Facing life with a smile!

Facing life with a smile!
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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.