Facing life with a smile!

Facing life with a smile!
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Thursday, September 22, 2011

E38 On Being Perfect

As a teacher, I have been accused of expecting perfection of myself and of my students.  Well, I do belive in striving for perfction, but I don't expect to achieve it, not in this life, and not every time.

I do expect a student to be willing to try again to improve.  I have found that my habit is a three-step learning process: 1) I make a mistake.  2) I make it again, remember having done it before, and tell myself not to do it again. 3) Catch myself in the error before I make it again. (I hope.) 

But I am not surprised that I make mistakes the first times I try a new or difficult activity.  And I am not surprised that a student makes mistakes on new material or skills. 

As with physical skills such as are needed for playing sports or playing a musical instrument, writing skills require practice and repetition because writing is not as easy as speaking.  Remember that a score of 80% marks mastery of a skill.  Strive for 100% and you may hit 80%, but settling for 50% will not allow you to move with grace and freedom on the 'court' of written communication.

Check this out:
http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?1781

Monday, September 19, 2011

E37 Double Negative No No


What’s Wrong with This?: Double Negatives
In English the rule is not to use the double negative.

She refused not to help.
The word ‘refused’ contains the idea of the negative.  The idea in full would be “She refused to help”.

I miss not seeing him.
Do you see him now?   If you do see him, this is correct.  If you do not see him, you mean to say “I miss seeing him.”

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Why Learn Grammar?

I could not have expressed it better.

I teach a course on thesis writing to Chemistry graduate students, and always refer students to AWAD for daily inspiration. The "Some assembly required" joke gave me an unoriginal idea as well.
Your atomic analogy for the theme of the week resonated with me. The following extract is from a public radio commentary on chemistry and words. I thought you might find it amusing: While the sizes, shapes, and functionalities of molecules are infinitely variable, just as a mouthful of words can be strung together to form a two-word matrimonial confirmation, or a dizzyingly long soliloquy, there are rules of bonding that constitute a molecular grammar. For instance, "I do!" and "Do I?" will elicit vastly different emotional responses, but "He do." is not allowed. Correspondingly, the three-atom chains chlorine-oxygen-hydrogen and oxygen-chlorine-hydrogen are allowed, but have quite different chemistries, whereas chlorine-hydrogen-oxygen is not allowed. The entire commentary is online.
Preston MacDougall, Murfreesboro, Tennessee

You will meet many interesting people and ideas at: http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html

Sunday, September 11, 2011

WHY IS GRAMMAR IMPORTANT? Reading Between the Lines

Grammar is all about meaning.  Children are frustrated no end when adults ask them to "read between the lines".  Knowing the context and the specific situation enables the adult to understand beyond the expressed words.  It is said that women do this better than men, but definitely adults do it better than children who are not as well-read nor have the life experience.

And understanding the difference between the Active Voice as opposed to the Passive Voice, taught in Grade 10, helps you read between the lines that the perpetrator is a) unknown or b) known but being hidden.
Here is what I wrote for Facebook:
Why is learning grammar important? Note the use of the Passive Voice in this interview: "a decision was made". This indicates that the person who made the decision is either unknown or known and being hidden. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7300

Thursday, August 11, 2011

E36 The Rule of Parallelism


THE RULE OF PARALLELISM
When you are making a list, put the items in the same patterns of parts of speech.  Whichever pattern you begin with, carry on with it with the other items.

WHY?
Some sentences are “awkward”; they just sound a bit wrong, and make the reader/listener stumble a bit.  A “smooth” sentence is easy to follow, and the cadence or rhythm will be pleasant to hear.  Can you or another person read your composition easily out loud?

When people listen or read, they naturally try to anticipate where you are going; they “think ahead”. They are trying to figure out if what you are saying fits with what they already know about and understand, especially if they have some background knowledge of the subject.

If you follow the Rule of Parallelism, your sentence (and your paragraph) will be easier to anticipate, easier to understand, easier to say and read, and it will be more beautiful to hear and more likely to persuade the reader to believe.

A SHORT LIST
She didn’t want to forget the essentials; so she made a list: shampoo, Tylenol, toilet paper, eggs, and milk.

Fire requires three elements to succeed: air, fuel and heat.  Start building your fire loosely with small dry tinder such as paper, little slivers of wood, tiny sticks or pinecones; then add slightly larger faggots or splits of wood; and finally put on top of the pile the larger splits of wood or even whole logs if your fireplace is big enough.  Touch a flame from a match or lighter to the tinder at the bottom of the pile of fuel.  In a dry forest, wind will help to direct the spread of a fire that starts in the dry duff of the forest floor and underbrush, or from a fire in a tree that has been struck by lightning.
(Note that I set up a pattern and order in the first sentence and followed it explicitly in the final sentence: air, fuel and heat.)
                                                           Gathering Faggots

A LONG LIST
Long lists may be found in instructions, in tables of contents, in outlines, and in your résumé wherein you list your experience and skills.  Whenever possible stick with the pattern you set up in the first item: for nouns, stay with nouns and noun substitutes; for verbs, stick with the tense and/or pattern that you start with.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Missing Words: Hoping Against Hope

Understanding English is made more difficult by the modern fashion for short sentences, but there are some ancient examples too. 
   First, I want to consider the way people say "The proof is in the pudding."  This is a stupid comment as it stands, but it comes from the more logical "The proof (test) of the pudding is in the eating."
   Second, consider 'please'.  We use it as adverb, but it is the verb 'to please'.  In the subjunctive mood it is properly rendered as "if it please you" as in "If it please you, give me a tip." Thus the verb 'please' is being asked to stand for an Adverb Subordinate Clause that modifies the verb of the Main Clause 'give'.
   Now about "hoping against hope", one starts with the Bible where Paul is speaking about Abraham and Sara: "Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara's womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God". Romans 4:18-20 Now about "hope", Pastor Richard Onebamoi, has distinguished between the first hope and the second one.  He tells us that first hope is a supernatural one that is based on God's word and promise, that is on spiritual belief, and it is opposed against the natural hope that is based on scientific fact or experience.  Abraham was hoping for paternity, expecting something good, against the fact that he and Sara were too old to have children.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

George Orwell on Writing


delanceyplace.com 5/13/11 - orwell's rules for better writing
In today's excerpt - George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," lamented the demise of the English language, in particular the lack of clarity in the expression of ideas. In it, he gave five brief examples of bad writing and five rules for better writing:
 "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
 "Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. ... Here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples:
 1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
 2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
 3. On the one side we have free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
 4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet
  
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as 'standard English.' When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune
  
"[When trying to avoid these faults], one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
 (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.  
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
  "These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article."
 


Wednesday, April 6, 2011

E35 Dictionary Definitions Change


The other day, I heard the word ‘sophisticated’ used with ‘people’.  My dictionary gave these definitions of the past participle of the verb ‘sophisticate’:
  1. experienced in worldly ways; informed; knowing aware 
  2. lacking in natural simplicity or frankness
  3. artificial
  4. misleading
  5. of mechanical or electronic devices, complex and advanced in design: sophisticated missiles

But, my old dictionary says this about the verb ‘sophisticate’ following from the entry word Sophism (a spurious proposition; a specious but fallacious argument; a fallacy designed to deceive):
to pervert;  [as in twisting the truth or corrupting morals]
to wrest from the truth;  [as in misleading propaganda and spin]
to render spurious by admixture [as in adding cheaper stuff to wine]

Sometimes it pays to check out older sources; they may give you a clearer view of an idea.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Twin Babies Converse

Here is a beautiful example of children catching the sounds of adult talk without being able to form the words yet.  They have the 'music' of the language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY

Sunday, March 13, 2011

E34 Emphatic Order


A while back in E26, I talked about emphasizing particular words in a sentence.

This article is about how to put the important data in a place where it will carry a punch.  Before I give these examples let’s review standard order.  (The grey word are never spoken nor written.  They are given for those to whom English grammar is a new subject.)  Skip it if you know this.


OK, let’s look at variations of emphatic order.  In exclamations, you place the emphatic word or idea in an important position, usually at the beginning in a short sentence:
            How lovely the bride looks!
            What courage he displayed!

  1. Put it first.
    1. Standard:  He went over.
    2. Emphatic: Over he went.

  1. Use repetition.
    1. Emphatic: Don’t do it tomorrow; don’t do it this afternoon; do it now.

  1. Delay key words.
    1. Standard: My marks are disgraceful, my father says.
    2. Emphatic: My marks are, my father says, disgraceful.

  1. Eliminate the unnecessary word or phrase.
    1. Standard: We all voted her captain unanimously.
    2. Emphatic: We voted her captain unanimously.

  1. Use the Active Voice
    1. Standard: A good time was had by all of us.  (expository)
    2. Emphatic: We all had a good time.  (narrative)

Make it memorable.  People remember best the part of the sentence (and lesson or essay) that is closest.  Thus they remember best the last thing they read or hear, and then next best they remember the first thing that they read or hear.  That is why we put the thesis at the beginning and the conclusion at the end: even if the anecdotes or facts are forgotten, the ‘gist’ of the idea will be captured.

Which version of these sentences would Henry David Thoreau have chosen?
            Give me truth, rather than love, or money or fame.
            Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Which of these sentence do you thin is the stronger one?
            Your success will depend on you, not on me.
            Your success will depend not on me, but on you.

            The jury found him guilty after deliberating for several hours.
            After deliberating for several hours, the jury found him guilty.

            I will never go buy that brand.
            Never again will I buy that brand.

Place parenthetical expressions such as I think, as they say, I am told, on the other hand, toward the middle of the sentence as in example 3 above in order to emphasize the key information.

Anti-climax is used for humour.  Put the trivial point in the emphatic position to draw the laugh:
            Confess?  I’ll confess anything — murder, arson, embezzlement, forgery, piracy, stealing candy from babies!  What would you have me confess?



Sunday, March 6, 2011

E33 Degrees of Comparison

Any grammar handbook or website will give you a standard definition of the degrees of comparison of adjectives and of adverbs.  They are the positive, comparative and the superlative.   The latter are usually signalled by the suffixes er and est (or ier and iest) or by more and most (or less and least/fewer and fewest).

The positive is the usual use in which you describe one person or action: Mom is usually kind.
The comparative is for describing two people or actions: Her mom is often kind, but my mom is more often kinder.
The superlative is for comparing three or more persons or actions: Her mom is often kind, your mom is more often kinder, but my mom is most often kindest.

But there is also a word game of the name Degrees of Comparison in which synonyms or antonyms are used to indicate differences.  It is always played with the pronouns He/She/They, plus You, plus I/We thus:
    He is pig-headed; you are stubborn; but I am resolute.
    She is cheap; you are frugal; but I am economical.
    They are totally profligate; you are a spend-thrift; but I support the economy.

Always the rule in this game is to find the word that denigrates the people in the 3rd person and compliments the people in the first person.  Unfortunately, many people play this game for real to justify their contempt for others and their justification of themselves.

A good thesaurus or  a website such as http://www.synonyms.net  will help you.

E32 Spelling Dictations

Another interesting German word that was discussed in A.Word.A.Day is 'diktat', which means

Def: 1. An order or decree imposed without popular consent.
2. A harsh settlement imposed upon a defeated party.

In English we might use the noun "dictate" for that. 

"Dictate" is also used to mean a common practice of schoolteachers: the weekly or monthly 'dictation'.  And that makes me think of the way we need to teach spelling.  If the student is to be tested by writing the word as spoken by the teacher in a weekly dictation, the student has to study the word by sounding it out while practising writing it.  After all, this is how the student will write it while writing a story, letter or essay.

When the child is older, he may also write whole sentences or paragraphs that are dictated by the teacher—who will expect the student to supply the correct punctuation as well as the correct spelling.  Many students will hate this because it may reveal gaps in their knowledge, and good teacher will use their failures as suggestions for further personal or class lessons.  




E31 Choosing Synonyms


The German compound word 'sitzfleisch ' has an interesting definition.

Def: 1. The ability to sit through or tolerate something boring.
2. The ability to endure or persist in a task.


I want to draw your attention to this paragraph discussion its usage, particularly to the words "politeness wants that the guest has to decide".

"A very common understanding in Germany is: you have guests and politeness wants that the guest has to decide when he wants to leave. Sometimes there are guests who stay and stay.  You want to go to bed but the guest sits and sits; we say 'He has sitzfleisch.'"

In English, although we can say "That car wants washing."  or "The meat needs more salt." and "This email requires an immediate answer."  There is a subtle difference in the connotations.  "Wants" comes from 'want' as in the situation of poverty or famine and means "has a lack of".  "Needs" comes from 'need' as in 'necessity'—without the salt the food is unpalatable or that the meat will rot without sufficient salt to preserve it when it is stored in the autumn for the winter.   "Requires" is another kind of necessity, and it implies the formal rules of politeness or protocol.

In the paragraph above I would have chosen "requires".

Choosing the right word among a set of synonyms requires a subtle knowledge of the connotations (related meanings) from checking the word origins and usages.  If one reads a lot of books and such, one can acquire a knowledge of "how the word is used" in many situations.  But that might take hours and hours of reading.  Not everyone is prepared to do that much reading nor enjoys it.  The use of a good dictionary can save you that much reading.

Even so, we may choose incorrectly due to inexperience or due to using what "sounds right" in the local parlance.  That is one of the reasons that students are required to write and write in school: to display one's experience or inexperience with words so that the teacher can point you to the most appropriate choice.  Kids who hate to read out loud or to hand in their writing for editing, are missing out on the opportunity to learn those subtleties of meaning.

Students need to learn to give themselves the break of learning; and teachers need to give them the break of distinguishing between a learning opportunity as opposed to a testing situation.



Wednesday, February 16, 2011

E30 Teaching Spelling


Out of the blue I got an order for penmanship books…after four years!  I guess someone was listening to the article on penmanship on Q on the CBC!  This made me review my instructions to the teacher that I include with the full version of my penmanship books.  In it, I include a small section on spelling, a topic that came up in conversation with a friend of mine.

The fine point is this:  The purpose for teaching spelling is so the student can transfer the sounds he hears in his mind to the words he must write on the page—SOUND to IMAGE.  Therefore, as he practices writing out the spelling word, he should be saying the sounds of the letters as he writes them.  When you give him the spelling test, do you not dictate the words?

This is how the spelling of the words was invented in the first place.  English spelling was standardized in the first place by pressmen, those pioneers who printed books and newspapers, turning local dialects and pronunciations into national spellings.  In some cases the spellings from one place became standard, but the pronunciation from another place became standard, and they did not quite match! Then we say that English spelling is crazy!

The student must learn to look at the word, say the word, then say the word as he writes it, and then check back to see if his version looks like the model word.  If his version is correct, he can go ahead and copy his own correct model whispering it out to himself as he practices writing.   I know, this can be noisy. … But it makes for a learning situation rather than a non-learning situation.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

E29 Teaching Penmanship


Today on the CBC program “Q” there was an interview with Gwendolyn Bounds about penmanship. 

She is a journalist who has researched this topic and written a number of articles in the Wall Street Journal.

She made these points:
1.  Writing by hand helps you to remember what you need to remember.

2.  Adults who are learning a new language with a different script (font) learn better if they learn to make the new letters and write the new words.

3.  Students who write essays by hand will write more, will write faster and will use more unique ideas.

4.  Children who learn to print or write by hand rather than just looking and typing, develop more brain connections in cognitive areas in thinking, language and memory, growing brains more “adult”, than those of children who just learned to keyboard.

5.  Handwriting can indicate neural disorders, too.

6.  Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University, says that good handwriting can take a marking score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad handwriting can tank it to the 16th percentile.  He notes that people judge the quality of your ideas by your handwriting.

What can you do?
Buy my booklets on penmanship offering printing, the traditional cursive and the Barchowsly Fluent Hand http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Susan-Grigor/Products

Buy Nan Barchowsky’s new method called the Barchowsky Fluent Hand http://www.bfhhandwriting.com/

Buy a “WritePad” for your iPnone
and
“abc PocketPhonics” for your child.


E28: Moods of Sentences

In the curriculum, periods are taught in Grade 1; that is, statements are taught.  In Grade 2, the question mark is taught; that is, questions are taught.  At this point it is easy to teach the students how to use my key word colour-scheme to help them understand basic sentence patterns as they appear in their texts, and you can teach how to locate information in context.

Because the exclamation mark is taught in Grade 3, and the use of commas and quotation marks is taught in Grade 4, I designed this exercise to appeal to the younger reader.  The rules or lessons, of course, apply at all Grades. 

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

E27 EMPHASIS 2 Yoda Speak


"A John Denver I'm not."  I tend to write expository passages, not poetry.  In the lessons on the Seven Simple English Sentences, you saw the basic order of words.  Here I am going to look at odd orders.

First, let’s look at the most famous speaker of odd English, Yoda, from Star Wars.

Sometimes he just sounds foreign.  There is no logical reason why Yoda’s grammar is wrong, but the rules are just idiomatic: Yoda's way is not the way we say it.

Sometimes he is actually using word order for emphasis:

  There is more to come.


Friday, January 21, 2011

E26 EMPHASIS 1 Italics

In written text we can use a variety of fonts or styles to draw attention to particular words in a sentence or in a work.  This lesson is about italics.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Familar or Forbidden?


Dear x28de,
“Can you give more examples for type III indirect objects with/ without the "to", and if there are cases where the "to" is necessary or forbidden?”

Indirect objects occur only in Pattern III sentences.  That is the definition of the Pattern III Simple Sentences, that it has the indirect object: NS-TV-NIO-NDO.  If you put in a “to”, you instantly throw it back into the category of the less sophisticated, less sophisticated, less complicated Pattern II: NS-TV-ND.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

More on Indirect Objects.

for x28de who asked
Can you give more examples to type III indirect objects with/without the “to”, and if there are cases where the “to” is necessary or forbidden.


You can say "Give me it!"  for "Give it to me!" 

Some English speakers may say "Give it me!", but that is because in their part of England, they tend to drop articles and such.  You can see that the "to" has been left out of that sentence where it is necessary.

That's really all there is.  Familiar patterns are familiar or not.  One little eight-year-old boy  whom I was tutoring understood the more sophisticated  "He read them stories." and not "He read stories to them."  

Longer sentences are considered to be harder to understand...but really that's when you are expected to remove subordinate clauses and make simple sentences of them.  We are told to use only 20 words, but complex ideas require complex sentences.

"Give to me it!" is not forbidden...but it sounds wrong to the English ear.  We would never say that.

The other day I heard a comic tell a story about European relatives who would put violent images into his head by saying things like "Would someone please throw me from the balcony ... a sweater."  It was the pause that made the comic timing that helped the joke.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Seven Simple Sentences of English Reviewed

When I started this blog, I didn't know how to make screenshots, so I made a very ugly set of lessons.  This is better, I think  It puts all of the patterns together in one place.  These patterns are the basis for subordinate clauses too.