I have to say that between my regular blog posts and my digital rules project, I have gotten so darn sick of grammar. But kind of in a good way.
I still take pride in my own grammar and spelling and I’m still very excited about trying to impart my love for grammar on my future students and I’m really enjoying learning how to do that in all my different English ed. classes. But I’m so sick of always being on the lookout for mistakes or oddities in other people’s speech and writing. I know that we weren’t required to talk only about the errors we see in everyday print, but those are the things that were most noticeable for me, I guess, and the easiest to write about. But remaining so sensitive to that stuff all the time has helped me realize that it’s really exhausting. And pointless. And really superficial.
That’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned from doing all of this, is how much we miss out on when we’re constantly looking for errors, and the overriding importance of message as opposed to technicality. I think the editor we Skyped with the other day put it wonderfully: I’d much rather read or hear an interesting piece that’s full of errors than a technically perfect bore.
I’m tired of picking apart people’s grammar because, honestly, I just don’t care anymore, if I ever did. But what I’ve really seen because of this special hypersensitive attention paid to the matter is the huge effect that grammar and writing conventions can have on a piece and how much a writer can change his or her message depending on something as simple and punctuation. It’s really fascinating really, and a lesson that I hope to pass on to my students so that those principles can become part of their everyday writing habits from the earliest ages. I want them to have access to all the tools they have available to them to help them learn and perform and contribute to the world in the best ways that they can, and one of those very important tools is grammar.
Now, doesn’t this look like a gentleman who’s going places in life?
. . . Upstate, mostly.
To my very unfortunate friend up there, I hate to break it to you, but you look like an absolute fool. Your tattoo, if you care (and you don’t really strike me as the type who would), is gramatically incorrect, exposing you as a moron–not because you’ve confused “your” and “you’re,” but because you didn’t think it might be wise to consult a dictionary or a style manual or a second-grader before permenantly branding yourself with this seal of stupidity.
Your denotes posession, meaning you can replace it with words like my, his, and her. Do it, and you’ll see that clearly “your next” is incorrect. My next. My next what?
What this guy was looking for was you’re, the contraction for you are. You are next. I am next. He/she/it is next.
http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/youre_your.htm
And what’s worse is that his tattoo artist didn’t see anything wrong with it either.
I had a professor at the community college I attended before Fred who said that she could always tell which students were from Niagara Falls as opposed to other parts of the county because they were the worst offenders when it came to the seen/saw debacle.
I’m from the Falls and, while I do, I have definitely noticed that way too many people don’t know when to use saw versus seen (replacing saw withseen more often than the reverse, I think) and it’s always driven me crazy. I never thought of it as a geographical thing though. I always just kind of thought it was a universal problem. I don’t even know that I’ve noticed a huge drop-off in the issue since I moved out to Fredonia, but I suppose it is a bit better. But maybe that’s because, obviously, when you never leave a college campus most of the people you meet are going to be pretty well-educated.
I figured I’d pose the question to you guys. I know you’re not all from the exact area I am but you do all live in Western New York and I was wondering if you’ve ever noticed that same trend, especially those of you who are maybe a little hypersensitive gramatically. Or any other trends like it even. Obviously there are huge differences between southern and northern dialects, but I’m talking about the subtlties within a fairly small region. Any thoughts?
More from Becoming Naomi León by Pam Muñoz Ryan . . .
” ‘Ms. Dominguez in case you don’t know, Blanca, is our principal.’ ”
It seems to me that “in case you didn’t know” is, in this case, a parenthetical phrase, and should therefore be set apart from the sentence by either parentheses or a comma–more likely a comma in this case because it seems a little more natural for dialogue and less stilted. Ryan used commas properly surrounding Blanca’s name but seems to have left out the very important parenthetical set that would make this sentence correct.
http://www.uhv.edu/ac/newsletters/writing/grammartip2006.08.29.htm
I just finished readingBecoming Naomi Leónby Pam Muñoz Ryan. Great book. But there were some things I noticed that were a little weird grammatically. I’ll post a few entries about this novel.
Firstly, many times trhoughout the novel she used adjectives when adverbs would clearly be the conventional option.
Some examples include:
“He had increased his tape usage considerable.”
“Skyla rested peaceful on the foldout.”
“Besides, you must both be natural curious about your mother.”
Adverbs are used to describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Adjectives describe nouns. The first two examples use adejectives to describe verbs (considerable describing increased, and peaceful describing rested), and in the third the adjective natural describes the adjective curious.
In order for these sentences grammatically “correct,” they might say:
“He had increased his tape usage considerably.”
“Skyla rested peacefully on the foldout.”
“Besides, you must both be naturally curious about your mother.”
Because this “mistake” is repeated so many times throughout the book, I think it’s safe to say that it is clearly a stylistic choice of the author for this piece in particular. Having read other novels by Ryan and never noticing this trend before tells me that she, for some reason, felt that it added some new element to this story. Perhaps she felt that it was more natural because the narrator of the novel is a young girl of about ten who may not have thought it important to follow this particular convention. Who knows?
I saw this at the mall, in the shoe department of some store.
mens. And right next to it was the womens section.
My first reaction was that this is wrong and it should say “Men’s.” Because the shoes belong to men. They are made for men. They are men’s shoes. A plural noun that doesn’t end in s gets a nice ‘s on the end when it becomes possessive. Here’s a pretty comprehensive look at the whole thing.
One man.
Two men.
That is the man’s shoe.
Those are the men’s shoes.
But then I thought there might be some exception made in this case because it’s like the name of the department and it seems that, actually, “mens” is accetable after all. At least that’s what I gather from that little “Also, mens” at the bottom of the page.
I found this book in a bargain bin last summer and I thought it was just so cute.
As you can probably tell, it goes through a variety of sentences whose meanings are changed depending on the placement of an apostophe. Some of them are really pretty funny. Or at least I think so, but I’m like twelve years old. You can take a look inside here.
Like the cover says, there’s another book from the same author called Eats, Shoots & Leaves that follows the same idea with commas, but I haven’t read that one yet.
Can I also take a second to draw your attention to the caption. I love it. Not “Why you can’t manage without apostrophes,” an explanation of why. But a statement, an exclamation: “Why, you can’t manage without apostrophes!” Look how much the comma changed that sentence. I love the throwback to the subtle reference to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
While researching for a paper on social media’s effect on writing and grammar I took special notice of the way that my friends were talking on Facebook. I found that we make a lot of style choices as writers even online that show an understood set of rules, sort of like we discussed in the beginning of the semester when we talked about alternative dialects.
Here’s one of the examples I saved that I found especially interesting.
There are a ton of errors here. I shouldn’t call them errors, though, because most of them were made intentionally, and many really help to convey meaning. I could go through and analyze each one of these one-by-one for you, but that would be boring so I’ll just pick a couple I like.
First of all, despite all the errors, it’s still really easy to follow this conversation, and no meaning is lost. Everyone understands each other and it all makes sense as far as content, so we’ve already accomplished what’s most important—conveying meaning.
Here, she leaves out a couple of ending punctuations and actually puts a smiley face instead, which obviously can’t be used in academic writing, but I wanted to use this as an example of how she makes her individual voice heard. Any other forms of punctuation would give the sentence a completely different feeling, and she knows that, and obviously has chosen this method on purpose. While her specific choice wouldn’t be acceptable academically or professionally, thinking of alternative ways to express ideas through punctuation or lack thereof is a good skill to develop as a writer.
Everything about this one is wrong. “No” isn’t spelled with three Os, and this punctuation is just crazy, but it has a completely different meaning from any other way you might write this sentence.
Here, read this: No.
What does that mean to you?
Now read this: Nooo…?
What does that mean? Something completely different. The first one would have ended the conversation, but because she chose the second one, the other person went on to explain herself.
These are just a couple of examples from part of one short conversation, but when you start looking at this stuff critically it’s really interesting. I think it definitely shows that social media can be a very valuable tool for teachers in assessing their students’ needs and helping them practice good habits.
Plain and simple–items in a list of three or more need to be separated by commas. Here there should be one between mules and a.
“Just two mules, a wagon, and an entertaining guide.”
Also, I know it’s a fragment, but that’s obvious style choice, so I’m not gunna pick on that, even though it is technically incorrect.
Rachael's Grammar Blog 