Word of the Week! Analyzation Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Analyzation Richmond Writing I usually focus on words I like, but this one needs comment, if only to keep more students from using it. It cropped up in a midterm, and I marked but did not penalize it greatly. Note that I used penalize rather than punish. The former word exemplifies derivation, where an affix (prefix or suffix) gets attached to a word to create a new one. Thus, from penal we get penalize.   I am not overly fond of words made with the -ize suffix, for no good reason other than their sound. Thus I do not put them in my list of faculty pet peeves. Like an ugly new car that gradually looks better over the   years, -ize verbs seem to beat down purists about style and usage.   I barely notice penalize now, considering it a less punitive synonym for punish. Not so for analyzation. Consider its root: analysis, a word as old as Ancient Greece. The Online Etymology Dictionary supports that honorable origin. As with many -ize words, analyze provides us with a neologism that does powerful work. I use it as the soul of my courses where students analyze literary work. In fact, its the most powerful intellectual skill a student can hone in college, where I often tell writers tell me what you learned. Even if I know the subject already, you can analyze what is new to you. That will then be new again to me. But the popular student word analyzation takes word-derivation a step too far, like a Rube Goldberg machine with too many steps to perform an action. A writer using our word simply makes a longer synonym for analysis that to a novice or careless reader sounds professional but actually, as in the title of a well respected essay by scholar David Bartholomae, merely provides another instance of Inventing the University rather than learning how we academics actually talk and write. Moral: Never avoid analysis, but avoid analyzation at all costs. Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. See all of our Words of the Week here. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.