That's all. Folks!

I went through and found some old papers, unfortunately, after looking over those old papers, I noticed that the teacher hadn't really been grading for those kinds of problems, most for content, so I had to go through other avenues to find what was wrong with my writing. I found that my biggest problem is apostrophes, (an example of a word I had a hard time deciding if there was an apostrophe in or not) since I am never really sure where they go depending on the word. Good thing that's what my mini-lesson is on right? :-) I also have a problem with fragments, I like to make short and sweet sentence, or, well, they aren't really sentences since they are fragments! My other problem is commas, of course! I am one of those people that followed the "when you pause" rule, and I over-use them all the time. Many, many times teachers have pointed out that my comma use doesn’t make sense or shouldn't be there.
Nitty Gritty Grammer says this about each:
On apostrophes pp. 30-32, “Use apostrophes: to replace missing letters in contradictions or surnames.” Examples of apostrophe work, do+not=don’t or O’Donell where the O is of for ‘of Donell’ (they also) replace missing numerals or letters as in ‘Class of ‘05’ of ‘Class of 2005’ They show possession, ‘the teacher’s view of her students’. (Or) to form plurals.”

On commas pp. 54-55, 99; Ironically- “Signals a pause, as if taking a breath. Put one space after a comma. (Use Commas) to separate an introductory word or phrase from the rest of the sentence, to indicate direct address, when someone is speaking to someone else, to signal a change of subject or action, to separate two independent clauses joined by a conjunction, to separate spoken words from the rest of the sentence, to separate two adjectives that modify the same noun, to separate words that signal that an example is coming, and to separate items in a series with serial commas.” A good example is in the previous quotation and this one! Don’t forget comma splices too, which is “where a period or a semicolon is needed…(you) accidentally (use) commas to splice two complete sentences together.” I am positive this is what makes my sentences awkward most of the time.

On fragments pp. 100 “Putting a capital at the beginning and a period at the end of a string of words doesn’t always create a complete sentence. Fragments are incomplete sentences, such as stranded dependant clauses.”

Like BJ, I feel I use fragments usually to create emphasis. I separate a few words by periods to make them stand out from everything else that I have said. I use commas splices to make awkward sentences, and I make words and phrases plural or possessive that aren’t by adding apostrophes where they don’t belong.

In class, as we talked about working on one thing at a time with students instead of bombarding them with information and trying to teach them everything at once, I realized that I’m pretty sure no teacher ever told me to stop making sentence fragments, or explained what a sentence fragment was. Weird huh? Since I have so much writing in my past such as the short stories and so forth without ever getting that correction may have lead to my fragmenting. It may even be that I like to write poetry, a medium in which knowing grammar isn’t required and following the rules is so not cool. For the love of everything holy, if I knew I was messing up myself so much with my poetry I think…oh wait, no I would have kept on writing it. J

An example of some of my writing goes as follows:

“The male dominated story has more of a calculating, gruesome lunacy; while the female dominated story has more feeling to it and less planning but more hysteria, which fits well with the times and the belief that women were always hysterical because of their female organs, i.e. the fact that women have hysterectomies. There isn’t much difference between the two characters, besides their gender and slightly their time period. Both these texts are also from different genres.”

It sounds kind of gruesome out of context, but my use of commas is fun, specifically because I can remember going back and adding those commas to eradicate the awkward fragments my grammar checker kept underlining. The last sentence was marked awkward by my professor, but grammar checker said it was ok, so now I begin to worry. Hopefully with grammar checker tracking my every move, I can work harder on keeping my commas to a minimum, my fragments non-existent, and my apostrophes where they belong.