After looking through the course pack,
I realized there are lots of small and odd grammar rules that I have yet to
master. When looking at my own work, the most common mistake seems to be run-on
sentences and comma splices. I don’t see any in my more creative writing
pieces, but in my essays I seem to want to cram too much information into one
sentence. In most cases, I am either trying to connect too much or trying too
hard to make the sentence sound artistic.
Although I fully understand what a
comma splice is, I still seem to do them without thinking about it. Usually I
catch most of them while I’m editing, but a few still seem to slip through. I
often have sentences that are grammatically correct, but they are just too long
to be effective. Listed below are a couple examples of run on sentences and/or
comma splices I identified in my writing.
Despite being trapped, the cage bird
continues to sing, for it has hope that one day it to can taste the freedom,
such as the slaves continued to sing and hope for the day they could put
slavery behind them.
The sentence above needs to be two
sentences. In my head I saw the connection between each phrase, however, there
are too many topics being addressed. By breaking it into two sentences, I would
make my meaning more clear.
In an attempt to connect all my ideas,
I SACRIFICE STRUCTURE,
ORGANIZATION, FLUENCY, ETC. [series of nouns connected with commas and no and’s].
In my desire to create a flow of connected ideas, I instead create a jumble of
ideas. I focus too much on trying to sound artistic and end up messing up the
basic structure of a sentence in order to achieve my goal.
Often times I think I am trying to
state something basic and then try and connect multiple ideas to that basic
idea all in one sentence. Instead of portraying my connections, I end up
sounding disorganized and I take away from the importance of each idea. If I
want to be ORGANIZED AND
ARTISTIC AND BE GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT [series of nouns connected with and’s and
no commas], I need to be more creative with my sentence structure. I do
tend to use semicolons often, which stems from my desire to connect my ideas.
However, although I use them correctly, I often don’t use them as much as I
should.
Gilpin argues that the difference
between the beautiful and picturesque is that beautiful has no roughness or
spirit about it, it is simply there, giving beauty to a form. The image of the
creek poses no further insight than what it is, there is no ruin or curiosities
about it, it simply is what it is.
Above is an example of me using commas
when I should have been using semicolons. I tend to like to repeat a phrase of
structure for emphasis, but in this case when I repeat the word it I am
choosing not to add a connecting word and therefore need to use a semicolon to
connect the two ideas.
