On Feb 12, 2006, at 21:46, Martha Krieg wrote:
Ah, but when you put your text into Word, the spell-checker squiggles under the "colour" words,
I don't know what my writing program is now -- Word, Word Perfect or something else entirely -- nor where its spell-checker lives. But I do know that I had to switch it off on the old puter, because I write both in English and in Polish and, when I wrote in Polish, the whole text was underlined, which drove me nuts :) And, anyway, it's a useless tool, since it'll accept what might amount to an incorrect spelling, depending on a situation (your/you're; their/they're; its/it's etc). I know where most of my spelling "weak spots" are in English (double consonants, c/s and s/z), keep a dictionary handy, and check.
And, a propos spelling, Ruth wrote:
I remember asking one of my daughter's teachers at a conference why, with Traci's terrible spelling, her paper was scored as high as it was. I was told that these days the emphasis is put on making the student feel good about him/herself rather than correcting and possibly embarrassing them.
When my stepdaughter, whose spelling is also atrocious (I think it goes through the female line among the Duvalls; her grandma was as bad, and so is her aunt, but not my husband) was in school (30+ yrs ago), she used to get straight As for her English essays and for her creative writing class too. When I asked her how that was possible, she said it was the content and style that counted, not the niggling details like spelling :)
back to Martha's message:
and unless you have the grammar-checker turned on, it ignores the hypercorrection "he was nice to my mother and I" --- an overreaction to "My mother and me went to the store together." The teachers drilled so much on "My mother and *I* went to the store" that people started using it everywhere.
I know "where it's coming from", but it still bugs me :) English has so few cases and in so few words, you'd think they'd be easy to keep track of...
There's another fairly common "grammatical bug" in present-day English that pops up and bites once in a while. "As the smallest child in the family of 5, her brothers often made her the victim of their practical jokes"
I think of it as a "doesn't follow", but suspect it stems from another over-reaction -- the excessive dislike of passive form in English. Can't have passive ("as a [...], she was the victim [...]"); active's better, always. Add to it the the post-Hemingway obsession with "short and crisp" instead of "long and meandering" (a whole clause as a subject? Perish the thought) and you can eliminate a whole lot of punctuation marks, too...
I hated grammar throughout all the 11 yrs of school; couldn't tell a subject from an object if my life depended on it (not sure I could even *name* them <g>), and couldn't diagram a sentence any more than I could diagram a car's motor. To this day, my theoretical knowledge of Polish grammar is close to zero, and what I do know about it is "in retrospect" -- I apply to it what I learnt about *English* grammar, at the U. But formal grammar lessons in school were, thankfully, few and far between (and counted, maybe, for 5% of the grade); as long as your speech and writing were grammatically correct, you were OK. If your grammar was poor, the teacher would explain why, and how to improve it (read and write more).
I didn't really need to learn grammar until I hit the U, and then it was the *English* grammar. I needed that, because we were being trained as teachers, primarily, so would be expected to be able to *explain* the corrections we made to our students' papers...
-- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
