Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A “Piece” at mind

Writing has been a passion of mine since the dawn of time. Well OK, not in a literal sense, but you can get the gist of how much writing means to me. When I was in the 4th grade I found that creative writing was a lot of fun because you could tell a story and change anything within in it to make it your own. Though I loved this newly found trait, I continuously told myself I would never go into an English profession; and here we are today.

I know that my strongest writing skill is spelling, hence my parents and/or friends always came to me asking how a word is spelt. So I am glad that this is a grammar class because that is where I am truly lacking. To name just a few issues that I struggle with are when to use punctuation, writing long sentences, the use of parenthesis.

I guess the main issue with when to use punctuation that I struggle with is would a comma, semi-colon or a period work better within certain sentences. For instance, “We finished our shopping for today; then we decided to stop for Dairy Queen on our way home.” This is probably the biggest issue that I constantly catch myself doing. What I hope to achieve throughout this course is to prevent this bad habit.

The second issue or complaint about my grammar that I must overcome is writing long sentences. I am really bad at doing this and rarely catch it; but it is one critique I have heard over the years from teachers and professors alike. For example, the last sentence that I have just written is a great example of what I am talking about. There could be two sentences easily made out of all that mumbo jumbo.

The last issue that I described earlier about using parenthesis isn’t really something that I struggle with, but rather something that I would like to learn because my writing could possibly benefit from the use of parenthesis. “The author prefers to write in a quiet place with no distractions (other than a glass of wine to his right) so he can finish his book. Like I said, no previous experience with using parenthesis so please don’t judge.

All in all I can see this being an exciting and enthralling course and I cannot wait to build up my expertise with practicing using the correct forms of grammar.