Grammar this week focused on FANBOYS and also on how some teachers explain punctuation to their students FANBOYS was a mini lesson taught by Barbara to help explain how to combine two sentences that relate to one another this was a very good mini lesson that was given to us by starting with the FANBOYS and then when went straight to our own writing to try to find places that we were not using commas and FANBOYS where we needed to in Socratic Seminar we discussed the opinions of an article this article discussed how punctuation is taught in school the wrong way and the correct way the article seemed to feel that punctuation needed to be practiced through a child’s writing instead of doing grammatical drills for punctuation statistics even showed that children who practiced punctuation through writing understood punctuation better than students who worked solely with punctuation drills the author of the text even said that students who hand wrote their piece with no punctuation and then later added punctuation when typing it better understood punctuation and why it show go in certain places I am not sure if I agree or disagree with this statement it seems like students may still have a hard time punctuating correctly when typing their piece out if they do not understand punctuation we also talked about our own personal stories with grammar drills and how they seemed like busy work because they weren’t genuine sentences they look more like computerized sentences using genuine examples from our own actual writing was more helpful because it was authentic and applied to our own outcome of our own paper
Holy Cow! That was so hard! I could not, for the life of me, stop putting punctuation marks into the above block of writing. I kept subconsciously putting at least periods and indentations when my thoughts were changing from one subject to the next. My internal dialogue kept screaming, PUT THE PERIOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I had to delete periods that I just automatically put. I feel like putting punctuation in my writing has been so ingrained into my mind that I can’t help but put punctuation. It’s interesting to see how I think about punctuation. I wonder if students feel this way about punctuation. I know that elementary school children do not understand, but what about middle school or even high school students? Do they understand where punctuation goes at least to a point where they have periods where thoughts change or end? How do we get these inner rules that scream at us to PUNCTUATE! I just don’t know. Did anyone else find it ridiculously hard to point out or realize what he or she was thinking while punctuating? Or did it seem like second nature?
Question of the week: Is this a comma splice-
“The more things you have, the more weight to carry, the more gear to worry about.”
Why or why not?
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI don't think it can be classified as a comma splice. A comma splice consists of two independent clauses that have been connected by a comma. “The more things you have, the more weight to carry,” could be a complete thought. However, “the more gear to worry about” is not. So it is not exactly a comma splice but I do think it is incorrect. It might be possible to write it like this, “The more things you have, the more weight to carry; the more gear to worry about.” It just still seems awkward because that first clause sounds incomplete to me.
very clever problem, Alex. Actually, there's a special name for this kind of structure--something adjectival. I'd say that
ReplyDeleteYou have the more things... is the main clause (to clarify the inversion of natural word order in English, with the others "the more" phrases just modifying that first one.
I think I'd reword it (not just to avoid the problem :-) because its meaning isn't clear to me.
"The more things you have, the more weight you have to carry and the more gear you have to worry about."