do it. And—this was the best part—I could correct errors on a line by pressing a key which activated a correction feature (best described as a hammer striking a character though a whiteout ribbon), so that as long as I kept my eyes on what was forming on the paper, I could use that feature to erase my mistakes.

I remember typing not only papers for my high school English and psychology classes with the typewriter, but also my college applications and, years later, my graduate school applications. Oh, how I hated having to perfectly line up the paper so that my characters did not go uphill or downhill on the application lines. However, I managed to do it right.

I even typed a few of my job applications. Of course, by the time I was in the “real world,” I filled out applications online most of the time, but there were some times when an application was a hard copy and would read, “PLEASE PRINT OR TYPE.” Handwrite a job application? Certainly not I!

The last time I used the typewriter was in 2017, when I filled out a job application which was a hard copy, and I did not even think twice about typing it. I was one of six applicants who got an interview, out of more than 20. I later learned that many of the applicants had handwritten their applications.

I still have the typewriter and it sits on a shelf in my office. I refuse to part with it until it needs a new ribbon cartridge; those are no longer made or sold.

Do you have an “old,” treasured piece of equipment that you used in your writing or editing?

As I mentioned in last week’s post, graduate school is often extremely stressful for a master’s or PhD candidate. It was for me when I was working on my master’s degree in biochemistry. The experiments, while highly interesting, were often grueling. I recall one in which I measured the growth of baker’s yeast over a twelve-hour period, which involved taking measurements every hour or so for twelve hours. Yes, that meant I slept at my desk in the lab between measurements and had an alarm next to me.

But I digress. For many graduate students, the most difficult part of the road is the writing of their thesis or dissertation. For some students, English is a foreign language and they have some difficulty with it. For others, writing in general has always been a struggle.

This is why scientific theses and dissertations are among the things that I edit. If you clicked on the “About” tab on my website, you know that writing my thesis was my favorite part of my master’s project. And I loved editing my own writing when I was working on it. It goes without saying that I love editing the writing of others as well.

My first client whom I did not know personally was a master’s candidate at a well-known research university. Her project was fascinating, but her English needed some help, as it was not her first language. I edited her thesis and got high accolades from both the student and her faculty adviser. The student successfully defended her thesis and earned her master’s degree.

The most important thing to do right after a student contacts you is ask for their adviser’s name and email address, and then get a written document saying that the student has the adviser’s permission to have the thesis or dissertation edited. If a student does not have such permission and you are a party to editing their paper, everyone involved will be in trouble, including you.

Graduate students in the sciences are the next generation of researchers and professors, and it is good to look at them as such. If you are aiding the next generation, it rather makes you feel good.

I don’t often post about current events here, but the August 28 shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill really struck me.

Having heard about it only on TV and the internet, I cannot even say that I am very educated about it. I know that second-year graduate student Tailei Qi shot his faculty adviser, Zijie Yan, and that the hand gun Qi used has yet to be found. I also know that Yan, who was married with at least one child, did not survive, and that Qi has appeared in court and is in jail.

Sadly, I also know that students and faculty had to shelter in place for hours that dreadful Monday. I read the many texts that were on the front page of The Daily Tar Heel which bared their terror and fear.

I believe Qi should receive the maximum sentence allowable.

I was a graduate student in the hard sciences back in the 1990s and I know how difficult such a life is. Graduate school is very stressful and can be cutthroat for many students. It can also often be very discouraging. But these are not excuses for getting a gun from who-knows-where and committing a horrific crime.

Could Qi have handled the situation—whatever it exactly was—differently? Of course.

If he was struggling in his program (and I’m not saying he was), he could have gone to the chair of his department and discussed what was going on, and hopefully the department chair would help him make arrangements that would create a more favorable situation for him.

If the chair was not willing to do this, Qi could have just done the best he could. Sometimes that is what one has to do. When I was in graduate school, I did the best I could and let the chips fall where they did. This is why I ended up scoring high enough on my comprehensive exams (given at the end of the first year in the program I was in) to continue as a master’s candidate, but not a doctoral candidate. In the end, a master’s degree was better for me personally.

Of course, guns could be made less accessible and controlled more, but I will not get into my feelings about that.