My Goals

Grammatical issues:?/ I don’t not know what your talking about.

            Although my grammatical are not quite that severe, there is definitely room for improvement. One of the issues I discovered that I have with grammar: commas. Another student in my creative writing class last year nicknamed me the “Comma Queen”. I’ll admit, if I don’t know if there should be a comma or not I usually add one anyways, just to be safe. COMMAS AND COMMAS AND MORE COMMAS. I can’t help myself. A lot of it comes from how I hear the voice in my head saying the words on paper. If I pause in my head, I use a comma in my writing. It is especially bad when I am writing fiction where I use a lot of voice. A possible cause of this is because I write a personal blog in which I do not worry about correcting grammatical errors and I use commas freely knowing that none of my readers would really judge me on it. For example here is an excerpt from one of my personal blogs:

“Sometimes happiness requires patience, focus, and a lot of hard work. You would think that it shouldn't take effort to experience happiness. Well, it doesn't. It takes effort to put all of the bad out of your mind, take a step back, relax and enjoy what's going on around you. For some annoying reason, many of our brains are trained to think of the worst possible situations in any and sometimes EVERY situation. Maybe it is so that we as humans can no how to react in any given situation. Like, okay I'm happy right now but just in case the world is going to end in five hours, I better prepare what I'm going to do about it. And, if it ends up ending in 3 days instead, I'll be able to do this, this, and this. So it's not always easy to get out of that mind set once you put yourself in it. It's not always easy to look at your life and say I'm just going to be happy and whatever happens happens. I'll tackle the bumps in the road when I come across them. But no, for me I'm looking miles down the road trying to check for bumps that I can prepare for, even if there aren't any I can see.”

As you can see, lots and lots of commas in just one chunk of writing!

            Another grammatical issue that I have is how to write dialogue. LONG DIALOGUES, SHORT DIALOGUES, SEVERAL DIALOGUES IN ONE CONVERSATION. I can write simple dialogues in a fictional story between two characters, but what fun is that? I realize all I need to do is pick up a book and see how the author writes their dialogues but I get too into stories to pay any attention. But if I don’t know how to write a dialogue well, how am I supposed to teach my students how to correctly write dialogues? As an example of a place where it would be an issue for me, when people are in a conversation talking back and forth at each other, does changing speaker result in change of paragraph every single time?

            Finally, even though there are likely to be many more issues in my grammar that need fixing, perhaps in this blog itself, these are the issues that seem most prominent to myself and my peers who look over my work. They are also the issues that I am most aware of in my own writing. However, another problem area of mine is changing tenses within my writing (without realizing it). Or more so, staying within one tense without changing it unless on purpose. Not only do I do it without realizing it, I could not make up a sentence right now as an example to show how to incorrectly or correctly do so without knowing the difference. Which is a definite problem. I never actually realized that I was doing this until last year when my creative writing professor pointed it out to our class. I was never once taught how to change or to stay in the same tense within writing. In fact, the issue was never brought up by any of my teachers in high school or college until last semester. Ridiculous right? So I wish I could give an example of it in here but I might embarrass myself by saying that I am writing it one way and end up writing it in the opposite way.

            Clearly I have some grammatical issues to be working on throughout the semester, but I am hoping that this class will not only help me with my own problem areas, but also help me learn how to teach my future students how to help them solve their grammatical wrong-doings.