Eng151- Bryson & Dawkins

Dr. Steven Kapela

Avalon Bednarcik

Before you Read

3. Technology has changed the way humans communicate in many ways. Somewhat beginning with writing letter, to constantly texting. This takes away so much face to face contact with people you love and care about. Technology in my opinion has also made people more ignorant, and has destroyed our knowledge of grammar. It does help us communicate faster, but less efficiently. Technology like Skype is very beneficial to correcting this problem.  Technology isn’t always grammatically correct because on most sources you can you abbreviations, and the other person you are communicating to will still understand what you are saying, an example is lol. This can affect your understanding of what people are saying because many other cultures with less technology will never understand these words because they are not included in the dictionary. New words that people from cultures and even an older generation wouldn’t understand can include, rolf, smh, and gata.

D & J

1. Bryson is specifically challenging the writing construct of the parts of speech and the way grammarians look at it. Bryson states how he believes parts of speech are entirely notional. His example of this is, when he gives an example sentence and rewrites it. Just by the reorganization of the word, suffering, it changes the word from a verb to a noun.  Many words in the English language are abused, to the degree that we do not know how to properly use them. Some of these words can included, uninterested and disinterested, between imply and infer. Also he states how our entire language is based on the Latin language. These to language in our current time he believes have very little in common. The English language has a lack of authority and can be very complex and confusing because of these various reasons.

3. What Bryson is trying to say within this statement is that, why would you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular. The prejudice Bryson classifies this under is a split infinitive. He explains how a Conservative Politian only returned letter including a split infinitive, which is an adverb comes between to and a verb. He expels his two examples of this, which includes; English ought to conform to the grammatical concepts that died thousand years ago, and you wish to cling to pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority. I really have never looked at English, let alone talking in this way. I have only seen communication as proper or ignorant and this statement is pretty self-explanatory. Any normal person can tell someone has never learned proper or even common English to some extent.

Applying and Exploring

1. Bryson states that English authority attacks the construction different than as a regrettable American, and how things appear differently in Washington than in London. He believes this statement is very ungrammatical. We use words in a very unattractive way- admittedly, mercifully, happily, curiously and so on. WE are instructed to resort to a clumsily passive and periphrastic construction, and the reason authorities maintain that hopefully in the first sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary- that’s is doesn’t belong to any other part of the sentence. I’ve seen how English has modernized a lot, because half the time both my parents and my grandparents can’t understand what I am saying. This is because alone our current generation has created a whole new language by itself. I believe Bryson would completely condone this and hates how ignorant our language has become.

Dawkins

Q & J

1. Dawkin is challenging the writing concept of how people understand punctuation rules, and offers a solution to the way people construct rules.

3. Dawkins made my whole view of punctuation change. He talks about how teacher do make students look at punctuation in a very strict way. He gives sixty nine examples of how you have choices between periods and semicolons, semicolons and commas, and commas and dashes, dashes and parentheses. I never looked at punctuation in this way and before reading this article, punctuation actually scared me.

Applying and exploring

4. In high school and grade school, I can honestly say I had the writing skill of a kindergartener. Although I cannot tell how much this class has already improved my writings. If I was writing a letter to a past teacher it would be my third grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, because I didn’t learning anything that year. It would include all the things I need to learn and really wish I did, although this could be my fault for not paying attention, but there is no way of proving now.

Dear Mrs. Brown,

                There are many concepts about writing I really don’t understand. I can name countless sentence structure rules I’ve never understood. Also many simple word rules like the different between a short and long vowel, and syllables. I am in another remedial English class besides this one and I finally understanding the concepts of nouns, verbs, adjective, and etc. Now that’s bad, I’m in college and I don’t know how to pick prepositional phrases out of a sentence. Do you want to know why I didn’t learn these rules? Because they are pointless. I know this because I made it all the way to college without knowing anything about them. Apparently it is required to know these things though, if you are attempting to become a communications major though.  I’ve gotten though every English class I’ve ever been in though with no grade lower than a ‘B’ my entire life, knock on wood. So, thank you Mrs. Brown for not making sure I learned these rules because they are pointless and unnecessary to me. That is all, thank you, and has a wonderful day.

Sincerely, Avalon B