Top Grammar Reminders - Spring 2010

1. Know the difference between their, they’re, and there  
2. Eliminate your contractions (including they’re) – there are NO contractions in scholarly writing. 
3. Check your comma usage around quotation marks.    
4. Do not use single quotation marks as you would with your fingers in general speech.  Technically, the single quotation mark does not exist in scholarly writing.  
5. Possessive apostrophe usage: Ben’s sitar, Akbar’s tomb, Chelsea’s elephant.  The most common mistake this semester has been writing, “It’s,” when you mean, “Its.”
6. Proper colon and semicolon usage. 
7. Proper usage of italics - words in another language. 
8. SPELLING – especially names and places. 

Parallelism

Mary continually refers to the students' poor parallel construction.  I am learning a lot about grammar working with her. 

For example, I appreciate Mary's poise, intelligence, and sense of humor.  (this sentence is badly parallel constructed).  What I mean to say is that I appreciate Mary's poise, her intelligence, and her sense of humor.  The wikiarticle says proper parallelism gives more focus and form to each item, thus bringing more focus to the writing as a whole.

good stuff.

Affect vs. Effect

Aardvark - a very easy noun.

Affect is a verb.
Effect is a noun.

most of the time.

Homonyms

What's a homonym?

They're, Their, There.
You're, your
Pair, pear
layed, laid --?
rose, rose
holy, holey

like that.  can you think of any more?

"To Boldly Go..."

So, it's okay to split infinitives?  Star Trek and Grammar Girl say so...

Amid vs. Amidst and Among

I found a great grammar blog.  Maybe I'll learn how to stop splitting my infinitives. 


Here are the comments about Amid vs. Amidst.

Seems it's better to use "amid" or "amidst" when talking about things.  For example, "Amid her academic inquiries..."   "Among" is used for people, i think.  For example, "While he was among his peers..."

I'm still not understanding why to use "amid" rather than "amidst" - seems like, in scholarly language, those folks go with 'amid.'

Joel?  Have any thoughts?

Grammar

Did I miss something, or do students not learn anymore that there needs to be a comma after a preposition that introduces a statement.

I.E.

During the day I walked up and down the hillside looking for four-leaf clovers.

The correction should be:

During the day, I walked up and down the hillside looking for four-leaf clovers.

Right? or Wrong? 

and according to what rules?