Marginalia for those without graduate degrees

February 10, 2009 1:08 AM

Will I ever be able to draw an excellent marginal brace without going to graduate school?

I once had a professor who insisted that graduate school was necessary to learn how to properly draw a marginal brace.

This is the mark I mean (the second from top) but of course, in the margin to mark off a section of important text. I do a lot of underlining when I read and my braces always end up looking really ugly.

Will I have to go to graduate school to achieve my dream or is there another way?

posted by fantine to writing & language (20 comments total)

It's kind of difficult to see where your problem is without an image containing a few of your braces, but...

The way I draw them is to keep in mind that they're basically two straight vertical lines and four little quarter-circles (two of which meet to form the middle of the brace).

Practice is the only solution. Print out a page with braces of various lengths and sit yourself down somewhere quiet and copy, copy, copy. That's the way kids used to learn handwriting. Take it really slowly to begin with. Each time you draw a brace, critique it - maybe the lines aren't vertical, maybe the curves are too sharp or too shallow). Refine it with your next attempt.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 1:47 AM on February 10

I hate to ask, but are you serious?

Was your professor making the point that in grad school you would underline text a whole lot, i.e. practice makes perfect? Well, then you have your answer.

I just drew a couple with absolutely no problems whatsoever, having not drawn them since high school maths class almost a decade ago. (I'm doing a PhD, but I happen to not highlight texts that way. Grad school has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to manipulate writing utensils.)
posted by minus zero at 2:18 AM on February 10 [2 favorites]

Man, I write dozens of these when handwriting code... and I've never managed to make them look like anything but pointy 3's and sigmas. It's damn hard. Especially to make them quickly. Most of my profs just drew squiggles (and I had one prof who called them that).

So, I don't know that grad school will help.
posted by Netzapper at 2:24 AM on February 10

I have been able to draw excellent marginal braces of all sizes since childhood and I do not have a graduate degree.
posted by cocoagirl at 3:05 AM on February 10 [7 favorites]

Assuming your professor did actually say that, maybe he meant properly drawing braces, ie so that they enclose the correct text (ie not lolz but interesting/ important points), rather than drawing them beautifully. A lament for the poor close reading skills of undergraduates, perhaps.

As for drawing perfect braces: do you try to model your handwriting on typographic styles as well, like a monk in a scriptorium? If so you may wish to carry over your technique for achieving the perfect Times New Roman handwriting.

In other words, as le morte bea arthur suggests, trace, trace, trace, then copy copy copy. That's how my handwriting teacher got rid of my v-shaped u's. Teach your hand the physical motions.

As a last resort to avoid graduate study, you may wish to consider highlighter pens.
posted by tavegyl at 4:12 AM on February 10

I once had a professor who insisted that graduate school was necessary to learn how to properly draw a marginal brace.

Unless the professor was a full-fledged nut, I really hope he was making the "grad school is a metric ass-load of reading and annotating" point.

To draw such a thing nicely, I like to draw points, and then connect the dots. Put a point at the beginning of the text, at the end, and then in the middle, further out than the first two. Then just connect them. I think getting the symmetry right goes a long way toward making them nice looking. There's no defeat in drawing a straight line, either.

Or, just use a highlighter.
posted by gjc at 4:14 AM on February 10

This question is bizarre. Are you serious? Is this some kind of secret code question that a few people will instantly understand where everyone else scratches their heads?

As it is AskMe, and we need to take things seriously I would suggest sitting about for an hour or so with a big pile of paper drawing them out repeatedly until you are happy and you shouldn't ever have to worry about it ever again.

Do you get docked points for shady braces at your school?
posted by ClanvidHorse at 5:02 AM on February 10

Braces I taught myself in high school, and I draw them as two stacked S's, one backwards.
posted by rhizome at 5:58 AM on February 10

Learn C (or C# or Java) and then write it without a computer. Trust me, your braces will get better in no time.

I vaguely recall honing mine in 7^th grade while doing math work about sets and set theory (you know what is the intersection of { ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1 } and { 0, 1, 2, 3, ... }.

The stacked S approach works, for a left brace I prefer to do it as a hook, a straight line down, a hook, then hook back in, a straight line down and a hook. I drew a dozen or so on scrap paper, and that's pretty much the process. I also tried a more fluid version that one of my CS professors favored in which it's all curves - no real attention to straight lines - and the center point ends up being a loop. It ended up unbalanced and too informal, if you know what I mean. You can get very mechanical looking braces by eschewing the curves entirely. Do a short diagonal down and to the left, a straight line down, then a short diagonal down and left, then a short diagonal down and right, a straight line down and then a short diagonal down and right. This will look very precise. Try it.
posted by plinth at 6:40 AM on February 10

STEP 1: Draw square brackets instead of curly braces.

STEP 2: Get lazy and let the square edges round out.

STEP 3 (OPTIONAL): start adding the little pointy nub at the middle.
posted by ook at 7:29 AM on February 10

I know 70-year-old mathematicians who can't draw them worth a damn. Practice may or may not make perfect.
posted by crinklebat at 8:07 AM on February 10

I brought this up with a professor I had a few years ago.

His response? "Oh, it's just two skinny 'S's, stacked, with one reversed." I tried it, and it worked instantly. "There you go," he said, "I just saved you six years of grad school."

For all those asking "is your prof serious???", the answer is almost certainly no. At least in math, it's sort of an in-joke amongst mathematicians. I'd assume it's the same for other subjects.
posted by oostevo at 8:51 AM on February 10 [1 favorite]

Marginal Braces -- Grad school may be necessary
Squiggly Brackets -- Any 3rd grader can do it

It truly is all semantics
posted by rtimmel at 9:05 AM on February 10

Nthing that you don´t need grad school for this, but the other side of the coin is that many people who went to grad school can´t draw {} legibly.

If you asked your professor how you could draw a {} more clearly for your personal notetaking, I think he gave you a snarky answer to what he or she found to be an annoying and useless question.

The latest thing that all the kids have these days are markers called ¨highlighters¨ just for marking important sections of text. You might want to look into that.
posted by yohko at 10:16 AM on February 10

You know, I didn't realize how bad I was at drawing these damn things until I did that turn-your-handwriting-into-a-font thing the other day. Even after trying it out on scrap paper a few times I couldn't get a set of brackets to look any better than a pound sterling symbol and a contortionist three.

But I suppose anybody would get better after writing them day-in and day-out for years, which I suspect was the professor's (jokey) point.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:32 AM on February 10

Thanks for all the responses so far. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who struggles to draw a tidy and elegant brace!

To those who question whether I am serious: the question was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but my intention to perfect my brace-drawing is perfectly legitimate. I have never drawn them well before -- they always end up looking like squashing semi-circles -- so I wanted to gather some wisdom.

As for highlighters, I am a fan of the old-school look of braces (ok, so I also use fountain pens and hankies) and I abhor neon on my texts.

The professor's remark was fairly off-hand, just an aside after drawing a (perfect) brace on the board. It was said jokingly but with a certain amount of assurance.

To paper and to pen! I must practice, apparently.
posted by fantine at 11:31 AM on February 10

The latest thing that all the kids have these days are markers called ¨highlighters¨ just for marking important sections of text. You might want to look into that.

What keyboard are you using that's putting Diaresis in for quotation marks?
posted by odinsdream at 12:46 PM on February 10

I believe this is just an old joke. I'm pretty sure I've heard it in the sense of curly brackets being what you get out of an M.C.S., since everything else you learn your first year is obsolete by the time you're out.
posted by dhartung at 10:43 PM on February 10

What keyboard are you using that's putting Diaresis in for quotation marks?

{¨!¨}
"¨" ? Oh dear...

Thanks for pointing that out odinsdream. Yes, those should have been quotation marks. Asus Eee, if that was a serious question. Off to figure out why this happened...
posted by yohko at 9:34 AM on February 11

OK: follow-up.

oostevo's advice was golden. I practiced on index cards, working on both right- and left-orientated braces.

Here are two recent examples of my braces. I am pleased with the progress and thanks again for all the advice!
posted by fantine at 1:26 AM on February 25