SparkNotes

Colons do several things. They're a highly useful little marks of punctuation.

Colons indicate that you're about to elaborate.
Rachel's plan was simple: camp out for as long as it took.

Today, I got two emails that overlapped perfectly with each other.

The first:

I really need help with semi colons, colons, and commas. Sometimes when I get a question I believe its supposed to be a semicolon but it turns out to be colon.

The second:

Today, a Sparkler wrote in to ask, "Can you help me streamline this argument?"

Throughout the book of Genesis, there are many sets of opposites as God creates heaven and earth. Among them are heaven and earth and darkness and light. Sets of two make many appearances in this specific book of the Bible. In Chapters One through Three of Genesis, there are many references to sets of opposites or doubles.

Terrified by your assignment? So's this Sparkler:

When I first walked into class and saw that our next writing assignment in my AP English Language & Comp class was to psychoanalyze Holden Caulfield (from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye), I was positive it was a joke.

After realizing that the assignment was deadly serious, she came up with the following:

Today, I got a question about possessives. Hooray! I love grammar questions! And not only that, but I now have the opportunity to quote at length from my very own book. ("I'm so vain, I probably think this possessives question is about me, I'm so vaaaaaainnn.....") Here now is the relevant excerpt from Ultimate Style:

For most words, simply add an apostrophe and s.

- The men's locker room is dirtier than the women's.

If you're a 17- or 18-year-old applying to college this year, the terrorist attacks of September 11 are likely a crucial milestone in your personal history. They happened at a formative time in your youth, and they're probably something you've thought about a lot. You might be tempted to write an application essay about them. And that's okay. But if you do, your essay will have to be amazing. It will have to be a total knockout. Why? Because half of the other applicants are writing September 11 essays, too.

Here's one thing a thesis shouldn't be: an observation. Unfortunately, you can't just point out something true about a novel or short story, and describe that something for five paragraphs. Or you can, but only if you want to see "OK...annnnnnd?" or "So what?" scribbled in the margins of your paper.

Coming up with an observation, as this Sparkler has, is a good first step:

In both the novel Life of Pi written by Yann Martel and the movie The Black Stallion by Carrol Ballard, the protagonists start their lives as innocent and naive boys but grow up mentally with the help of experience, heart built relationships and actions that show they are different from most boys.

Is there anything worse than doing badly in a class, and not knowing how to fix your grade? It's a terrible feeling, especially when you have a test coming up. A Sparkler writes:

im a high school student in 10th grade.. im in Honors English 10. and i am doing badly in that class right now because my essay skills really sucks, i just don't know how to write good essays. and i have another upcoming In-Class essay this friday about the outside reading book that i read, The Tempest by Shakespeare. and the theme is "quest for power". i dont know the prompt til that day. its a suprise prompt.

Today's thesis victim is writing about The Scarlet Letter.

In his work, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses the main female characters, Hester’s defiance of societal standards and social norms to portray a pro-feminism stance, however; he challenges the feminist movement and ideals through male characters, like Chillingworth, who represent human nature and essentially solidify the extreme differences between men and women in not only the novel, but throughout most real societies.

We've got one big problem here, but before I get to that, let me address smaller concerns in red:

Thesis week continues!

Today, a Sparkler sent me this thesis on the GG:

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the characters’, and in particular Gatsby’s, struggles to achieve financial and emotional success as an allegory for how he views the struggles of people trying to reach the American Dream. By examining certain aspects of the characters’ individual struggles, the reader can learn that Fitzgerald views the American Dream as an empty, dead idea that is completely unattainable but a goal people continue to strive for anyways.

I've put my thoughts in red: