Blog Assignment Number 1

To be completely honest... grammar has never been my strong suite.  I can never remember when is the proper time for a semicolon or a comma. Should I use a period here? Or maybe this sentence is better served by some obscure piece of punctuation I am sure I learned about in 6^th grade, but now can’t remember to save my life. As a creative writer, I am used to using whatever kind of punctuation bests shows the points I am trying to make without much regard for what is considered “Conventional Grammar.” This method is, of course, rather useful in the stories I write, but always comes back to haunt me in schoolwork. While I am writing, I often get the “Fragment, consider reversing” message when I right click that lovely green squiggly line that seems to love lighting up my essays. I also seem to never put semicolons where semicolons go, but thank God for Word... it likes to tell me.

For example, in a thesis I wrote two semesters ago: “In 1953, Franklin produced the photograph that changed the world’s view of DNA; the “B” form image of a section of DNA, proving its double helical structure.” I had originally used a colon in place of the semicolon, but I saw the green squiggle as soon as I finished the sentence, and my computer corrected it to a semicolon. While the reason behind that still eludes me, I hope to understand it better in the coming weeks. I would love to experiment more with all the different punctuations and grammar patterns that can help bring to life my stories; to really help convey the messages I am trying to put to paper.

The one thing I don’t want to do is give up my own sense of language in my quest for proper grammar. I am from Louisiana originally, and was born in to a Military family. I have lived in: Louisiana, Florida (twice), Arizona, Germany, Hawai’i and Washington. Because of this, my language has become a strange, and unique, blend of all of those places. I frequently spell words in the European style. For example, I have always spelled favourite with the “u” in it, but here it is supposed to be spelled “Favorite”. But for any schoolwork I try and sensor that. Because I tend to spell some words differently than they are spelled here in America, I have had teachers accuse me of plagiarizing because they didn’t realize that my 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th grade years were spent in Germany.

I also frequently hear the words, “You pronounced that wrong.” I sometimes stress different syllables than people here do. At first I found it funny, but now it makes me somewhat angry, and I do get tired of hearing it. Luckily for me, living all over the place has helped to remove most of my accent, so I no longer have that issue. I agree with the SRTOL idea of teaching “proper” grammar, that we should teach grammar, but keep in mind each students idea language.