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?
Firstly, I would like to point out that I really liked your opening paragraph and the insight that you gave about your thoughts on how autocorrect is ruining people's grammar.
ReplyDeleteNow, on to the assignment at hand. With the apostrophe, the pattern that Mrs. Buyserie wanted us to practice was replacing a letter with an apostrophe to show home language such as, strikin' instead of striking. In that regard, you did not follow the pattern that was given, yet you did successfully incorporate the apostrophe pattern that is used to show possession. With the semi-colon pattern, you did a great job at fusing that into your "after paragraph" in my opinion. The reason I feel that you did it correctly was that you began with a sentence talking about how one needs to be able to speak well and than you followed it up with a sentence about having good grammar will help you be successful in life. These two sentences are definitely closely related (speaking well & grammar).
A place where I believe you could add an apostrophe to add home language is with the word "saying" in your one highlighted sentenced. Replace the "g" with an apostrophe to make it "sayin'."
Cool! thanks for the awesome feedback Ryan!
ReplyDeleteHi Christine and Ryan,
ReplyDeleteGood job talking about how to use apostrohpes to show home language. I wanted to respond to emphasize that home language (and academic language) doesn't make sense in all contexts. Here Christine did a nice job of arguing the importance of using academic language--so using "sayin'" might not make sense in this context (particularly if Christine wouldn't consider it her home language). However, if Christine were aruging the importance of being able to use home language in an academic context, then using "sayin'" would be appropriate for the context.
Just sayin'. ;)