When should you grammar?

The classic "slow children" sign.
Perhaps CAUTION or Drive Slowly
would have been a better choice.
© Second Print Productions

Edited using picnick.  Painted over the
original boy image and replaced with
a stamp.

Today’s assignment is to edit a photo online using two different online editors.  Once I have finished that, I am to post the photos online describing the programs I used, the methods for editing, and which program I preferred.  The task is simple enough, but it does not have much to do with grammar. So I thought I would add a little twist to keep my theme and to stress when grammar is essential.   

A Neck Dote All Evidense

I work part time in the trade industry in order to pay the bills while in school.  Doing so has brought up the interesting dichotomy of being an English major in an environment where little value is placed upon whether or not you can identify a word usage error.  But, even here the importance of grammar comes up every now and then.  When he is in a good mood, my boss is fully capable of self deprecation, and one of his favourite stories to tell is the one where he had to engrave a plaque for an award.  Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses and my boss is a very intelligent person, but English is definitely not his strong point, particularly spelling. 

Edited with Sumopaint.  Cut and pasted the boy image to
right.  Created a cartoon bomb using the paint features.
Cropped.

The story goes; he was tasked to engrave a safety award which he did with exquisite precision.  The award looked very professional and it was presented to the company and put on display immediately.  Unfortunately my boss never made a safety award; instead, he made a SAFTY award.  The error was not found until months after the award had been on display and as a result he was suitably embarrassed.

That being said, anytime your work is on display for public scrutiny grammar receives great importance.  If you want to look professional and you don’t want the message you're conveying construed into something completely different, then you had better care about grammar.  Otherwise you end up seeing things like actual church signs which read “Dont let worries kill you let the church help.”

  

--Blake

Review: It has been a while since I have edited a photo but both Picnik and Sumopaint were pretty straightforward.  Picnik definitely took less time to achieve the desired result, but I guess what I did with Sumopaint was a little more complex. The biggest thing I liked about Sumopaint was the ability to Ctrl Z to undo, which is something that I do very often when editing photos.  The simple user interface is probably Picnik's best feature.  I don't have a real strong preference to either at the moment, however, if pressed I would probably lean towards Picnik.

I can has Twitter?

So the assignment this week was to sign up for twitter and I must say it was not without controversy.  There appears to be a lot of resistance to Twitter from the class for various reasons.  Some just plain don’t like Twitter; others fail to see the relevance for a classroom setting.  Even after being shown a video about the beneficial uses of twitter in the class, I am not without my reservations.

Forget the probable distraction it will cause when Paris Hilton twits about her new shoes and all the students in the class are instantly notified.  Forget the detached social interaction of sitting behind a computer screen twitting with the twit sitting right next to you.  And forget the privacy / security concerns when random lurker guy starts twitting spam to students.  The part that concerns me with Twitter the most is the 140 character limit.

Y Shud U care about 140 chars?

All the benefit Twitter can bring to an English classroom will be gone the moment a student runs out of room on his twit, and the only way to shorten it enough is to remove all the commas and apostrophes and then replace real words with shortened forms.

Grammar is getting worse these days and my theory as to why is twofold.  First, 100 years ago there was a much greater emphasis on grammar.  Of the three or four English classes that you would take in high school, one of them would be grammar.  That’s it, just grammar.  Second, if you wanted entertainment at home you would read.  There weren’t many other options for storytelling when TV and radio weren’t around.

TL;DR

People still read lots today.  In fact I would not be surprised if young people read more today, thanks to the internet, than they did 100 years ago.  The problem is that they are reading either poorly edited websites, or forums, texts, and status updates which have no grammar rules at all.  In the case of Twitter you are almost forced to throw grammar out the window if you have something meaningful to say so that you can stay within the character limit.  Maybe we can squeak a Harry Potter novel into young kids if they let their guard down, or we can convince teen girls to read a watered down vampire love story if there is some steamy heartthrob on the cover.  In general, however, people today have such short attention spans that “fast entertainment” supersedes reading something truly engaging and thought provoking.

Twitter, for better or worse, is probably here to stay, whether or not it will make it into my classroom remains to be seen.  For now, I am joining the twits to see how it goes.

--Blake

Mine Blog

Okay first things first.  I am not some crazy grammar pedant; the intent here is to have some fun.  My name is Blake Brown and I am currently enrolled in UVIC's Teaching Program and one of the assignments I have been tasked with is starting a blog.  So with that being said I thought I would find something apropos to one of my teaching areas and run with that.



Donald Knuth has a Grammar



Something that I have noticed as an English major is that a lot of people think that I: can spell every word in the dictionary, have some great enthusiasm for punctuation, will spontaneously combust if you tell me that you “seen” a movie last night.  Well guess what, a degree in English does not ensure perfect grammar.  I can pretty much guarantee that I would never win a spelling bee, and if I correct someone for saying something like "I seen," it's because I dont want to pick up the habit.



I am sure some of my English professors would love it if I could stop everyone from texting each other LOLROFLBBQ, as stuff like that is destroying good grammar.  But truth be told sometimes it’s funny to say “lol” in the middle of a conversation with friends.  These things have their place, maybe not in the middle of your doctoral dissertation, but most certainly as a text message response to your friend’s lame joke that vegetarian zombies eat "GRAINS!!!"  So I am not quite sure what direction this blog will take, but at the very least I shall try to poke some fun at the English language.

In that light I ask you, if cactus plural is cacti, does that mean that Jesus plural is Jesi?

--Blake