This week seems to have been, for many of us in the class, a whirlwind of new terms and rules. AWWUBBIS, or the subordinating conjunctions, confused me at first, simply because there seem to be so many that don’t fall into the acronym. I think, though, that as I get better at recognizing them and whether or not they are used and correctly, I’ll feel more comfortable with them. I was glad to have the chance to practice identifying the subordinating conjunctions in my own blog. It is very helpful for me to practice the specific skills we learn each week on my blogs in workshop. It’s interesting to see which elements of sentence structure and punctuation I am already using correctly and which I need to improve upon.
While working on my grammar scrapbook and helping fellow classmates with theirs, I’m realizing how difficult it can be to explain what exactly is wrong in a grammatical error. It’s one thing to be able to point out a mistake, but it’s quite another to describe in grammar rules and terms what makes it incorrect. It becomes even more complicated to think how one might go about fixing the error. Working on the scrapbook has really made me more aware, and possibly critical of, others’ writing as well as my own. And as an added bonus, I get to laugh at some of the more ridiculous typos and errors in print in alleged professional publications.
I think one reason people seem to be having so much trouble with finding errors in print to include in their scrapbooks is the fact that we are not conditioned to notice errors. This is a good thing, because it means that we as readers focus on the content of a piece of writing rather than its conventions. I usually find myself mentally editing the word choice, organization, and strength of argument of a newspaper or magazine article before I can pick out its syntactical errors or weaknesses. It is necessary, however, to start noticing mistakes in writing so that we can help our students become more fluent writers and be conscious of their own work.
Question: When looking for errors in print, do you notice any specific type of error or problem that jumps out at you? If so, do you think it is because this is an error you have had trouble with in the past, or continue to have trouble with?
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I tend to see errors that I have a good grasp on as opposed to those I would have to work through in my own writing. It seems that those are easier to get hung up on because they're personally unnatural mistakes to make, whereas grammatical errors outside of one's comfortable writing domain can be ignored, especially if they are phonetically easy to pass over.
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