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By Cindy Reitzi
What distinguishes a clumsy 200-word run-on sentence from a captivating 200-word piece of artistic prose? Clearly, part of it is the skill of the writer. But one of a writer’s main tools is a deep grasp of standard grammar and punctuation.
Grammar is important in creating meaning in written language. Take, for instance, the now-classic punctuation exercise for the following sentence: “Woman without her man is nothing.” Men wrote: “Woman, without her man, is nothing,” while women wrote: “Woman: Without her, man is nothing.”
In this case, punctuation is essential to the meaning conveyed (and determines where you stand on heterosexual co-dependency).
For me, effective usage requires meaningful written context, although meaningful writing doesn’t always produce effective usage.
I remember one student who broke her 3½ semester-long written silence in English 9 with an “essay” on Romeo and Juliet.
“Marching majestically across the page,” (as Mark Twain would put it), she carried on for eight enthusiastic, typewritten, 12-point font pages with few periods and no paragraph breaks. (She did, however, double-space). She didn’t burst into eloquence because she suddenly discovered how to use a semicolon; she finally had something powerful to write. Romeo and Juliet gave her a context and pride in her masterpiece. Grammar notwithstanding, I was proud of her, too. It was a first step. Like my student, I also needed context to teach gramma.
This summer, digging through papers, I found some grammar quizzes I wrote for a class five years ago. I was teaching parts of speech and decided that students might care more about nouns or verbs if they were the nouns the verbs were talking about. So I wrote sample sentences with which they could easily identify. Not only did they have plenty of context, they were virtual snapshots of our classroom relationships at the time. It made teaching grammar fun for me as well.
Because these grammar quizzes used sentences about the students, reviewing them took me on a trip down memory lane. I recalled:
Student friendships
Liz frequently laughs at Moreece (or is it with him?)
Ana baked a cake for Karina’s birthday.
Who was ‘boy-crazy’
• Ms. Reitzi said, “Darcy, stop manhandling Jon!”
One memorable Badger game
• Jake sighed incredulously, “28-0 in the first 10 minutes...!” and
• Until last week, they were Badger fans.
9th grade issues
• When Jeff threw paper at Felicia, Ms. Reitzi asked, “Are you in middle school?”
• Jeff rolled his eyes when Ms. Reitzi asked that same, tired question.
And the quiet kids
• Noah looks quiet, but secretly he is a Ninja death master.
By far my favorite memory was solving a class management problem using the quiz. I particularly remember one strong student who started to rest on her laurels and play “beauty parlor” in class. She never went so far as to dig out her make-up kit and start troweling it on in class but she definitely liked to brush her hair.
Once, when I asked her to put the brush away, she predictably complained, “Why? I’m not bothering anyone.” Because I was peeved that she just couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, I remarked officiously, “You’re disrupting others’ learning processes.”
Baiting me yet another time, (while brushing her hair) she snidely inquired of her friend, “Am I ‘disrupting your learning process?’ ” to their raucous amusement, making me regret my lame retort.
So I decided to try humor and hold up a grammatical mirror and regain control by inserting a new sentence into our next grammar quiz. As they took the quiz, I watched. Both girls got to this sentence at the same time, and burst out laughing:
“Liz brushed her thick, lustrous hair in English class and quipped, ‘Molly, am I disrupting your learning process?’ ”
After that, whenever Liz pulled out her brush, I’d say, “Liz, what beautiful, lustrous hair you have,” and she’d laugh and put the brush away. We came to an understanding after that.
Now, the question is, what do I do for an encore while teaching punctuation?
November 4, 2005