Posted on 03/30/2005 8:30:57 AM PST by Vision Thing
nO CAPS. -5 POINTS
I just called grammar. She's fine...
All the people who swear the MS office rules the day because it can check grammer need to pay attention to this..
That is why students should spend several years in school studying them and memorizing, memorizing, memorizing the rules. Of course that is considered bad teaching these days.
When I was in school we had a much dreaded Junior Essay Exam that determined whether we could advance into College Prep English our Senior year, or whether we had to take a year of remedial English. We were offered a selection of topics and had to write a "timed" essay in longhand with only a couple of mistakes allowed. That meant that the essay had to be composed in proper form and no more than one word could be mispelled, or 2 punctuation marks misused. No writeovers, crossouts, erasures, etc. were allowed, either. We had to start the page over, if we wanted to change anything.
We spent most of our Junior year preparing for that exam. My high school graduating class numbered approximately 600. Out of 600 Juniors, about 65 passed the Junior Essay Exam and were approved to take College Prep English. Our major project in College Prep English was to write a full fledged, researched term paper with footnotes and NO MISTAKES. I think I still have my paper tucked away somewhere because I used the footnoting style as a model in college.
Back in the day when I taught at the University of Houston (1990-93), I told my students that reliance on Word's grammar- and spell-checkers would doom them.
I showed them how incorrect Word can want a sentence to be.
Some of them, being knowledgeable, were shocked.
Some of them agreed with Word.
I truly think that at least half the grammar problem could be solved by teaching diagramming again. That's the only way I know to verify if something is in fact a sentence.
For instance, the abomination "Just because I'm blonde doesn't mean I'm stupid" is undiagrammable.
I have a spelling chequer
It came with my PC
It plainly marks for my revue
miss takes I cannot see
I've run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two no
its letter perfect in its weigh
my chequer tolled me sew.
I failed papers for one run-on sentence, one sentence fragment, or three misspellings.
I was tough, but fair. They were all take-home papers, so my students had every chance to proof their work, and have someone else do it as well.
I have a better idea. Students studying English and learning grammar so they wont ned the crutch of MS Word F7.
-By Dave Barry
I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.
What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II."
The truth is that grammar is not the most important thing in the world. The Super Bowl is the most important thing in the world. But grammar is still important. For example, suppose you are being interviewed for a job as an airline pilot, and your prospective employer asks you if you have any experience, and you answer: "Well, I ain't never flied no actual airplanes or nothing, but I got several pilot-style hats and several friends who I like to talk about airplanes with."
If you answer this way, the prospective employer will immediately realize that you have ended your sentence with a preposition. (What you should have said, of course, is "...several friends with who I like to talk about airplanes.") So you will not get the job, because airline pilots have to use good grammar when they get on the intercom and explain to the passengers that, because of high winds, the plane is going to take off several hours late and land in Pierre, South Dakota, instead of Los Angeles.
We did not always have grammar. In medieval England, people said whatever they wanted, without regard to rules, and as a result they sounded like morons. Take the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who couldn't even spell his first name right. He wrote a large poem called "Canterbury Tales," in which people from various professions - knight, monk, miller, reever, riveter, eeler, diver, stevadore, spinnaker, etc. - drone on and on like this:
In a somer sesun whon softe was the sunne
I kylled a younge birde ande I ate it on a bunne.
When Chaucer's poem was published everybody read it and said: "My God, we need some grammar around here." So they formed a Grammar Commission, which developed the parts of speech, the main ones being nouns, verbs, predicates, conjunctures, particles, proverbs, adjoiners, coordinates and rebuttals. Then the commission made up hundreds and hundreds of grammar rules, all of which were strictly enforced.
When the colonists came to America, they rebelled against British grammar. They openly used words like "ain't" and "finalize," and when they wrote the Declaration of Independence they deliberately misspelled many words. Thanks to their courage, today we Americans have only two rules of grammar:
Rule 1. The word "me" is always incorrect.
Most of us learn this rule as children, from our mothers. We say things like: "Mom, can Bobby and me roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson's cat?" And our mothers say: "Remember your grammar, dear. You mean: 'Can Bobby and I roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson's cat?' Of course you can, but be home by dinner-time."
The only exception to this rule is in formal business writing, where instead of "I" you must use "the undersigned." For example, this business letter is incorrect:
"Dear Hunky-Dory Canned Fruit Company: A couple of days ago my wife bought a can of your cling peaches and served them to my mother who has a weak heart and she damn near died when she bit into a live grub. If I ever find out where you live, I am gonna whomp you on the head with an ax handle."
This should be corrected as follows: "...If the undersigned ever finds out where you live, I am gonna whomp you on the head with an ax handle."
Rule 2. You're not allowed to split infinitives.
An infinitive is the word "to" and whatever comes right behind it, such as "to a tee," "to the best of my ability," "tomato," etc. Splitting an infinitive is putting something between the "to" and the other words. For example, this is incorrect:
"Hey man, you got any, you know, spare change you could give to, like, me?"
The correct version is:
"...spare change you could, like, give to me?"
The advantage of American English is that, because there are so few rules, practically amybody can learn to speak it in just a few minutes. The disadvantage is that Americans generally sound like jerks, whereas the British sound really smart, especially to Americans. That's why Americans are so fond of those British dramas they're always showing on public television, the ones introduced by Alistair Cooke. Americans love people who talk like Alistair Cooke. he could introduce old episodes of "Hawaii Five-O" and Americans would think they were extremely enlightening.
So the trick is to use American grammar, which is simple, but talk with a British accent, which is impressive. This technique is taught to all your really snotty private schools, where the kids learn to sound like Elliot Richardson. Remember Elliot? He sounded extremely British, and as a result he got to be attorney general, secretary of state, chief justice of the Supreme Court and vice president at the same time.
You can do it, too. Practice in your home, then approach someone on the street and say: "Tally-ho, old chap. I would consider it a great honour if you would favor me with some spare change." You're bound to get quick results.
Grrrrr. My lawyers up here love to use "comprise" instead of "compose," and they get their backs up when I correct it.
I have actually had to whip out the Little, Brown grammar handbook to show them why they're wrong.
(But then, when you're dealing with a group of non-British non-knighted people who against all logic call themselves Esquire, some idiosyncracies are to be expected.)
Yeow that's a brutal test, but it certainly helps. Good grammar, punctuation and spelling really do improve ones ability to communicate. And it's especially useful for lawyers, I've heard multi-hour Constitutional debates that revolved primarily on how one comma devide clauses and altered meanings, anybody that didn't have a solid understanding of the use of commas in English will be seriously impared when it comes to legal interpretations.
Yet my local paper just published this quarter's "High Honors" and "Honors" rolls.
Total High School population = about 750.
Total "High Honor or Honor" students = 368.
49.06%
I have asked a couple of school board members to explain how a student achieves honors?
I went back to my classbook with 136 graduating seniors.
Forty-four of us (not me) made the RI Honor Society by achieving an 85% overall average for THREE years
My old man wasn't paying teachers $70,000 for six months work in those days, either.
Me...I'm going back to school....to learn Chinese.
Reminds me of the No Homers Club, which turned down Homer Simpson because the sign says "no HomerS" and they already have one!
I think he just forgot how the light switches work...again.
That's a VERY good reason not to use quotation marks around IDs, passwords, commands, and so on.
Bold, italic, a different font color or typeface - there are umpteen ways to set something apart from what surrounds it that don't involve potentially confusing punctuation.
Not so much anymore.
The trend (one of which, for a change, I am in favor) is to write the 's, because you pronounce that extra S - Jesus's car isn't pronounced "Jesus car," but "Jesuses car."
"Sandeep Krishnamurthy is now on a mission to get the software giant to tweak its grammar-check system."
What scares me is that, being a resident of the United Soviet Socialist Republic of Washington State (USSRWS), I will be paying for this professor to spend his time on stupid things like this.
Hangovers will do that. ;o)
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