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.