grammar

In everyday speech, I'm pretty lenient with grammatical mistakes. I make them. Other people make them. We still communicate. I make a small effort to speak correctly, but I don't panic if my nouns and verbs don't quite agree. On this bog I'm pretty laid back about my own writing. However, in academic writing, I do my darndest to write like a professional. That means I use standard spelling and grammar conventions. I want to sound like I know what I'm writing about. I think this is reasonable.

That's why it was so shocking when one of my textbooks featured outrageous mistakes. For example: Assessments are good tools to find out where the students are at. Where are the students at? That poor, unneccessary "at" is just drifting along purposelessly at the end of the sentence. No one wants it there. It doesn't need to be there. It's just there, making the textbook narrator sound like a hick.

There were more mistakes. I can't remember them now - I think I blocked them out of my memory. Why am I reading such dribble?

On another grammatically amusing note, we had a discussion in Methods class that made me and my fellow grammar student friend laugh. In grammar class we had a discussion about how English doesn't have a gender neutral pronoun. If someone were to say, "An anonymous donor provided the funds for all the MIT students to go to a conference," I wouldn't know the gender of the donor. If I wanted to ask if the donor worked nearby, I would have to say donor or he/she. Anyway, this is getting boring. The point of the story is we had the exact same dicussion in methods class. And it was funny. It's not so funny written down in a blog paragraph, but I'm tired. I'm going to get more coffee and finish my homework now. I get to answer questions like what is my most creative response to this situation? Listen to your inner stillness and write down what insights you receive about yourself and the situation.

Gah.