Chris, Chris', Chris's

Well, I lied, I said that I was going to write back in a week but it has been two. Don’t be mad, the lack of blogging was due to the lack of no assignment. Reading over my blog from last week I have not learned anything magical in class that would help me with the problems I have grammatically. Do not worry; I will keep you guys updated on my growing knowledge. Although, this does not apply to the problems I talked about previously I have learned some new things about apostrophes, pronouns, and other word classes. WAHOO!

In English 326, the past two weeks I have learned about apostrophes. It seemed to me that apostrophes were pretty straight forward. I thought that all a person has to do is stick one after a word and then an s to show possession of something. Or to make a word smaller or contract the word for example it is can become it’s or to make something plural like letters or numbers. These are of course very important uses of apostrophes but there is a “gray area” when it comes to these punctuations. This “gray area” comes when there is a name ending in s. The old way says to add an apostrophe and then an s. For example if there is the name Chris to make this possessive it would be Chris’s. But the new way says that you only need the apostrophe which would mean Chris becomes Chris’ when he possesses something. I find it very interesting that different magazines and newspapers do not follow just one way. The magazines use old and new depending on which specific magazine they are. I wonder if the old way will just fade out or if the new way will just fade out or if they will both always be in existence.

Over the past two weeks I have also learned about word classes. I knew what nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on are but I did not know they are called word classes. I also found it extremely interesting that some of the techniques that I learned for memorizing the word classes are not the best way. For example to remember noun I was taught to remember that they are people, places, or things. But these kinds of techniques or definitions are “COIK” or Clear Only If Known. Instead, it is better to use test sentences. An example of this would be “They want to ______” for verbs. If you cannot put the word you think is a verb into that sentence then it fits into a different word class. It is good to know as a future teacher that having explicit definitions is not always good for learning these word classes. I hope that I can learn some of these tricks to finding what word class a specific word fits into. It would be great to be able to explain this to students in a useful way.

Learning about apostrophes was a good experience. I liked learning how sometimes there are “gray areas” in grammar. Although I learned that there are good techniques to use to show students where words fit in the sense of word classes, I still feel that I could not teach them. I want to be able to use these in a classroom and feel confident that my students will understand. As I said already I hope that we learn more about these techniques. It has only been three weeks into the semester and I have already learned so much and I know that I have more to go.

Question of the week:
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remember the little tricks we learned about word classes? or are we just supposed to have hand outs to look at?