My never done thunk us'ns orta bug we chilluns wif al them detales uv grammer. S'long as thu content uv there brillant thowts are cleer, why git bogged down wif trivier?
Showing my age here, but I have always believed our spiral into semi-literacy began with our having abandoned sentence diagramming in school. It sharpened verbal skills and taught logic simutaneously, great exercize.
By the way, I also believe we need to put the missing gerund case on the side of milk cartons. Anyone seen one lately?
When I was in high school (mid-80s), an English teacher grew so frustrated with our writing that he attempted to show us the mistakes by diagramming the sentences. He was quite disappointed when he realized none of us knew what he was talking about.
I would say that I am a better than average writer, but I have a lot of trouble explaining to someone why a sentence needs to be fixed. The best I can say is that it doesn't seem correct to me, or it sounds awkward. I think I have done so much reading in my life that I have internalized "correctness".
Unfortunately, I've been finding a lot of mistakes in books written in the last handful of years.
***Showing my age here, but I have always believed our spiral into semi-literacy began with our having abandoned sentence diagramming in school. It sharpened verbal skills and taught logic simutaneously, great exercize. ***
I taught all three of my children how to diagram their sentences. They all improved in their tests as a result. It is SO simple to teach diagramming. VISUAL AID.
When I asked one teacher whey it wasn't taught, she said, "Oh, that's SO old fashioned." Yeah, sure!