Grammar Bitch History

[azurelunatic]

The thing with me and grammar/proper usage is that I was raised that way. FatherSir went out of his way to speak correctly around swallowtayle and me, and insisted that others do so as well. Until I was perhaps four or five, he attempted to ban the word "Yeah" in the household, and insisted on "Yes" instead.

I was not raised knowing the names of the grammatical rules that I was following, but I followed them. In school, we were not taught the names of the rules that I remember, and in any case, I didn't feel that I needed to know the names of the rules that I already knew. My elementary school had many grammar lessons in the form of "Find what is wrong with this sentence." I aced it, and must have resembled Hermione Granger with the hand-waggling and "Oooh, pick me!"

I aced the ITBS grammar sections at 99th percentile or similar in fourth through sixth grade, and came out of the SATs with a respectable 640 (I think -- I got a 1070 all told, and I was lower in maths, with a 430 IIRC) in the seventh grade. (And this was when the SAT scores were not readjusted to account for the lower scores that students had been pulling. My ex's ex-stepdad had come out of the SATs in high school and felt he had done well with a lower score than I had gotten five years younger and felt I hadn't performed up to specs.)

There was nothing new taught of grammar in high school. We were never given the names of the rules. We were expected to already know this stuff, and when we didn't, we were given a quick "Don't do it like this, you idiots!" summary before charging on to the formulation of an essay, how to write an argument and support it, how to research, and how to understand literature.

I think it sad that my college teachers in English 101 had to spend two weeks re-inventing the wheel at the beginning of the term, covering the grammatical concepts that I'd mastered by the 7th grade.

I don't know the names of the rules, and I couldn't tell you what subjective or objective case is, much less diagram the parts of a sentence any more. (We did learn, in the third grade, about the parts of a sentence, but most of those have left my brain because I didn't find them important enough to hang on to when I already knew most of what was going on without the labels on the anatomy.) But when some of the rules are violated, my eyes bleed, and then I take that out on the rest of the class.

Comments

You have my sympathies but...

[hasfartogo.livejournal.com]

... try learning another language's grammar rules before you know your own. I went to French School, not French Immersion, French Catholic Schools in rural Quebec. So I learned French grammar before I knew English grammar. I never really read English books till I was in grade 5. The kicker is, my mom is an English teacher. All she did was read to us when we were young, and then encouraged us to read on our own. And she coorected our grammar every chance she could.

I am currently learning English grammar as I volunteer in a public school. I am being re-educated and reliving my childhood. And it is fun, most days.

Ooo, fun with rules!

[azurelunatic]

Playing with rules is fun. I can construct Yoda-speak very well, though I'd have a time explaining why I do it that way.

Once, when my girlfriend and I were being silly together, we started phrasing things in English in ways that might be grammatically correct for other languages. We made up the very silly rule that while in English, when speaking of yourself and another party, you put the other party first for the sake of politeness, that in this convention, you would put the most sentient/intelligent party first, though that might be governed by the rules of politeness. Also, the most sentient party should be the object of the sentence.

So, with those rules, "Shawn and I" (where "Shawn" is "That Idiot Shawn" from high school) would not be grammatically correct, though it would be grammatically correct if one were being polite, and "the toaster and Shawn" would be incredibly rude, if correct.

[nalidoll.livejournal.com]

i was one of those who learned to diagram sentences at a young age, and then by time i was in high school they had stopped teaching it. i still do it, in my head, in moments of boredom or stress or what-have-you.

my *usage* is often less-than-precise, but this is mostly because i write verbally. punctuation is not there for grammar reasons, generally.. it is there as inflection cues. this is what happens when you have a dual theatre/english major.

my frustration was at its worst in foreign language classes. in my case, this was mostly german. my teacher had to teach others the rules for english grammar to most of the class, so that they could understand the different cases and tenses that were used. german adds one to the usual list, which made it even more "fun" to explain.
my teacher allowed me alot of leeway in letting my attention drift to other activities while he reviewed. he would actually apologize to me at the end of another class wasted on grammar lessons.

[nalidoll.livejournal.com]

just so you can feel my pain... that extra case i mentioned, for German..

imagine, if you will, sitting in a classroom waiting for the teacher to manage to get this through the heads of a bunch of people who were only there because a foreign language was a requirement for graduation.

[azurelunatic]

Iyeek.

Seriously.

[nalidoll.livejournal.com]

heh. and it makes *perfect* sense to me.

this is one of the reasons some of my grammar-bitch friends overlook the fact that much of my writing falls short of.. well.. "correct."

heh. i *know* the rules i am breaking. i scare people when i start rattling off the technical specifics when i correct something.. i just choose to ignore many of them.. mostly as a style-based choice.

that, and i live in Texas. i found that there were alot of people who could not follow what i was saying if i said it correctly in some cases.
sad, but very true.

[azurelunatic]

To wrap my mind around it and grok it fully, I'd have to drift up into a meta-discussion of what a case is, and have examples of all the cases in English pointed out to me and explained as to why they're that case before being able to remember what goes where.

My rule on cases is generally "Because it sounds right."

[nalidoll.livejournal.com]

see, i'd think that you'd find diagramming sentences to be amusing. not so much for practical usage, but more because it makes for interesting patterns. (i think visually)

along with the few friends that i had who were also good at this, i used to play with stuff.. making sentences that were technically correct but a nightmare for your standard english teacher. it was a challenge for us to see just how far you could take a complex sentence. we came up with some seriously long, rambly things that we could then prove were, in fact, correct.

it pretty much fell into the "because we can" and "because most people can't" catagories of amusement.

[azurelunatic]

Nifty!

[azurelunatic]

boojum and I practiced our nested parentheses on each other when we were teenagers. It was fun! I got to be on the classroom computer reading/writing e-mail to her while the 10th grade English teacher was going over the lesson with the rest of the class. Every now and then I'd chime in and contribute to the lesson, translating between Teacher and Student. I'd already finished the book, you see, and that made it irrelevant for me to participate in the discussion that was intended to help the rest of the class who couldn't read so fast.

(I chime in to the lesson when I don't actually need to ask a question for myself a lot, actually, when someone asks a question and they're not quite sure of the question or of the answer. I can smell the confusion, and when that happens, I ask another question just to clarify the point in their heads.)

Sad? Yeah...

[eequor.livejournal.com]

You grew up a lot like me. One of my favorite books when I was little was my English grammar book. It must have seemed strange to my first grade teacher for one of her students to be trying to teach the rest of the class grammar. I was generally right, too.

I don't know what happened to that book. It was an excellent teacher, but, as with you, I never picked up the names for what I was doing. Strange to find the details important later....

I also generally aced the standardized tests on grammar. I notice grammatical problems immediately; it irritates me to see language misused.

Do you get annoyed at HTML as I do?
To get a grammatical space after end-of-sentence punctuation one must write   . I type two spaces, knowing the browser will ignore me, but it's the right thing to do.

Re: Sad? Yeah...

[azurelunatic]

I was clued in to the nature of word processors at about 15, and their magic way of aligning things to make the period, space into period, space, space. So since I type with word processor reflexes, I don't put in the second space now.

[kdorian.livejournal.com]

I pretty much go by "what sounds right." Unfortunately, while this seems to put me ahead of 90% of the pack when it comes to grammer, it doesn't mean that what I write will be correct. I just wish that one of my local colleges had an advanced grammer class that I could take. The one college english class I took that covered grammer went too slowly for me to really get into it, having been designed for people who didn't know what they were doing when it came to the rules of grammer. *Sad sigh*

[azurelunatic]

*nods*

Remedial Grammar: Just the Rules is something I'd like to either take, or learn and then teach.

(God. I'm supposed to be a teacher. I'm not sure why.)

[kdorian.livejournal.com]

One good thing I got out of that class was the book - Simon & Schulster's Handbook for Writers. That was one college book I didn't sell back!

One of these days I'm going to finish it and find out what exactly a gerund is. (Don't tell me! You'll spoil the ending! :p)

[azurelunatic]

My father told me it was gerbiling.

[kdorian.livejournal.com]

O_O Man, nobody told me there was kinky stuff in the book! No wonder we didn't cover it in class!

[azurelunatic]

*snicker*

[azurelunatic]

530 and 540.