Emory College Writing Center

Our Staff

Your name: Lara Townzen

Your home town: Lexington, MA

Your major(s): Major- International Studies, Minor- Global Health

Are you fluent in any language(s) other than English? Not fully fluent, no. I took Spanish through middle school and high school and I'm taking Russian here at Emory.

What are your career plans? Ultimately I'd like to work in foreign aid either in the fields of public health or international development.

What is your favorite book or author and why? So many! First to come to mind are Atonement by Ian McEwan and The Constant Gardener by John le Carré. One of my favorite authors though is Dennis Lehane--suspenseful mysteries set in the neighborhoods of Boston make for fun reads.

What is your most frequent grammatical error? Run-on sentences

What is your biggest grammatical pet peeve? It's not really a grammatical pet peeve, but my biggest pet peeve in writing is cliches.

What is your favorite word? Hoppipolla (it's Icelanding for “jumping through puddles”)

What is your favorite procrastination method when you have a paper to write? Food.

Describe (in a short paragraph) a significant breakthrough in your development as a writer: My junior year in high school we read Death of a Salesman in my American Literature class. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I hated the prompt, so on a whim I asked my teacher if I could just write “well-developed rants” about certain aspects of the play instead. To my surprise, she said yes. I picked four themes/parts of the book that I found really interesting and wrote as much as I could about them. It was probably the first time I really began to understand how to pick meaningful quotations and to do thorough quotation analysis. I still think it's one of the best papers I ever wrote.

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