Article 1 Response

When I read this article I paid careful attention to the examples, and which ones I could relate to. It’s very simple to write how I think, so it’s easy to have run-on sentences, or for instance, have ‘dangling’ sentences. I also think I struggle with bad parallelism, it seems very tricky, and I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the way lists can actually be written the wrong way. I never use semicolons, and frankly I don’t understand them enough to feel confident adding them in my writing. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’ve “mastered” words. What does that even mean? Our vocabularies get larger the older we get, so mastering this rule seems very impossible. Pronouns, verb problems and subjunctives I feel pretty confident about. Basically whenever I read a sentence that involves one those issues, it’s easy to spot out and clarify if it’s right or wrong.

The main purpose of this article was, of course, rules of grammar that we should pay attention to (the purpose is pretty clear in the title).  The main points were the seven different reasons the author mentioned. He was pretty clear about all the rules writers should pay attention to, and even gave examples for each rule. I found that this article was very helpful, I didn’t even know what bad parallelism was or how to fix a dangling sentence. These are all common mistakes that writers and students make, so it was very easy to point out the things that I struggle with whenever I write.

I’d like to discuss the passage that is about dangling conversations. I’d never quite heard of this before, but I could definitely see how people get confused. The author gives us this sentence that one of his students wrote about a consumer product, “Sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performed well…. Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you.” I did laugh when I read this, that’s probably half the reason why I choose this to discuss. What was wrong with the sentence? The bra did not sit in class or dance with you, and “your breasts” are not pricy. He talked about using a strategy by finding sentences that have this type of structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB, then changing the sentence to where it’s arranged as SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. That’s how he formed the following sentence, “The bra, sitting in a class or dancing at a bar, performed well.” But, it sounds weird so throw in a couple words and BAM you get “Whether you're sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performs well.” This passage is important because dangling conversations can make the writer look stupid and uneducated, but whenever you go through the sentence structure strategy, the writer comes up with a genius sentence. I’m not sure if I can fully connect to this, but these dangling conversations sound like a form of run-on sentences, and I struggle with those. This strategy can help me improve my flaws of writing run-ons. If students and writers take this helpful hint into account for their own writings, then this can improve their writing and make it more interesting.

I choose this picture because at the end of the article the author said, “Do not use it's, you're or who's when you mean its, your or whose. Or vice versa!” I felt like this picture relates with the article, and it’s something that everyone from time to time, still struggles with.