Mr.
Sitze, the Open Program English teacher, had taught us about crazy punctuation
such the colon, semi-colon, hyphen, and dash.
We got into four groups and presented one of the punctuation marks to
teach the class. Now we have to write a
blog post using each of these punctuation marks twice. The four tenets that I will be using is
creative problem solving, to find different ways to use each of the punctuation
marks, and independence since I am thinking up examples on my own.
Reasons
grammar has never been my friend – the crazy punctuation, not enough practice
and it’s actually pretty confusing. Back
in middle school we practice grammar more than anything else and I thought it
was super boring; the only punctuation marks I would use would be commas,
periods, question marks and sometimes the exclamation mark. Of course not wanting to use punctuation marks
is very difficult now in high school; I will need more practice to show mastery
in it. There are many ways that I would
help me improve: find online worksheets,
ask Mr. Sitze or look on YouTube for videos tutorials. Punctuation marks I have the most trouble
with: semi-colons, hyphens and dashes. Colon is the one crazy punctuation mark that I
am the most comfortable with.
I
am hoping that this year in English Two, I can show more mastery in punctuation
marks so they don’t have to be my ex-enemy. Until then I will most definitely
continue working on punctuation marks.
Punctuation can be as hard or easy as you want it to be. It's like cooking.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to make a nice Alfredo sauce (which I do since I am currently hungry), you might look at the recipe and say, "Man, that's a serious looking recipe -- I don't know how I can do all those things," and give up altogether and order pizza.
But as good as pizza is, it's no Alfredo sauce.
So what do you do?
You take a full afternoon, you clear off your schedule, and you say, "Okay Alfredo sauce, it's me and you. One of us is going to get consumed by the other, and I'm not getting eaten by no recipe!"
And then here's what happens next, the important part: you slow it down, you break apart the recipe piece by piece, and you see that it is just a series of steps. Each step, by itself, isn't too bad. So you start in. At the end of the afternoon, you have an Alfredo sauce.
In the same way, grammar can seem like a complicated recipe with all sorts of strange spices like participles and dependent clauses. But if you really want to get better at it, slow it down, take it apart, and spend an afternoon working on it.
Believe me, you'll get better. And if you need me to help, I'll be the one in the chef's hat.