chasingtides (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chasingtides) wrote2008-03-24 10:05 am
chasingtides) wrote2008-03-24 10:05 am
Diagrams and Wank
I was wibbling about my Spanish exam until I found the grammar and spelling wank over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
torch_wood. As that comm periodically breaks my language-loving soul, it warmed the icy cockles of my heart to see someone finally call them on it. (And seriously, being dyslexic does not mean that you can get away with posting things that look like they were put through Babelfish six times over. Seriously, people it doesn't.)
I felt vaguely guilty for adding to the wank with my overwhelming joy. I mean, it isn't necessarily totally your fault that you are uneducated and can't be bothered to go out and buy a $6 book. (This only goes to the people writing discussion posts. If you are uneducated and cannot be bothered with grammar or spelling and are writing fic, GTFO.) So, to soothe my eternally guilty Catholic soul, I went searching for grammar and spelling aids online (so people wouldn't even need to spend that $6 to learn grammar). I am a magnanimous soul.
As some people know, I learned grammar in the old-school Catholic manner. This meant diagramming sentences and being hit with rulers. I learned to adore sentence diagramming, which must be some form of Stockholm's Syndrome because no one should like to diagram sentences. I decided that I might like to showtorch_wood this love (and maybe some sense could be knocked into them with rulers). Instead I found something that frightens even me:
Oh yes. Someone decided to diagram a sentence from The Scarlet Letter. Just reading that book made me want to weep, never mind trying to diagram Hawthorne. If you're really into sadism, see the same person diagram the first sentence of Milton's Paradise Lost here. If you want to see fairly decent sentence diagramming (since, apparently, most people don't learn this in school?) the basics are here. This website, among others, suggests that children have not been taught how to diagram sentences in schools for roughly thirty years, so I might be among the last of a dying breed. This is quite sad as it was through diagramming that I finally learned (really learned, that is, without needing to consistently consult a grammar books) the parts of a sentence/speech and how to restructure things to express what I wanted to say. It got me beyond simple writing and into higher level writing styles by simply improving my comprehension of language.
... I am now tempted to teach children English just so that I can improve a new generation of writers/speakers by teaching them to diagram.
Ooh! Look, an academic article on sentence diagramming and how it can teach the basics of grammar.
torch_wood. As that comm periodically breaks my language-loving soul, it warmed the icy cockles of my heart to see someone finally call them on it. (And seriously, being dyslexic does not mean that you can get away with posting things that look like they were put through Babelfish six times over. Seriously, people it doesn't.)I felt vaguely guilty for adding to the wank with my overwhelming joy. I mean, it isn't necessarily totally your fault that you are uneducated and can't be bothered to go out and buy a $6 book. (This only goes to the people writing discussion posts. If you are uneducated and cannot be bothered with grammar or spelling and are writing fic, GTFO.) So, to soothe my eternally guilty Catholic soul, I went searching for grammar and spelling aids online (so people wouldn't even need to spend that $6 to learn grammar). I am a magnanimous soul.
As some people know, I learned grammar in the old-school Catholic manner. This meant diagramming sentences and being hit with rulers. I learned to adore sentence diagramming, which must be some form of Stockholm's Syndrome because no one should like to diagram sentences. I decided that I might like to show
torch_wood this love (and maybe some sense could be knocked into them with rulers). Instead I found something that frightens even me:
Oh yes. Someone decided to diagram a sentence from The Scarlet Letter. Just reading that book made me want to weep, never mind trying to diagram Hawthorne. If you're really into sadism, see the same person diagram the first sentence of Milton's Paradise Lost here. If you want to see fairly decent sentence diagramming (since, apparently, most people don't learn this in school?) the basics are here. This website, among others, suggests that children have not been taught how to diagram sentences in schools for roughly thirty years, so I might be among the last of a dying breed. This is quite sad as it was through diagramming that I finally learned (really learned, that is, without needing to consistently consult a grammar books) the parts of a sentence/speech and how to restructure things to express what I wanted to say. It got me beyond simple writing and into higher level writing styles by simply improving my comprehension of language.
... I am now tempted to teach children English just so that I can improve a new generation of writers/speakers by teaching them to diagram.
Ooh! Look, an academic article on sentence diagramming and how it can teach the basics of grammar.
no subject
EDIT: Just took a peek at the post. Don't say that you use a spellchecker in a comment full of errors spellchecker would catch! That's one of my biggest pet peeves. I can understand misused words-- I make those errors all the time-- but all those squiggly red lines going "what in the bleeding hell is a 'reayl'?" should be saying something to you!