For floating: tip your head back as far as you can. You think you’ll end up with your nose under water, but you won’t, and it helps create the arch in your back that will let you float. Also, let your feet just dangle down from bent knees.
Of course, if you don’t have any body fat, these tips are useless.
Cool. I’m going to try to hit the pool tomorrow or Friday morning, and I’ll try some of these tips. (Ah, more adventures in ‘looking like an idiot in the pool’. I assume it builds character.) The weird thing is that I’m comfortable in the water and I know I’m not going to drown (especially since one of the public pools is, no joke, a whopping 4 feet deep, which is safe even for those as short as I am). I just can’t seem to get my body to place nicely in the water.
I think Shagnasty hit the problem on the head - I have a feeling that while swimming I’m trying to compensate for my lack of technical knowledge with brute force, which isn’t very effective.
A friend (who actually knows how to swim fairly well) said that I might also be falling into the trap of tensing up my abs/hips when I’m on my back, which she said for some reason is apparently a common reaction.