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These rules of grammar & spelling, where do they come from? Is there a panel of experts ruling on these things, well we know there isn't.
So they're not really rules, they're conventions, that can & will change over time. All very democratic in fact.
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Posted: |
Aug 5, 2014 - 11:44 AM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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I’ve learned a lot from this topic. Posters are so insightful. (What I’ve totally ingrained is never to mess with Tall Guy or edwzoomom. )
I am glad to see that Strunk and White did not scare everyone. I’ve also noticed that they have not posted anything about film scores. Hmmmmmm.
Going back to our topic, I don’t see schools advocating the diagraming of sentences anymore. Some research did not support that diagraming helped students learn parts of speech or written fluency. The challenge that remains for teachers is to convince students that grammar and ancillary topics like spelling and punctuation are relevant to their lives. That is a tough challenge.
I used to talk to my students about career mobility. At my first job when I was in high school, I could wear jeans and T shirts. I didn’t have to write or interact with the public. Grammar didn’t seem to matter. Later, as I chose a career path, correct grammar and writing became necessary skills. As I had mentioned previously, my husband’s wonderful parents were not educated, so he learned poor speaking patterns. He put himself through college and embarked upon a banking career. He needed to write well and speak correctly, so those grammar and writing lessons became essential to him. With these stories, I could convince some students that grammar and writing skills might make a difference in their lives.
Students can say the “darndest” things. One student told me that he knew saying, “Me and him are going down town,” was incorrect and that he should say, “He and I are going down town.” He proceeded to tell me that he and his friend still made it to town even if the pronouns were incorrect. Such insight.
Another time, I tried to tell students that learning parts of speech would help them correctly use new vocabulary words. I listed a group of new vocabulary words from a story we had read and asked my students to use these words in an original sentence. Two of the words were “sadistic” and “sadism.” (I wonder if we were reading Poe or Stephen King.) One student wrote, “The sadistic whapped the little old lady over the head so he could steal her social security check.” I had to laugh at that sentence. I never knew that adjectives could whap people.
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I cannot find The New Yorker cartoon to post here, so I'll just describe it:
Little girl coming home from School and she complains to her Mom that she lost in the spelling-bee at school that day. Mom:'What happened honey?' Girl: 'I spelled 'Gangsta' wrong!
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Posted: |
Aug 5, 2014 - 3:58 PM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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Oops TG. I'll add this realizing that you will still love me. Even with a semi colon, the word "however" will still be a conjunction call a conjunctive adverb. We have many conjunctive adverbs. See examples:
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/conjunctiveadverb.htm
In the great scheme of life, who really cares?
I've just seen this comment!
You ask 'who really cares'? Unfortunately for me, I still care about such things. Having noted your most recent comment, Joan, about studies showing that parsing/analyzing sentences is a zero sum game (and I take the point, since kids need to READ regularly to put this into practice), those early exercises taught me invaluable lessons about writing. A university lecturer once said to me "your writing is a model of clarity, but it reveals your age". I thought about it and, yes, he was correct. I was at university with students 20 years younger and their writing was radically different; as our lecturer said, 'the language changes from the bottom up, unfortunately".
I still enjoy the lapidary art of writing and I particularly admire those for whom sprezzatura is a golden talent, God-given and never to be assumed or even learned by other mere mortals!!!!
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i saw that. I thought it was a sloppy pasta dish at my local italian!
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