Back to Grammar School

I can read and I can write.  I hope I do both well enough to get by.  I feel like I have a fairly good grasp on the English language and know when grammatically something is incorrect—or at least some of the time I do.  I can read the newspaper and last I heard (and this was when I was young) the newspaper was written for a sixth-grade comprehension level, so that's something.   And yet I'm terrible at grammar itself.

And by that I mean I can't correctly diagram all elements in a sentence of reasonable length.  And I fret over punctuation—is it appropriate to use a colon here or should it be a dash?  Can I explain the difference between a reflexive and a possessive pronoun?  Do I make the same silly grammatical error repeatedly in this blog that causes my readers to shake their heads and think, "When will she learn"?

I've always thought if you can't explain a thing, then you don't truly understand a thing.  So, this morning I went back to school.  I wanted not only quizzes but explanations and examples.  Start me at the beginning, say nouns or something, and work me through the most complicated rules on punctuation.  For example, when does punctuation mark go inside and when does it go outside the parenthesis?

I looked for apps.  You know there were eleventy-twelve grammar apps available on the app store, but most of them were quizzes alone.  I needed hard-core education.  Well, maybe I needed mom-core education, but, either way, I needed more than just quizzes.  I did find an app I liked and was about to buy it when looking at user reviews, someone pointed me to the company's website.  Why?  Because you can buy this marvel of grammatical education for one-third the price in PDF form and you can not only use it on your device, but your computer too.  So sold.

So now grammar boot camp has officially begun.  And the first section is on verbs.  "I totally know what a verb is, this shall be easy," I thought to myself.  And then at page three—at the very start of the entire course—I read something I didn't know.  Ouch.  Now, mind you, I don't mind not remembering many of the things I've learned in school.  Say, for example, details about the American Civil War or how to calculate related rates, but that's largely because I don't use that information regularly.  I don't, shall we say, "need" it.

But, I do write every day.  I would like to write better and I dislike not knowing if I've punctuated or hyphenated correctly.  Some people don't care about language—I was one of those people for most of my adolescence.  Some people like to put emoticons and abbreviations and "l33t speak" (nerd for "elite") in their text, and that's fine for them.  But, and here's the big but...if I'm planning to write something of note other than this little blog someday, it stands to reason I'd better get up on my grammar.

The Big Boy Update:  Register check, aisle three, please.  He tried mightily to get into their plastic shopping cart today; and he made it.  He made it with arms, legs and half of his body dangling over the sides.  He then asked his sister to push him (on the carpet) and she dutifully went to the back and tried in vain to get to a cashier and see how much he cost.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Scratchy.  Only not like her brother.  She moves fast and she runs into things.  With her very light skin, every scratch and bump she gets shows up red and makes us look like we're not on top of our jobs as parents.  She must try to protect her body from any falls by placing her head in the way, because it seems all the scratches are on her face.

Someone Once Said:  When you have eliminated what you can’t do, what remains is what you must do.