Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Actively teach grammar or acquire by osmosis?

LOL. My take on semi-colons is that they're usually a pretentious decoration. Once you understand that their primary purpose in life is to connect two independent clauses, that leads you to one inevitable question: "What's wrong with a period?"


For me, it took learning a second language to see why it mattered at all. Lots of people have already mentioned how easy it is to play by ear, but you can't do that in a second language.

Also, this illustrates how educational outcomes can be skewed by family background. You can't successfully play it by ear if your ear has been tuned to the wrong key.

Yes! A thousand times yes.

I rarely toot my own horn, but I'm a really good editor. I have helped many people get published. My goal is to make sure my clients' writing makes sense and is clear and pleasant to read. Of course, I also make sure it follows the rules of their discipline.

I don't give a good goddamn about the ablative. (But I adore semicolons. They add so much musicality and subtlety. However, I admit that you can write perfectly well without them.)

I think that clarity IS good grammer. By definition.

Jus' sayin'.

-Mich

Loving this thread. I agree that much can be just absorbed by exposure, and that you can be a great writer without being able to explain grammar rules. I was so poorly served by my lack of a basis in English grammar, though, that it made learning a second lanuguage more difficult (Spanish), and even the third (German). I taught Spanish...but sometimes not very well because I was really bad at explaining grammar. I just know that I would have loved learning it the way dd did and I would have liked (would still like) to understand WHY something sounds right or wrong.

The semicolon is for when you've reached the end of you're sentence but you want to keep talking; it has to be another sentence and another but would have just looked silly there. I see no reason to overuse the semicolon; they're to be used sparingly. I think the semicolon may be my favorite punctuation mark but I do also love the txt emoticons and the £unn¥ 3Rit!ng where you try to use numbers and symbols for letters; it's hard to say which of the three i like better. I was driving and I saw freon r134a on an autozone sign and I spent a minute trying to read it before it dawned on me.

I can't never just not say nothing so I'll just quote dad, "It's a problem when I think that what I'm trying to say is more important than how it's being heard."

Wow - thanks for the great responses! This is definitely the forum when you want to get thought provoking responses to clarify your own thoughts.

I can see why it may be preferable to provide formal instruction. At the same time, I can also see why it is not completely necessary.

I am in the "I love semi-colons" camp although I would very seldom use it in the casual context of an internet discussion forum. To me, the use of semi-colons is often a question of precision and timing; sometimes you want a pause of a certain length.

The second language sub-thread is an interesting one. However, I msut say that it is entirely possible to "play it by ear" in a second language. I am bilingual and can personally attest to the possibility of being equally ignorant (as far as grammar) in two languages. However, I do recall being taught some grammar in various foreign language courses in junior high, high school and college, but I am not fluent in any of those languages. Since foreign language instructions in school were never particularly difficult, I can't quite imagine how much easier it would have been with prior grammar instruction in English.

Thanks for the references - I will check them out.

I totally agree with the bolded. I guess as long as you aren't trying to teach it to someone else, it really doesn't matter so much. I agree about foreign language instruction in school not being very difficult...it wasn't so much learning the language as really feeling fluent. I think for me perfectionism plays a big role here...I just want to sound like a native speaker, and that isn't going to happen no matter how well I might understand the grammar--but blaming it on my lack of instruction in English grammar seemed like a good excuse I guess!

I dearly love semicolons and colons; I also am a big fan of the Oxford comma, parenthetical statements, and quotation marks. (Ellipses, not so much.)
It's extremely gratifying when the child whose papers you've been editing lo these many years (and who, four years ago, couldn't spell his way out of a box with a compass and both hands) comes to you with a joke about punctuation. Even if he did lift it from Facebook, I appreciate that he understands the humor.

You may like the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (2004), a humorous best-seller (!) on grammar.

Quantum2003 hit the nail on the head for me with semicolons. I like to precisely engineer the meter of my writing. I started writing very conversationally and informally for a blog I created. I improperly employed hyphens, double-spacing, a line with only one word, and a mess of other traffic violations, all for the purpose of getting the reader to hear my snarkiness. (Mind you this was intended to be a blog for Internet friends about parenting/infertility).

To my surprise, this landed me some opportunities to write for
some well-known parent / baby magazines. When I turned in my first properly-punctuated piece, my editor asked me revert back to my informal 'blog-voice'...which is when I realized how much the Internet has influenced our consumption of written material.