Always Remember: The Apostrophe and the Semi-Colon

Apostrophes, and semi-colons, as you already know these are the two patterns that I am going to be practicing in this blog this week. I want to take some of my writing that I have done for this class. Little blurbs of my writing that I want to incorporate these techniques into to make them stronger all around. These three patterns are all that I learned grammar classes when I was younger – obviously I try to use them as much as I can. The apostrophe is something that you can’t hide from. I think it is the easiest to remember, but with auto-correct on our phones and computers we never have to think about using the apostrophe. The other two patterns, long sentences and semi colons are a different story. We don’t use grammar when we text except for when our phone corrects us. So when we write papers then we don’t focus on challenging ourselves because we’ve always had every little apostrophe corrected for us, or a comma put in for us even if we don’t know if it’s right or not. So coming back from my rant… here is the blurb of writing that I am going to give you. I am going to show you the before and the after of the paragraph and show you what I changed in it:

The Before:

One thing that really stuck out to me while reading the article was when she states how her societal language classifies her. Intelligence, warmth, and kindness, aren’t enough and that you have to have good grammar – you need to also speak correctly. What I took out of this was that she was saying that even though you have all of these great personality traits you need to be able to speak well or else you wont (successfully) make it in life. Also, is it an indication on your cultural background? The way you are raised, and how you are brought up can affect the way you speak – good or bad. Do you agree that your cultural background can have an affect on the way you speak?

The After:

One thing that really stuck out to me while reading Christianson’s [showing possession] was when she states how her societal language classifies her. Intelligence, warmth, and kindness, aren’t enough and that you have to have good grammar – you need to also speak correctly. What I took out of this was that she was saying, even though you have all of these great personality traits you need to be able to speak well; having good grammar will essentially help you (successfully) make it in life. [Adding the semi-colon to connect both related sentences] Also, is this an indication on your cultural background? The way you are raised, and how you are brought up can affect the way you speak – good or bad. Do you agree that your cultural background can have an affect on the way you speak?

My first post…About grammar yay!

I am going to be honest I think I struggle in grammar. Now, obviously I know how to use punctuation and the basics correctly – but when it comes to anything other than a comma and period – I think I kind of start to freak out. When I am writing a paper I think that grammar (although important) is the last thing I am thinking about. I try to focus on the content of the paper rather than the grammar. When teachers give you and assignment to write a paper with certain requirements to focus on the student just tries to meet those requirements and then they are done. That is what it is like with most assignments. There are a couple things I want to get out of this class: one being, working on my grammar. Another thing that I want to work on is not only knowing where to use correct grammar but being able to apply is correctly to my papers, to make my sentence structures differ. By the use of the dash, parentheses, the colon, I can make my sentence structure different and more appealing to the reader.

I want to focus on dashes for a couple reasons. I think the dash can do something different than parentheses can. One way the dash can be used in replacing the parentheses is to add drama. That’s how I like to think about it – adding drama to a sentence that might seem bland. Now I am not sure I correctly used this but when looking at this paragraph the reader’s eyes are going to focus on the dash that’s in the middle of the paragraph. Which is why it adds drama because you can put in a dash in the middle of some generic sentences and the reader will then focus on the sentence that seems important to the writer.

Parentheses, I think these can be so useful in a paper. When you add in parentheses it is showing the reader that you have extra information to add but it is more of a whisper. This is how it compares to the dash. The dash is a loud talk and the parentheses are a whisper in adding information. I think that both of these can be beneficial to a paper. I like the way that they both are so helpful in adding in separate but relatable information without using a comma, or a period. The way you can change sentence structure can make a paper so much more interesting. When you use the parentheses or the dash it can be super helpful in relaying and argument and making an argument stronger.

Now, let me talk about the colon. I always need to remember that the sentence before the colon must be a complete sentence. Using it in a paper, it can be helpful when needing to list out different ideas that you are going to talk about: the way that the colon is used, how many times you can use it, etc. It can be so helpful when listing things out to keep you organized. I want to focus and practice this because I think that the colon will really help me keep organized in my paper.

Now I hope that I used grammar correctly in this blog post, but if not I am always told that mistakes mean growth. Thank you!!