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?
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?
thank you for the link to the blog citing Vonnegut's hatred of the semicolon.
ReplyDeleteAs for indirect/direct objects:
see MORE NITTY GRITTY GRAMMAR, pp. 122-123, for more detail.
We don't spend any time on them because there are no common errors associated with them. Even native speakers use them just fine.
oh, BTW: have you always been in love with semi-colons? I didn't know if this was a new thing or not.
ReplyDelete