Practical Application: Revising to Use Appositives, Participle Phrases, and Adjectives out of Order

I revised the intro to an essay for WSt 484. And I even noticed I have a few accidental appositives! I didn't use those, though. Hopefully I got the adjectives out of order correct. For some reason, I think I'm having the most trouble with that sentence structure.

Which Side Are You On?

Queer Subtext in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”

According to Eve Sedgwick, a leading theorist in gender studies, [APPOSITIVE] queer is defined as an “open mesh of possibilities” (“Queer and Now” 8). Similarly, in his book, Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, Steven Seidman groups homosexuals together with “’loose women,’ ‘the delinquent,’ and ‘the sex offender’” as the denizens of the closet--the social classes that threaten the institutions of repronormativity and heteronormativity (25). In this essay, I will take these ideas to heart while considering Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row,” which recounts the goings on of the neighborhood of the same name. In this enclave, activities that would normally be frowned upon in common society are flaunted—carnivals are held, there are battles, people are having sex—and in the end, it’s all just a part of life, albeit a life that agents of the institution within mainstream culture continually work against.

Leading lives that challenge each character's historic personality, [PRESENT PARTICIPLE PHRASE] the diverse population of characters on Desolation Row illustrates Sedgwick’s idea of the possible: Cinderella, the Good Samaritan, Einstein, Cain, Abel, Casanova, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound are jumbled together [APPOSITIVE]. Varied, collected, [ADJECTIVES OUT OF ORDER] the peculiarities which pulled them or drove them there aren’t punished the way they would be were these characters located in mainstream society—just across the street. 

Here, things that would ordinarily be criminalized (namely sexuality, as well as general mischief) [APPOSITIVE] are commonplace. Desolation Row can be read perversely as a metaphor for queer culture as well as the closet—a place where a collective of characters comes together to form an underworld that resists society’s laws and norms.

The first verse of the song introduces the listener to the general flavor of the town: “Here comes the blind commissioner/ They’ve got him in a trance/ One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker/ The other is in his pants” (Dylan lines 5-8). On Desolation Row, the agents of the institution (the commissioner, and, elsewhere in the verse, sailors and the riot squad) are free to do things they wouldn’t be able to outside of Desolation Row. Romeo—a symbol of heteronormativity— [APPOSITIVE] is rejected and punished while on Desolation Row for verbalizing the anti-feminist idea that Cinderella “belongs” to him (Dylan line 18). Cinderella, queered in the song "Desolation Row," [PAST PARTICIPLE PHRASE] is also a traditional symbol of the heteronormative culture; instead of hiding away by the fireplace like she does in the fairy tale, she stands “Bette Davis style,” smiling and easy in her own way, sweeping up “after the ambulances go” (Dylan lines 16, 22-24). Presumably, Romeo stayed to fight after being told to leave Desolation Row, which resulted in him being injured enough to require an ambulance. This introduces the idea that queer culture has its own etiquette, which might be different from that of the mainstream ideology. Furthermore, the queer movement is geared up for a fight.

[...]
                   

WORKS CITED

Dylan, Bob. “Desolation Row.” Highway 61, Revisited. Columbia, 1965.

Sedgwick, Eve. “Queer and Now.” Course Pack, WSt 484. Pages 78-85. Pullman: Shahani, 2010.

Seidman, Steven. Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Blog 4 - Sentences and FANBOYS and other stuff...

I’ll be honest, this week’s lesson wasn’t as enlightening as the past few weeks. I’m pretty sure I had the concept of complex and simple sentences down already. However, building on last week’s lesson on linking verbs helped me nail that down, and I finally learned the definition of a comma splice! I’ve never been told by a teacher that I have a problem with comma splicing, but I hear about it at least once a semester from my peers, mentioning their own problems. BUT NOBODY EVER EXPLAINED COMMA SPLICING TO ME; THEY JUST MENTION IT IN PASSING. Now I know!



I liked working with the magnetic poetry kits to form sentences, although it was tricky. My partner and I first tried working with the “cliche” set, which meant that rather than having only words, we were given small phrases to utilize; this was a very hard way to create sentences to parse. Given the way other people’s sentences turned out, I’d venture to guess that the other kits were the same way. I wouldn’t have thought to use the magnetic poetry kits to this end, although in high school we did use a variation of the concept for a creative unit.



As far as objects go, my most enriching lesson came outside the classroom for that one. Thinking about it, though, I think that might have been because we really only breezed over the idea of direct and indirect objects. Maybe we’ll go over them in more depth later on in the semester.



But OH MY GOSH do I love semi-colons. Really, I do. It is probably my favorite variety of punctuation mark, if only because in high school (and even my first year or two of college), we were taught to avoid the semi-colon at all costs. Pfft. Even Vonnegut... but whatever (and as the linked blog states, it may or may not be a joke). Scare tactics did, in fact, turn most of my peers against the semi-colon, but it also made me love it to the point of really wanting to make other people love it as well. Maybe it's a good thing. Dunno.



Anyway. The point of this blog is to say that I really liked this week’s exercises, but I’m afraid I didn’t learn a whole lot more than I already know.


Questions: Am I missing anything in my own writing that you can see? 
What is your stance on the topic of semi-colons?

Week 3: Sentences, etc.

This week, I feel as if the concepts we have been learning in class finally connected to real life. I guess all the things we've been discussing have, but this week it seemed particularly obnoxious (in a good way). During the grammar/income exercise on the first day, I took notes on the difference between "lay" and "lie," because that's one thing I never understood. I always relied upon the “People lie, things lay” rule, but I took that to mean, literally, you can only use “lie” when it applies to humans. Dumb.

But anyway, this past week I was writing something where I had to use "lay" because "recline" wouldn't work. From my notes, I knew that the correct sentence structure would be, “I lay in bed," (context implies that it’s past tense) but I didn't understand why until the class period during which we discussed sentence patterns. Brushing up on transitive and intransitive verbs--something I’m now pretty sure that I never learned in the first place--made it clear that you can only use “lie” without an object, and “lay” requires an object. I’m still a little hazy, though. The model I wrote down on the first day was this:

I lie in my bed.

Last night, I lay in my bed.

I have lain in my bed.

I lay the pencil down.

I laid it down.

I have laid the pencil down.

So is “lay” not only a transitive verb, but also just the past tense form of “lie”? I guess that makes sense, now that I think about it. Still, I’m not sure if I’m just inventing rules to fit with what I see or not.

Another thing I’ve learned is that you really can’t use the reflexive case without the subjective. I was taught that in tenth grade, but then when I took English 101, the professor went on this strange tirade about how it wasn’t only improper but completely redundant; you yourself do not need to use the reflexive to add emphasis, because the subjective itself tells you what the subject is. Dunno. I sometimes like to do it anyway, just to spite her (probably one of the worst learning experiences I’ve had, to date). But was she right? Is this something else that is trending out?

AND I REALLY LIKED PARSING SENTENCES, TOO. I diagrammed sentences once, in one grammar class, but this was infinitely simpler. Doing (sometimes complex) real-world examples also helped. It seems like teacher-generated examples are kind of hit or miss. It’s easy to create sentences that go right by the book, but looking for S-V-O sentences in a newspaper gave us the chance to identify tricky sentences, and not just the basic ones (which are good for an introduction, but if we hadn’t done the newspaper exercise, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t understand sentence structure as well as I do now).

Questions:
1. Do I have this lay/lie thing straight? If not, what am I missing?
2. How do you feel about reflexive pronouns? Was my professor right, or just picky?

Week 2: Apostrophes

But if "you" don't actually "exist," who's to know about the bucket?

Although we’re only at the end of the second week of term, I feel like I’m already getting a better handle on grammar and punctuation. I always felt I was pretty good with punctuation, especially apostrophes, but now I feel as if I can already explain their usage and rules better, and certain rules that nobody really explained to me before were cleared up.

For example, I always used to have the tendency to write:

“Grammar” is spelled with two “a”s.

... rather than just writing a-apostrophe-s and forgoing the quotation marks around a. I also never learned the “Socrates’” rule for indicating possession, although that may be more because it’s no longer as popular as just putting an apostrophe after any noun ending in -s.

I’m not sure I would have ever thought to teach someone the difference between “its” and “it’s” the way that Barbara explained with her anecdote. For people who understand grammar, or who use it correctly enough to not have too many problems, explaining grammar’s in’s and out’s seems like it could be tricky. This is something I want to remember during this class (and beyond). How to teach grammar in language that people who understand grammar less than I do can grasp onto. It seems like a no-brainer, but it’s something that could easily be forgotten, as a teacher.

(Something else I learned: you pluralize words by italicizing them and adding an apostrophe+s. I never knew it had to be italicized.)

I loved the “Exercises in Rhetorical Punctuation” handout we worked with. The Eats, Shoots, and Leaves example was used in my seventh grade grammar class that I mentioned in the last post. Another of my favorite examples for how commas work is this:

I might have laughed for a minute straight when I saw that the first time. It’s interesting how a single comma can change the meaning and attribution of a sentence.

I guess one thing that still confuses me is the difference between letters in all-caps and letters in lowercase. Something I was taught (not by a teacher, which is why I suspect its correctness) is that for acronyms written in all-caps, you don’t need periods between the letters, but if they are all lowercase, you do. So you would write either “ATM” or “a.t.m.” but not “A.T.M.” Does anybody know if this is correct? I think that most people just write things in all-caps, but what do you think?

As for the pattern of the week, I offer this: THE WIND IS BLOWING, SHRIEKING, WHISPERING.

Self-Reflection

As a writer, I’m not entirely sure what my greatest grammatical fault is. It could be that I don’t know enough about grammar to really identify my biggest problems by name; or maybe I’m just average enough in the messing-grammar-up category to fly under the radar of most of my professors. So while I’ll have the rest of the semester to fully examine my weaknesses with a technical eye, for now I’ll focus on one thing I’m sure I need to develop: the use of active voice rather than passive.

My first introduction to the concept of active and passive voice occurred in seventh grade, the same point in time I learned that “grammar” is spelled with two a’s. As far as the lesson went, I remember only that my my teacher said, “Avoid passive voice in your research papers,” and proceeded to mark my drafts with check marks every place I used “was,” “were,” or “had.” She lowered our final grades by a point for each time passive voice was used. I think I got my first C on that paper.

(This learning experience is reminiscent of my very first exposure to the concept of grammar, in second grade, when my teacher asked the class to list the parts of speech. Someone said, eagerly, “Noun!” and so then she asked us what a noun was. I was completely lost for this whole exercise. I’d never heard of a noun, and I didn’t know there was a whole type of word to account for something that was a person-place-or-thing. Fortunately, I finally nailed down the noun thing; unfortunately, I still struggle with active voice.)

I’m sure I can pick out and fix the passive voice in the previous paragraphs, due to the helping verb rule. But I’m not sure if passive voice is simply when a verb is in the past tense, or if it’s a special kind of past tense, or why it even matters--other than to make your writing not “drag” (English 101 at the community college I attended before WSU taught me this).

Furthermore, in what cases does it make a difference? Is active voice always applicable to the situation? Taking the following sentence:

“I’d never heard of a noun, and I didn’t know there was a whole type of word to account for something that was a person-place-or-thing.”

... How would I even make this into active voice? Is it already? This is the dark side of grammar, I’m sure of it. I get so caught up in trying to remember vague rules obscured by time and suspect encoding that I wind up convincing myself that it either doesn’t matter, or I make up some rule to account for why the above sentence would be active. So I just tend to avoid thinking about the whole mess. And people have stopped marking me down, so I just don’t worry about it anymore. Maybe this semester will fix me, once and for all.