Anything that is worth knowing about can be simplified to a basketball metaphor: the pick and roll. I might be oversimplifying, but sit back and follow along anyway. The pick and roll is a basketball play in which a ball handler has a “pick” or “screen” set for him by another player who, in most cases, will roll to the basket to accept a pass. It is the most common fixture of modern basketball. Teams spend hours upon hours learning the basic motions of this play. Teams remember this basic structure no matter how complicated the sets become. Our “friends” grammar and punctuation operate the same way within our lives. The plan (with aggressive hyperbole) is to walk you through the complex metaphor of a ten-second action that can be the key to grammatical achievement.
The key to starting a great pick and roll comes before you even call the play. Personnel and spacing are both necessary to take into account before you can even think about rolling the ball out there. Have five guys who can’t pass? (You’re bad at building a basketball team.) Obviously-- you should make arrangements for different personnel. Regarding spacing: coaches drool at the possibilities of having room to turn the court into the dreamscapes that only a maniacal, middle-aged man can scribble in a notebook. And they should! The thought of ruining a perfectly good play by forcing limited room upon world-class athletes moves those same middle-aged men to tears faster than an ASPCA commercial.
These factors are similar to how writing styles affect your reader. No matter how great your grammar and punctuation are: poor diction, voice, and non-concise writing will ruin your credibility. Many students and writers throw these rough choices around like a jump shot in the d...
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...usand words get assigned to that ten-second action mentioned previously? It’s simple; basketball and grammar are both art. They both require a deft mind that is willing to always strive for something better. Details are the key to success in both pursuits. The fact that you can dissect my vocabulary for days on one page like a frog on the canvas that is Microsoft Word is what makes the system of grammar exciting, like basketball. This excitement and possibility are adjectives not often associated with language from our mouths or on the page. Luckily, things don’t always have to stay the status quo. If you start to appreciate your use of grammar the same way that you approach your favorite art, that excitement will find you. In summation, whether you want to score points in the grade book or on the scoreboard, remember how much easier it can be with a good pick.
David Foster Wallace, author of the essay “Authority and American Usage*,” praises and advocates for “good” writers who have a strong rhetorical ability, which he defines as “the persuasive use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of an audience” (Wallace 628). To have a strong rhetorical ability, an author needs to be aware of whom their audience is, in order to present their information in a way that will be influential on their audience. Wallace recognizes that an author who applies a strong rhetorical ability will be able to connect with the audience so that they respond “not just to [their] utterance but also to [them]” (Wallace 641). An author needs to take into consideration not just content, syntax and grammatical structure (their “utterance”) but also how their character will be perceived by their audience. A positive tone will make the author seem more pleasant and relatable, whereas a negative tone connotes arrogance and pretentiousness. That is why it is crucial for an author to recognize that an audience will respond to “them” and not just their “utterance,” as an author’s appearance to their readers can also shape how impactful their writing is.
Frahm holds a similar point of view encouraging clear, straightforward writing not one with a “Confusing introduction. Lack of content. Bad transitions. (and) Excessive grammatical errors.” (Frahm 271).
Writing can have many goals: to inform, to persuade, or to entertain, but in each section of writing the major
Good grammar shows how others feel about and respond to each other, which carries a lot of importance in the business arena. Making an impression on customers and colleagues through the usage of proper grammar can help an employee maintain an air of professionalism and can help show others that he really cares about his job and his company's products or services. The fact
With the intention of sounding impressive, novice writers use pretentious language because they believe that this makes them sound knowledgeable on the topic they are writing about. Many think that they sound smarter when they use big words. The truth of the matter is that smart writers who really u...
Through the years, linguists have produced many models of grammar, however, two models have proven to be most controversial. They are Chomsky's generative grammar of formal syntax and functional, usage-based approaches. These two fields, formalists and functionalist, are divided into two divisions of linguistic theories without cooperation. While one field focuses on cognitive abilities, the other directs their attention to syntax and universal grammar (henceforth UG). This essay investigates the main characteristics and basic differences of generative grammar and usage-based approaches.
Writing is an important part of everyone’s life, whether we use it in school, in the workplace, as a hobby or in personal communication. It is important to have this skill because it helps us as writers to express feelings and thoughts to other people in a reasonably permanent form. Formal writing forms like essays, research papers, and articles stimulates critically thinking. This helps the writer to learn how to interpret the world around him/her in a meaningful way. In college, professors motivate students to write in a formal, coherent manner, without losing their own voice in the process. Improving your writing skills is important, in every English class that’s the main teaching point; to help students improve their writing skills. Throughout my college experience I have acknowledge that
From the teacher: Cat's interest in the subject of this paper was sparked by her consulting clients repeated requests to have her "just go over the grammar" in their papers. She wondered what they meant by that. Why were they so concerned about grammar? As a result, she decided to investigate how students are instructed in grammar. This paper, her final presentation for the Peer Writing Consultant course, grew out of her research.
5. Clarity Serious writers strive to be understood, strive for clarity. Bad writers, on the other hand, aren’t afraid of being obscure as long as they can make the reader think, “What an extensive vocabulary! What learning! What talent!” The surest sign of bad prose is the use of uncommon words where common words would suffice.
Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two inter-related studies: Morphology and Syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units called morphemes. For example, Derivational Morphology is a word building process by which we generate (or derive) the Noun teacher from out of two smaller morphological segments: the verb stem {teach} + suffix {er}. Syntax, on the other hand, is concerned with how Words are strung together to form larger units of expressions such as (partial) @link Phrases, @link Clauses, and (full) @link Simple Sentences. As an example, it is owing to an infringement on syntax (and not morphology) which prevents us from speaking the ill-formed sentence *John likes to teacher (=John likes to teach).
Grammar helps you understand what people are trying to get through to you and their ideas about the topic. According to T.Rowe Price, who works on employees’ communication skills, says “so much is driven by the written
For teachers, this allows them to evaluate the student’s work. The nice part of the Glossing process is that grammar instruction is individualized. The teacher can assist students individually while others fill out their “Glossing Sheets.” This process also allows the teacher, depending on the grade, to steer the process based on what they are teaching their students. For instance, Johansen and Shaw explain how a freshman teacher may highlight fragments and run-ons in their students’ papers while a senior teacher might highlight parallelism (98). However, to keep students from feeling overwhelmed by the amount of grammar rules, a list of twenty most difficult grammar rules for students in 9th to 12th grade was created, English Conventions Rule Sheet. Based upon this list, the teachers would go through the student’s compositions and highlight the rules that were violated. Johansen and Shaw conclude the article with the results of their research which consisted of students understanding the Glossing process, a better understanding of the grammar rules, or finding the process tedious yet
The job of grammar is to organize words into sentences, and there are many ways to do that or we could say that- Words can be organized into sentences in many different ways. There are hundreds of grammar rules but the basic ones refer to sentence structure and parts of speech, which are noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, conjunction and interjection. The parts of speech come in many varieties and may show up just about anywhere in a sentence. To know for sure what part of speech a word is, we have to look not only at the word itself but also at its meaning, position, and use in a sentence.
Recently, linguists and professionals in education have shifted away from viewing grammar through a traditional lens and have focused their attention more on the functional use of grammar. Functional grammar does not view language as simply a set of rules; instead, it focuses on the way language is put together so that meaning is communicated for a specific purpose. It is concerned with how the various bits of language in a text work together to fit varying ranges of cultural and social contexts. Unlike the prescriptive, traditional approach, functional grammar is a meaning-based, descriptive approach.
Grammar teaching has an irreplaceable place in English language teaching because of the fact that without teaching grammar learners cannot learn the system of English language; they may not achieve to express their intentions or meaning of the messages in a well-established communicative activity. It has been seen that throughout the history, the attention of grammar teaching has differed from time to time. In the beginnings of the twentieth century, grammar teaching was considered so essential that other aspects of language were ignored as it was thought that it was necessary to know the grammatical rules in order to communicate appropriately.