Blog 8

I finally figured out why I'm not a huge fan of the Frank Smith readings. He's very wordy; I'm more a fan of being concise. Sometimes you don't need 20 pages to say something, it can be said in a couple of paragraphs. While his examples this time were interesting, I still feel like he didn't need to spend so much time detailing each technicality of writing.

I enjoyed his quote that "being a writer begins with seeing (yourself) as a writer" (193). If you can't see yourself as someone who writes, how can you get your words onto the page? It's a teacher's job to instill that belief into students, because sometimes the parents don't or can't do that. There's also the idea of reading like a writer, which is instrumental in learning how to write. You can study that other person's sentence structure, the way they organize their thoughts, and from there begin to create your own style of writing. Amusing, how Smith points out that spelling can be learned from reading. So can vocabulary. I have a couple of friends overseas who learned English in grammar school, but their internet travels have helped them learn conversational English. They've then incorporated that into their writing, and it's made them better writers.

Revision and editing... what do I have to say? Well, I've always been one of those people who write one draft and that's it. It's not so much as being taught that you just write to hand something into a teacher. It's more along the lines of "Good, it's done, I'm done, no more of this paper." However, things are different when it's something I've written that I really care about. That's when I take the time to go through and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

As for the Hartwell essay on grammar, I have to admit, he brings up a few good points. When I think of grammar, I think of the general usage of the rules of English. I don't go into specifics of subject-predicate and so on. However, I believe some of it needs to be taught! Yes, we pick up some of the general ideas of usage through speaking and reading, but does it stick? How many times have you heard someone say something and been tempted to correct them because it just sounds wrong? If I remember my high school years correctly (and I may not), we stuck to general usage throughout the years, except for 11th grade. That's when we spent half a semester or so (block scheduling- everything was in semesters) immersing ourselves in grammar. I have to admit, it was long. It was sometimes boring. But we learned it. Maybe we just need to find the key to making it interesting for students instead of just stating "These are the rules, now follow them." We shouldn't be dropping it all together.