Grammar lessons

I don’t teach writing like they used to in school. One of my first rules is leave the writing rules you learned in school at home. You will not need them here. Then I tell them about the left and right brains and the corpus callosum in between.

Our left brain holds all the data we have picked up in our lives, all the numbers, all the words, all the rules, all the facts are in our left brain. Our right brain contains our imagination, intuition, insights, emotions all the soft unquantifiable skills are there. You need your right brain to lead your writing process, to draw from the words in your left brain and make them flow onto the page. How to wake up the right brain is what I choose to teach and that’s what I concentrate on.

But — close to the end of my writing class I sit down with every student and edit their work with them explaining each edit — totally a left-brained process —  but absolutely necessary for good writing. For me this session is the most physically exhausting because to do it well, I have to put myself in the shoes of my student and try to figure out what he or she is trying to say and see if there is a way of saying it better — more simply, more clearly, so the writer communicates with the reader heart-to-heart. Not only that, the writing must be grammatically correct.

I don’t like to teach grammar. It’s boring. I learned it in school in Maryknoll College when learning to read and write in English was of utmost importance. Then in the grades we would have workbooks called Voyages in English and in high school those workbooks grew into textbooks. You had to spend your English Composition class doing those exercises. We also diagrammed sentences. I really enjoyed diagramming sentences, the more complex, the more fun. If you really want to learn grammar go to a bookstore and buy a book called Grammar for Dummies or something similar and you will learn it. Keep it close at hand so when you edit your writing you can check because grammar is complicated.

However, here are a few tips for the gentleman or woman who asked me write and give some grammar tips. One, make sure your subject and predicate are compatible.  If your subject or noun is singular, make sure your verb is also singular. In general (because there are exceptions) a noun is singular when it has no “s” and a verb is usually singular when it ends in “s.”  For example: “This box seems empty.” And “These boxes seem empty.”

To me that rule is easy enough to remember. Not to many Filipinos who will still write or say, “These boxes seems empty.” If you don’t get it, reread please and re-read again until you get it.

What are the exceptions? Collective nouns. From Google: “A collective noun is a word for a group of specific items, animals or people.” For example, a group of ships is called a fleet, a group of cows is called a herd, a group of lions is called a pride, a group of baseball players is called a team, and a group of ants is called a colony.  Collective nouns are always considered singular.  So — “the fleet is in” or “the herd is on the hillside.”

And there are more collective nouns, which when correctly used have no “s” at the end. Like baggage, luggage, furniture, jewelry. The words “baggages,” “luggages,” “furnitures,” “jewelries” DO NOT EXIST.  They are wrong. If you use them, you let others know that you do not know English. In other words, you are either baduy or jologs. The other thing that gets on my nerves these days is how we pronounce things. It’s not “adVOCacy.” It is “ADvocacy,” with the accent on the first syllable. I capitalized where the accent should be if you want to be perceived as an intelligent, well-schooled individual and not someone who is baduy or jologs. This paragraph represents my pet peeves in other people’s English. That’s why I sound so hostile and why I usually don’t like to give in to people’s requests for articles on particular topics.

The other thing is agreement between pronouns and their antecedents. If the antecedent is Betsy, the correct pronoun is her. If it is Henry, the pronoun is his. If referring to problems, the pronoun is they; and if it’s an issue, the pronoun is it. For example: “Stop worrying about your problems, they will be solved.” “That issue is so small it will solve itself.”

Let me end this piece by apologizing to people who I may have scolded for misuse of collective nouns or pronunciation. I apologize but please try to understand that your inadvertent ignorance simply drives me up the wall.

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