Blog 6/7

*Note: This is not a full paper. This is a small portion.

The issue of identity, the fact of being who or what a person or thing is [APPOSITIVE], is a repeated theme in Shakespeare plays. Characters are constantly dealing with identity issues, whether it’s changing their identity for the protection, or concealing their true identity to get what they want. One such character is Viola from Twelfth Night. Viola is a young woman who has been recently shipwrecked and lost the last of her family, stranded in a foreign country where she knows no one [PAST PARTICIPLE]. Her decision to disguise herself and change her identity has significant repercussions for her actions and her decision-making. 

            Viola begins her journey as a woman, seemingly alone in the world, as she believes her only living relative, her brother [APPOSITIVE], has just drowned after the ship they were on wrecks. Alone in the world [NOUN ABSOLUTE], Viola asks which country the shipwrecked group has landed in and she learns they are in Illyria, a land ruled by a duke named Orsino (I.ii.1-27).  Orsino is in love with Olivia, a woman who has also recently lost her father and, more significantly for Viola, her brother (I.ii.36-41). It is natural that Viola would want to go and serve Olivia first, one because she is a woman, and two because they share a common bond in their sorrow. However, she shortly learns that serving Olivia will be impossible because “she will admit no kind of suit” (I.ii.45). Viola decides then that she will dress as a eunuch and be presented to Orsino as a singer (I.ii.47-61). Her decision to change her identity from a woman to a man is significant. This switch from man to woman can seem unwarranted, though history and the text offer a reason. When explaining Olivia’s situation, the captain says that her father died a year ago, leaving her “in the protection of his son, her brother” (I.ii.36-38). It seems, at least in Illyria, that women are under the protection of men and not allowed to live on their own. Even Olivia, who is more than capable of supporting herself, has to have her cousin, Sir Toby, come and live with her. Viola has no man to protect or watch over her, and, while in Illyria [APPOSITIVE], disguising herself as a man appears to be her best option. As a woman, Viola could have gone to Olivia and offered herself as a lady-in-waiting, but because Olivia is not accepting visitors, Viola’s next option is Orsino, whom she cannot serve as a woman. Her other intention is to secure for herself a “psychic holiday” (Huston 285). Viola has been through quite a bit of emotional trauma and in a society that would require her to either have the protection of a patriarchal figure or get married, the disguise of a man would give her time to recuperate mentally. The decision to take on a male identity also frees Viola to do and say things that a woman could not.

Super Short Blog

Can I just start by saying that I loved Dora? I also really enjoyed hearing about the ways my classmates learned to read and write. It’s interesting to see how many similarities and differences there are between schools across the state of Washington, and other states, too.

            Something I wish we’d talked about more on Thursday was how to best help our students through learning new concepts. While self-discovery is great, how do we best resist the urge to mark up their papers and just give them the answers? Dora’s teacher seemed to have endless patience and knew just the right way to help her get to where she needed to go without stifling her learning process. I guess I’m just concerned that I won’t know how to act with my students and will make a huge mess of everything if I’m not amazing like Dora’s teacher right off the bat.

So, what is (in your opinion) the best way to help a student understand where they’re going wrong with their punctuation?

Conjuction Junction

Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?

I’ve had that song stuck in my head since Thursday. I was walking through the mall with my mother and I started singing Conjunction Junction when I realized I only knew the first part of the song. I can’t seem to get past “what’s your function?”. This poses a possible problem because about halfway through the song they list the conjunctions.

            This week we learned my new favorite acronym: FANBOYS. FANBOYS is a way to remember the seven coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. These coordinating conjunctions are used to combine two sentences with a comma. For example, I could say “She moaned, and he shuddered.” “She moaned” is a complete sentence, and so is “he shuddered”; HOWEVER, together they make a compound sentence when combined with “,and”.

            I also learned this week an easier way to tell if I’m committing the grammatical sin of the dreaded comma splice. In class we got the extremely simple example of two complete sentences separated only by a comma. I wish one of my teachers had broken down the comma splice like this for me before instead of just writing “comma splice” on my papers.

I’m still very shaky on my semi-colon usage, so my question for the week is: Did I use my semi-colon correctly?

What I've Learned So Far 2.0

This was an interesting week for my grammar education. As a class, we have officially dived in to more of the nitty gritty grammar—the meat and potatoes, if you will—and, for me, unfamiliar territory.

            As I’ve said before, I did not get the best grammar education growing up. The grammar education I did get was punctuation. So this week talking about subjects, direct objects and the like had me attempting to reach back to things I may or may not have learned in the fourth grade. For the most part I understood what was going on. However, every now and then we’d begin to parse a sentence and I’d get it wrong. I think I understand now why student errors go up right after a new topic is introduced. Even if you think you understand what is going on, there are always little exceptions to a rule, or a confusing case where it is not obvious which answer is correct.

            Another interesting thing I learned this week were the proper names for the personal pronouns. Subjective case? Objective case? I had no idea personal pronouns fit in to any concrete categories. AND I LEARNED THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF NOUNS (ABSTRACT, CONCRETE, COUNT, NONCOUNT, COLLECTIVE, PROPER, COMMON). Oh, the fun things I’m learning!

Does any one have a magical solution to parsing sentences? Is there an easy way for me to instantly recognize a subject, verb, direct object?

What I've Learned So Far...

As a class, we haven’t gone over a lot in the way of punctuation and grammar. This is perfectly normal since we’ve only met four times and one of those days was Syllabus Day. What we have gone over so far in this class, apostrophes, I’ve found extremely interesting and helpful.

            Before this class, I knew how to use my apostrophes, or so I thought. It’s not that my use of apostrophes has been wrong; I just never thought about the massive amounts of gray area I had been ignoring all these years. NUMBERS, LETTERS, ACRONYMS?  Was there really more than one way to punctuate a variety of things and I had never known? Or had I unwittingly been switching back and forth, fluttering around the gray area like a confused punctuation moth drawn to the flame of the apostrophe?

            Another thing I’ve learned in this class so far was the ‘Jones’’ and the ‘Joneses’. My last name ends in an e, so this has never been a problem for my mother when doing the return address for the Christmas cards. ‘The Moore Family’ is extremely easy to tell where you put an apostrophe and where you don’t. But those silly Joneses are an entirely different matter. Now, here’s my question for the perpetually forgetful: would there ever be a time where I would use Joneses’ ?  I’m just avidly curious about this because one of my roommates asked I wasn’t sure what to tell him. So, I said I’d ask my class and get back to him.

Self-Assessment

I’ve always loved to write. As a small child, I would try and imitate my mother as she wrote a grocery list or a note. When I got older, I would write stories about the things I imagined or the world I saw around me. My teachers always encouraged my writing, but never did much in the way of fixing my punctuation and grammar. I cannot remember ever diagramming a sentence or learning grammatical terms like ‘preposition’. To this day, I don’t think I could tell you what a preposition is.

The eighth grade is the first time I can remember really getting any sort of solid grammar and punctuation instruction. Our English teacher, Mrs. Preble, had us write autobiographies as our first writing assignment, and used those pieces as a diagnostic tool to decide if the class needed a lot or a little when it came to grammatical instruction. My class apparently needed a lot. It was in Mrs. Preble’s class where I learned almost all of what I know about punctuation. She was the one who taught me what an appositive is (one of the few terms I know).

When I began Running Start, I noticed a trend in the grading of my English 101 papers: comma splices. My instructor would scribble all over my paper about comma splices, without ever telling me what they were or how to fix it. By the end of that class, I was almost too afraid to even use a comma, fearing that a gratuitous use would result in red ink.

So what does all of this introductory jibber mean? Well, dear friend, it means that there have been a lot of holes in my grammatical instruction. Through a lot of reading as a child and Mrs. Preble’s instruction, I have a fairly good grasp on where my punctuation is supposed to go. However, the rest of my syntax may possibly be lacking. I don’t know, because I’ve never been told. My rule of thumb for comma placement was always “put a comma where you pause”. When I’m thinking, I pause a lot. When I’m listening to myself talk in my head as I write, I pause a lot. I’m no longer sure if the “pause” is a good rule to follow with comma placement.

I have zero idea on what to actually do with a semi-colon. I use them sparingly and with extreme caution. I avoid semi-colons the way some people avoid black cats or speeding cars while in the crosswalk.

One of my worst habits is speaking in passive voice. While my words have become more active (unlike me), I still find myself falling into the passive trap, almost in an effort to sound “more academic”. I have a tendency to fall into one of two camps: colloquial or passive. Where is this coveted middle ground? How can I find the promised land?

Overall, I would really love to great a better grasp on punctuation and grammar. My current grasp has been good enough to avoid major red ink on my papers, but I feel that it could be much better than it is. Commas are wonderful, but what about a dash? A semi-colon? A colon? I feel like I’m missing out on this great, wide world of wonderfulness because I’m too afraid to take a chance and be wrong. I want to be able to play with my sentence structure and create new things and find new ways of expressing myself through semantics.

Oh, and I want to be able to annoy my friends even more than I already do by correcting their punctuation, spelling, and grammar.