Dawkins&Bryson

Dawkins Reading

This reading was definitely difficult to get through for me. Like it states in the book, in high school you get so used to teachers grading so hard on grammatical errors that it almost makes you afraid to approach them. Since the day you learn how to write, all the proper ways to use punctuation are forced down your throats until you cannot stand to hear another rule. So to me, I found it hard to even understand what Dawkins was saying because I find myself forgetting all the rules for dashes and semi colons because I’ve barely used them.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling:

1.       Dawkins is challenging the writing constructs with the use of punctuation and the strict rules that seem to come with them. Like he says in the beginning teachers only seem to tell us what not to do and how not to do it when they should be telling us what do to and how to do it. When you force rules onto students, at least for me, it seems you only scare them away. Dawkins is then challenging what teachers are teaching their students basically. He is questioning the strict rules of punctuation and showing his readers all the ways the rules can be bent and broken apart into sentences that are still completely correct. When there is a one-rule strict approach to punctuation and only brings negativity to the writer and reading. Rules are meant to be tested and stretched.

5. Before reading this, I know I was kind of clueless about all punctuation rules. I don’t think there is one person on the earth that knows every single rule and is completely perfect in their writing. I didn’t even know what dashes were used for but now I know they can be used like commas or parenthesis (I think!). I have never used a dash or semi colon in writings that I can remember but I think it is just because I’ve been scared to use them in fear of getting points taken off from a paper. It’s hard for me to identify when I can use them or the difference between fragments and independent sentences. So hopefully this reading can help me become more adventurous in using punctuation.

Applying and Exploring Ideas:

4.

Dear Mrs. Grow:

        You are my English teacher and my creative writing teacher so you should know all about writing and creativeness in theory, right? Wrong. Not only did you make me feel as if I can never make a mistake grammatically but I lost a lot of my creativeness in formal writing. The biggest rule that sticks out to me that I had to follow in your class is the use of “I”.  Although “I” is the biggest way to express creativity, you took that all away from me. This rule is very unnecessary to me, even if the paper is formal; it is my own writing and my own opinions. I am speaking from personal experience and research in all of my papers therefore I should be allowed to use “I”. It is MY paper and MY writing. If you lose your sense of “I”, you began to lose the content of your paper. I begin to focus so hard on using substitute words for “I” like “one” and I have to change all my sentences around so the word “one” sounds grammatically correct in my writing. That is where I go crazy because I am focusing so hard on getting “I”’s changed into different words that my content is lost and I tend to stick with my first draft because I am so exhausted from writing when I’m done. Writing is all about creativity and I believe when you force students to take “I” out of their papers, you lose the worth of the paper.

Bryson Writing

Before You Read:

3) Technology has not only affected the way we speak to each other but it has completely changed it dramatically. There is now text messaging, Facetime, skyping, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and a thousand different types of internet websites and phone apps that have completely revolutionized the way we communicate. Communication has become easier, quicker and less expensive. Why send a letter when you can send someone a text message or email? Some of the ways we communicate on these are grammatically correct but others are not very acceptable. In my being younger, I definitely believe it is more efficient and it is easier to understand people in these new technological ways but for others it does not have the same effect. New words that I can think of would be “tweet” in the sense of your writing something not birds chirping. Also words like “ttyl” and “LOL” are not really words but I kind of see them as words.

Discussion and Journaling:

1.       Bryson is basically challenging the English language. He is challenging who controls it and who is saying what we can and cannot do. For so many words there are so many different meanings and tenses, he is challenging who the people are that tell us we have to follow those and why we have to follow them in the first place. He is questioning certain words, the true meaning of them but also the way we use them and what makes a way correct or not correct. For example the words imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, he continuously brings them up to show his point. He also questions the split initiative and why the English language has to follow so many Latin rules.

3) Prescriptive is the way we impose the rules onto our language. Descriptive is how we describe those rules. The way we have to complete our sentences with a certain structure for example, with a verb and a noun in each, that is prescriptive. It gives us exact guidelines onto what should be in our sentence, what it can start with and also what it can end with. I think descriptive can be a little bit more difficult but it is how we describe those words and how we are shown we should use them. Just like the words “What?” and “How?” are sentences but we have to know why. Descriptivist’s are open to change understand that there are some things that we all agree on but we don’t really know why we all agree on them.

Applying and Exploring Ideas:

1.       The English language has hugely changed, from the times we’re we used to use circumflex’s on our words to now we used words like “LOL”. A lot of the strict Latin rules that we started out using have been changed and simplified. We only have up to 6 different tenses of the world when Latin can have up to 120. The language has changed to be more sufficient and to better our verbs and nouns and our understanding of our sentences. I think Bryson would accept the change but might not agree with some of it. Words like “bromance”, “chillax”, “crunk”, “droolworthy” and “grrrl” have now been added to the dictionary. This brings a huge step into modern English that would never be referring to as proper or of Latin descent in my opinion.