Why should you learn to punctuate properly? After all, many people have made successful careers without ever learning the difference between a colon and a semicolon. Perhaps you consider punctuation to be an inconsequential bit of decoration, not worth spending your valuable time on. Or perhaps you even regard punctuation as a deeply personal matter — a mode of self-expression not unlike your taste in clothes or music.
Well, punctuation is one aspect of written English. How do you feel about other aspects of written English? Would you happily write pair when you mean pear, because you think the first is a nicer spelling? Would you, in an essay, write Einstein were a right clever lad, 'e were, just because that's the way people speak where you come from? Would you consider it acceptable to write proceed when you mean precede, or vice versa, because you've never understood the difference between them? Probably not — at least, I hope not.
. . . more . . .
(Via Amicus. Good boys always bring grammatical articles to their mothers' attention. Now get back to sorting the compost.)
OK, really, I have never been able to get enough of the derailment of sense via punctuation errors, or of posting links to articles my children and other students should read, if they haven't already, which then saves me the untold resources of time and energy which I would expend in explaining this stuff to people who aren't really listening all that much.
Did you hear me? I said, it saves me untold resources of . . . oh, never mind.
Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes. What's the next best thing to attending the University of Sussex, circa 1997? Visiting the website. Alternatively, you could drop in at Abandon Hopefully, where we have tons of neat stuff just like this (and also not just like this) on the Homeschooling Hot Links page. Meanwhile, the Grade 9 booklist is more or less up, though I'm adding more web resources, writing ideas, and other goodies as I find them. My aim is to begin soon on Grade 10, though I'm awfully distracted by the opportunity the new forum provides me for talking to myself all day long.
Chick'er out. And talk to me. Please.
6 comments:
Heh. Reminds me of my favorite source of edit-lessons: Political mailings. The, last, one had way, too, many, commas.
What do you think of the new fashion of writing emphasis by putting a period after (and sometimes capitalizing) the Really. Important. Words.?
I am a curmudgeon, and to me it is just one more instance of the false notion that written prose is spoken text set down on paper. Also, it reinforces the idea that punctuation == pause. (Where does my son, homeschooled his whole life and hardly ever given a grammar lesson, pick up that idea?)
But you wanted resources. Have you seen Jan Carr's Greedy Apostrophe? It's Lynn Truss for the picture-book set. We love it!
I always pull out stories like this one if people try to say punctuation doesn't matter. When $70 million is on the line, it sure does matter!
Ha, yes. The buck stops at the period.
Anne-Marie, I've probably done the emphatic. period. thing. myself at some point, but I'm bugged by it as a general written-verbal tic. The first time it was probably funny and sharp. As a full-scale adoption into the language, it's one of those "oh, that again" things.
And hoo, yes, the political mailing. Not that I vote for or against people on the basis of their commission of the dreaded comma splice, but those kind of glitches don't make you look like the smart candidate, exactly.
The most delicious Schadenfreude comes from reading illiterate campaign materials from candidates for the school board.
Indeed. I remember going once, long ago, to some homeschooling Q&A event sponsored by our then-state's Department of Education. We had already been homeschooling for a year or two, and I was not persuaded to alter our course by the state homeschooling guy's power-point presentation, in which "its" was spelled with an apostrophe at least once in every frame. Yeah, when you guys master basic English grammar, I thought, do please get back to me on the subject of my iffy unregulated standards.
BTW, I will have to look for that book. We around here who are old enough to appreciate Lynn Truss do.
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