Closing thoughts: Grammar Graduation

In my first blog, I made note of two particular grammatical insecurities that I wanted to overcome this semester: correct use of the word “whom” and the ever-popular “dash” (hooray! I used a colon correctly!). While I can’t think of a direct application of the word, “whom” to this blog, I’d like to fabricate an example to test my usage of the word. “My sister, whom I love dearly, is a little crazy.” I think that this is the correct use of “whom” because “whom” is a direct object, and a substitute for the word “sister.” I think that developing, refining and retaining (parallelism in which I opted to omit the last comma) grammatical understanding is nothing short of a lifelong process.

But (I began a sentence with a “FANBOYS”), I feel that I have made more grammatical progress in this class than at any other point in my life as a student. After completing English 326 (AAAWWUBBIS-laden introductory clause), I feel generally more conscious about parts of speech and how they function, but I take pride in the newfound ability to pinpoint mistakes in grammar. Not only that, but I am able to explain why they are incorrect. At the beginning of the semester, this came as a struggle to me. I recently looked over some scraps I had cut out for my scrapbook, with notes of what I thought was wrong about each example. Now it was easy to see that not only did I not have a clear idea about what was grammatically incorrect about them, but some really had nothing incorrect about them at all. Now, I have a better perception of what is correct and what is not.

As to the issue of dashes, I have come to realize that prior to this class I was oblivious to the concept. I am guilty of erroneously lumping “dashes” into the same category as the more comfortable “hyphens.” Fortunately, my sudden awareness of the difference reflects some growth in the area, and while I am still not comfortable dashing away in everyday writing, I am more receptive to attempting to use them. I’ve realized that hyphens are used to connect two words, while dashes -- typically -- are used to create a pause or additional thought.

I have found other unexpected areas of improvement throughout the course of the class, as well. My writing style, previously limited and constrained into a comfort zone (adjectives out of order), has developed a wider array of evocative possibilities for sentence structure. Prior to taking English 326, a class which I had previously worried about (appositive), I had been less aware of ways to add extra flavor to my writing; brushstrokes like appositives and adjectives out of order are two techniques which I have used this semester to spruce up my writing. Sentence variety helps, too.

One of the most valuable, albeit simple components of grammar that I will take from this class is the importance of consistency. Although there are differing personal preferences regarding trends in grammar, such as the debate over whether a comma belongs before “and” in a list, I am entitled to use either of these options as long as I consistently use one or the other. To do otherwise would suggest a sense of grammatical uncertainty and a compromised writing standard. More than anything, as I continue to hone my capabilities in written language, I hope that I am able to continually grow in grammatical aptitude at a consistent rate. I feel like I now have the tools and drive necessary to demand even more of myself as a writer.

As a closing thought, now I have come to acknowledge that grammar is much more than that nice old lady, my mother’s mother (appositive), who is married to my grampar and sends me cookies in the mail from time to time.

English 325 Revisited

My Life As A Reader: Revised Using the Lanham Method

In this revised excerpt of earlier writing, I worked on untangling the sentences and restructuring them to fit a who-did-what pattern to the best of my ability at this point, without altering the original message. I’ve become so set in my writing style that this presented a challenge for me.

As a child, I always enjoyed reading. Living in a rural corner of my school district, I didn’t have the involved social atmosphere that most of my classmates grew up in. I had no neighbors or kids my own age nearby. I primarily interacted with other kids during the school day. I spent many afternoons and evenings with the company I found through reading.

My favorite books promised adventure, interactions with nature, encounters with savages, or anything to feed my imagination as to what might lurk in the forests surrounding my home. My aunt, a middle school English teacher, funded my love for reading by sending me book store gift cards every Christmas and birthday. The first book I bought was Hatchet by Gary Paulson. As a third grader, the turn of each page found me facing each new obstacle right along with the character. I identified with the wilderness as a backdrop for stories because the forest was part of my own identity, so I sought more books with similar settings. Next, I read My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I soon sought my own solitude in tree forts, at least until the sun went down.

Coloring Outside of the Lines

Original Text: This was taken from an Englush 351 short story.

As the sun hung high above, a formidable figure entered the forest, immediately opposed by a labyrinthine tangle of vine maple. Gerry carefully lifted a sagging maple stalk and dipped down underneath, stepping gingerly over another. Though the forest teemed with life, today all was still as though frozen in time; nothing ever changed here. Animals come into this world, live a while, and die. Seedlings sprout, blossom into towering firs, and someday tumble down again, yet nothing really changes. The forest runs on a different clock than the hoards of caffeine-crazed businessmen in their twelfth-story cubicles. Onward through the underbrush, he crept along as seamlessly as a cat stalking his prey. Each footstep ran a risk of disturbance, so he tediously ensured that no step fell out of place. The tattered litter of leaves, bark, and splintered twigs on the mossy forest floor had seen two months of autumn showers and were worn to a deep homogenous mulch. This usually facilitated silent, stealthy maneuvers through the trees, but the forest’s lavish shag carpet had become crunchy from a week of bitterly dry weather.

Below, the same text was modified to add "brush strokes" of writing, including absolutes, appositives, participles, and adjectives out of order. Specifics of each example, in brackets, follow the bold text.

As the sun hung high above, smiling wearily upon the faded landscape [Participle], a formidable figure entered the forest and was immediately opposed by a labyrinthine tangle of vine maple. Gerry, a stealthy predator, [appositive] carefully lifted a sagging maple stalk and dipped down underneath, stepping gingerly over another. Though the forest, a bustling biome, [appositive] teemed with life, today all was still as though frozen in time; nothing ever changed here. Animals come into this world, live a while, and die. Seedlings sprout, blossom into towering firs, and someday tumble down again, yet nothing really changes. The forest, timeless and unregulated, [adjectives out of order] runs on a different clock than the hoards of caffeine-crazed businessmen in their twelfth-story cubicles. Onward through the underbrush, he crept along as seamlessly as a cat stalking his prey. Each footstep ran a risk of disturbance. Palms sweating, pulse pounding, [absolutes] he tediously ensured that no step fell out of place. The tattered litter of leaves, bark, and splintered twigs on the mossy forest floor had seen two months of autumn showers and were worn to a deep homogenous mulch. This usually facilitated silent, stealthy maneuvers through the trees, but the forest’s lavish shag carpet had become crunchy from a week of bitterly dry weather.

comma overload

After discussing comma placement in the previous couple of classes, I’ve come to realize that I have got my work cut out for me. I definitely have an arsenal of bad habits that I had not been aware of until now. I had felt confident about my use of commas, but now I realize that in all forms of writing, I have been guilty of omitting commas. Take that last comma, for example (and that one, too). I would have loved to have deleted both of them because choppy, comma-polluted sentences annoy me when they are overdone. Unfortunately, my gut instinct is that the demands for academic punctuation require gross overpunctuation. In certain circumstances, I feel like a comma in an academic paper is like steeplechase, with a hurdle to jump over, followed by that big, empty void. The more commas I am obligated to add in order to be grammatically correct, the more I bog down my ideas with space and pauses, and it makes reading my own work feel tedious. However, I am glad to finally have a set of rules for words that require commas. FANBOYS, AAAWWUBIS and other mnemonic devices are helping me standardize my writing.

It is not a matter of when I WANT to add a comma, but more importantly when I NEED to, like it or not. Often in my education, (*unwanted comma*) I have been told that there are differences between formal academic writing and informal writing. I had always thought I distinguished between them, but now I am going to have to look over some of my previous literature papers and see just how many commas I omitted. With the inevitably missing commas, I understand the difference between “stigmatized” and “unstigmatized” grammatical issues, as my academic writing style is established with omitting commas, yet I don’t believe I’ve gotten comments from professors regarding these issues.

Question:
This is more of a broad question (and a little bit of wishful thinking) for thought and discussion: considering that commas, in some of their uses, are “trending out,” will that bleed over into academic writing? How much choice does a writer have to omit unwanted commas and not sacrifice the academic integrity of the paper?

Concision vs. Clarity

I am a bad English student. I say this in the respect that when I find myself confused with behemoths of confusing sentence structure, I stop my train of thought and simplify it. Rather than find a way to make such complex sentence structures work, I do what Barbara has said that over-critiqued young writers do: I shrivel up. At least, this is my perception of my writing process. Often, this comes when I find my sentence structure to be a maze of commas, or in many cases, a ridiculously long sentence, regardless of its actual legitimacy as a sentence.

If I look at my academic writing, particularly my theses for literary or historical analysis… they are BEEFY. When I read them, part of me says, “wow, those are some sentences,” and the other part of me wonders why I didn’t simplify them so that they were less rediculong. It comes down to the fact that I embrace concision, and a major part of that is avoiding complex, compound thoughts all represented in one sentence.

But what do I lose in the process of concise writing? I think I ignore opportunities to use more semicolons, hyphens, parentheses (which I use often in general writing but rarely in academic writing), dashes, ellipses and all of those gems of grammar. Aside from general hesitance of these things, I might also attribute their absence simply to preference; concise, accurate grammar and a clear message are valued goals that I shoot for in writing. Miles Davis lived by the concept that “less is more,” and I believe there is something to be said for clear, concise use of grammar as it applies to sentence structure. It certainly beats reading a sentence and having the sensation that you are running through a corn maze of grammar and syntax.

Question: I branched out of my shell in this blog! I used one of those ugly little semicolons, not because I wanted it to be an example, but because it actually made sense to me to use one as opposed to a period. Does this look like an appropriate use of the little bugger?

Beautiful Mistakes

When we were discussing “Dora” in our fishbowl discussion, I found myself reassured with the fact that teaching is a delicate process. A good teacher can encourage without putting acknowledgement of mistakes at the forefront. Dora’s teacher gave her the liberty of figuring out mistakes on her own, while encouraging her for the thing she was doing right. I think that this approach has applications to teaching high school as well, to a degree. Students can get scared off by writing if we shove too much at them at once before they have a chance to process it.

While I was thinking about grammar in my free time today (yes, I sometimes even think about English Ed while fishing) and realized that students of all age groups know more than they give themselves credit for. I knew the words, “running, eating, sleeping,” etc. before I knew that the “ing” form of these verbs were called gerunds. I knew “to be, to smile, to concentrate” before I knew that these forms were called infinitives. It just then occurred to me why grammar terminology shouldn’t be forced upon students all at once: they already know all of these words and how they fit into the English language. Students have been speaking them since they were four or five years old. They already have a working understanding of these concepts and when we as teachers come along and label the concepts with frighteningly large polysyllabic words, writing becomes a science, even though they thought they already understood the concept, breeding insecurity and self-doubt. Insecure students sacrifice receptiveness to learning and growing out of fear of making beautiful mistakes.

I don’t think that the educational and developmental aspects of writing are intended to be standardized, because everyone develops at a different rate. I was always the student that sought help from teachers if I didn’t understand something, but usually at the end of a tutoring session I still flat-out didn’t “get it.” So I put some more thought into the problem, whether it was math or whatever, and there came a certain point where understanding just snapped into my brain. It wasn’t in the classroom, it didn’t happen overnight, but through working at it and putting forth some real effort, students can learn on their own and that will stick with them for a long time.

Here’s a broad question that I’m working on wrapping my brain around: for high school students, how do we introduce grammar in a way that sticks with them and really sinks in?

From Abstract Ideas to Dissecting Grammar

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn as a future teacher, but the activities involving word classes last class period and in periods prior helped me dispel some apprehensions I have felt about grammar. It isn’t so much that grammar intimidated me, rather the idea of teaching it was scary. There is definitely a distinction between teaching in a way that promotes active learning instead of presenting students with a mountain of facts and saying, “here you go, learn this!” The technical nature of grammar is something that I believe students can only really pick up with self-motivated initiative aided by classroom projects or discussions.

A teacher can’t force-feed these concepts to students. The newspaper and magnet activities helped me understand that students can’t really absorb English grammatical jargon (and more importantly, understand how to apply it) unless they PRACTICE. Writing my own sentences and then labeling words and phrases was less daunting than looking at someone else’s work and doing the same because by looking at my own work I understood my own formation of sentence structure. Also, I become more conscious with holes and inconsistencies in my work. Going back to the first week of class, Barbara’s story about ending a sentence in a preposition caught me off guard because I didn’t know that there was something wrong with that outside of it feeling awkward. My point is that these concepts are abstract to me (and, I presume, many young grammar students) until I can get my hands around them and really start working with the concepts myself. Practice is much more valuable than just staring at definitions of terms and being able to rattle off what a preposition or a gerund or an adjective are. This kind of passive “knowing” is not enough. Most students, if they’re anything like me, can’t internalize abstract concepts until they apply them, as in the activities we have done in class. They really have to start adverbedly verbing some adjectivish nouns to pick grammar up. That’s part of the challenge for me as a future teacher: NOT teaching the four open word classes, but instead developing activities that will empower students to truly LEARN them in their own way.
Question: When I read things like the course pack handouts or the grammar textbook, I need to rethink what they say in my own way and actively find new ways to think about them to get the concepts to sink in. for example, I noted in the “linking verbs” section that linking verbs often rely on senses, such as “Mary feels…” or “the soup tastes..” Does anyone else have to think like this? Are there any quirky memory tools you’ve created?

Consistency, Parentheses and Cookie Monster

While working on the “House Style” portion of my scrapbook, it occurred to me how important consistency is in any form of writing. There are “grey areas” in defining correctness because there are multiple ways of writing the same thing. I could write possessive “Lukas” as “Lukas’s” or I could omit the last “s.” (I personally prefer the latter so as to keep the “ass” out of my name.) Both of these are stylistically correct and accepted. However, last week it occurred to me that if I don’t consistently use the same form when I’m indicating possession, my writing is more problematic on paper. The same applies for whether or not I drop the last comma preceding “and” when listing items. Aside from just being inconsistent, I would have a more self-assured personalized style of my own if I decide on these little quirks of writing. Having choices can be a liberating or scary thing, depending on how one approaches them. (As a completely unrelated side note, I had to revise those last three words; it had read, “how you approach them,” but I hate being accusatory in my writing just as much as I can’t stand reading writing in the second person, where people dictate my actions.)

Another thing I have gotten into my head in the past week is that with pronouns, and with other word classes, it is helpful to strip down a sentence and see if it still makes sense. I didn’t think about it much, but when “I” vs. “me” were pointed out on page 149 of Nitty Gritty Grammar, I realized that I may be using the wrong words at times. Is it, “Tracy and I ate the cookies,” or “Me and Tracy ate the cookies?” If I strip it down and get rid of Tracy (sorry, Tracy), The sentences become “I ate the cookies” and “me ate the cookies.” Now, unless I’m cookie monster (who I’ve been told *GASP* doesn’t even eat cookies anymore), stripping down the sentence makes it clear which form is grammatically correct, and I definitely see the value of using this meat-and-potatoes approach to sentence analysis when I am teaching in the future.

As another note on the subject of consistency, I find myself putting periods and apostrophes on different sides of parentheses depending on what I want to say. I made a conscious effort to be uniform in even this short blog and I ended up going inside the parenthesis on some and outside on others, with some parentheses enclosed in the previous sentence, and others standing alone. Evidently I still need to work on standardizing my use of parentheses considering their prevalence in my writing.

So, my question for the week is: is there a line between being consistent and taking grammatical issues (like the parenthesis issue) as case-by-case situations? I feel that each way I use parentheses reads a little differently for the most part, but does anyone see any problems with how I have (oh, so abundantly) used them in this blog?

Words are Funny Like That

From the time I first spoke to my first experiments with writing in my early years as a student, and finally to my present educational situation as a future teacher, linguistic aptitude and correctness have remained points of emphasis. As I continue to develop my skills as a student of the English language, I find myself intimidated by the daunting stack of grammatical gems I have yet to wrangle into submission. Words are funny like that. I have become so set in my own little stockpile of pre-established vocabulary and semantic usage that I am capable of glossing over or detouring around facets of grammar and syntax that I have less control over. But at what cost? I am missing out on opportunities to develop my voice as a writer and as a future educator. It is imperative to me that I allow my vocabulary to grow and evolve. Essentially, I am hindering my ability to branch out into new grammatical territory by clinging too tightly to the security blanket of familiarity. How else can I incorporate new vocabulary into my arsenal without first familiarizing myself with proper usage of these words?

With this being said, the most problematic grammatical pickles I find myself in usually spur from my attempts at using words and phrases that hide in more obscure corners of my vocabulary. These minor word usage issues could potentially result in me digging through a style guide or seeking examples online, but the sad reality is that I can usually get by with careful rewording and avoiding the problematic phrase. I feel that I should develop a greater professionalism about language, not having to stop and think whether “who” or “whom” belongs in a particular circumstance. I can often hear the difference and take a stab at the correct word choice, but when a student asks me which is correct, I want to be sure. Another thing I am inconsistent about is hyphenations. I often throw hyphens between a couple of words only to find out later that the words could have been left unattached, or even that it should have all been one word. I have semi-inadvertently provided an example in the following paragraph. In this case, I struggle with deciding what/which (another problematic word substitution I face) form reads more smoothly and is considered grammatically correct.

Still, the things that worry me the most as I wrap up my undergraduate education are those sneakily glaring, all-too-abundant errors that I make without even thinking. One that comes to mind is Barbara’s example from class about a student being criticized for ending a sentence in a preposition. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn’t pay close enough attention to “Schoolhouse Rock.” I don’t know all of my word classifications and categories well enough to label words and phrases with technical grammatical jargon. I feel it is an extremely important concept for me to master if I wish to be taken seriously as an English educator.

QUESTION: This is a minor thing I am inconsistent with: gray vs. grey. I know that one is British and one is standard American English, but I interchange them and so far I haven’t been slapped on the wrist with a yardstick. Is it accepted in academia to use either in America?