Grammar and Writing

Looking over the grammar rules implanted a weird nostalgia in me for my school days. Making me remember the days of flipping through the text book in sunlit classrooms. Listening to the teacher as she wrote out sentence structures on the board.

It also made me remember why I once heard a Frenchman describe English as an "ugly lurching fool of a language". Commas in particular need some kind of tribunal to ensure their purpose are clear and concise. Never once have I met an English teacher who could give me a complete answer for what commas were used for. The best I got were definitions from the textbook or personal advice. As an aspiring writer and English teacher this bodes poorly for the ease of my professions. Don't even get me started on semi-colons.

This is what happens when a bunch of languages are dumped in a bucket and allowed to spawn.

I also started to remember learning how to cite. We weren't taught how to do so until Senior year, and even then only in a running start based course. I didn't understand the process of it, in particular the indecipherability of the citations themselves seemed like spy code to me (I wonder if it was my autism acting up). I took me two years into college to understand how to cite correctly. It was a rare miss by my high school English teacher (who I adored and still consider one of my favorite teachers).

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