Grammar Nazi

3-26-10

I am not a Grammar Nazi.  Anyone who reads my blog can tell you that.  I’m not a very good proofreader.  Now, if I were in fact a Grammar Nazi, would I forget to proofread?  Of course not.  Besides peer review, I don’t think I’ve ever looked over a paper before handing it in.  That’s mostly because I procrastinate on papers so much that I don’t have time to look them over.  I don’t have an excuse for my blogs.  Lazy’s probably a good way to describe it.

Now, I do like grammar.  The rules of punctuation, double negatives, tense, and sentence structure fit together easily for me.  It’s sort of how some people get math I guess.  I think that’s because in I had some really scary English teachers in middle school and high school.  I loved them though.  I’m not so great at spelling though.  My senoir year Mrs. Burgland explained that she wasn’t going to teach us grammar for Comp.  We were just going to write papers.  She said that we knew the basics and even though we had been taught other stuff over and over again no one remembered them.

She asked the class, "Can anyone tell me what a predicate nomnitive is?"

I answered, "It is a noun that follows a linking verb and renames the subject."

"You don’t count," then she shook her head and ask, "Okay, who can give me an example of a subordinating conjunction?"

"Provided that, as if, as long as…" I started.

She cut me off, "Okay shush.  I’m trying to make a point here, and my point is that no one besides Ashley can remember that stuff.  So why should I bother teaching it?"

I loved Comp my senoir year.  I didn’t have to go through a bunch of stuff that I already had drilled into my head so many, many times before.  We just got to write papers, which I have to admitt even though I put them off, I do like writing them.

Now, even though I do not consider myself a Grammar Nazi, I would say it’s fair to call me a grammar freak.  I hate when people use double negatives when they talk, but I especially hate to read it in their writing… unless of couse it’s in dialouge or something.  My papa one time told me a story about how he wrote a paper for class once and got an "F" on it because he wrote it like he talked.  I think it was after I was complaining about something a teacher did to me.  I guess he thought he had a story to relate, but I agreed with the teacher.

I try not to cringe everytime I hear someone say something like, "I don’t got nothing to eat." or "Yesterday I run to the store."  Sometimes I’ll correct them, which I hate myself for because I remember how annoying it was when my mom did it to me when I was six.  And that was my mom.  I can’t imagin how annoyed I’d get if it were my friend or something… especailly since I am supposed to be grammar freak in the group.