Grammar Punk Blog

Making Sure Writing is Fun

Writing is communication.  Writing is a way to convey ideas, tell others what we’re thinking, share an experience, tell a story, or create a world all our own. When, I wonder, did writing stop being fun? Writing should be fun.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that writing for the sake of writing being fun is in the same category as algebra and logarithms. Don’t get me started. But the fact is that remains that strong writing skills remain an absolute necessity in every aspect of life during school years and certainly beyond the classroom. College admission boards, future employers, we all need strong writers. Thus the inevitable question: How do we create them? An even better question is how do we make this oh so necessary skill fun? Because if it’s something students like to do they’ll do it. And the more they do it, the better they’ll be at it.

Writing for a purpose makes writing fun. Give students a reason to write, a bunch of topics to write about, impetus to improve what they wrote last time, and they’ll have fun with writing. They’ll want to keep doing it. You won’t be able to stop them.

Here are a few Grammar Punk™ sentences an auditorium full of seventh graders wrote. They had about five minutes to get the hang of using the Grammar Punk dice and a few of the cards available from various Grammar Punk programs and this is what they came up with. The dice rolled were: C A 3 and we let them choose one CHARACTER, ONE EMOTION and one LOCATION from the cards. The dice words are underlined, the card selections bolded. They had a blast creating the sentences—you could have heard a pin drop as they were creating—loud laughter and cheers as we read some aloud. Here are just a few of our favorites.

C A 3 | Butterfly Hunter — Serious — Family Reunion

Cassie, a very serious butterfly hunter, can’t go to her family reunion because she knows she will be mocked.

C A 3 | Doorman — Revenge — North Pole

The doorman cautiously guarded the gate to the North Pole because secretly, he planned to revenge the years Santa Claus had left him high and dry.

C A 3 | Tap Dancer — Menacing — Hotel Lobby

Calvin knew, in a very menacing way, his tap dancing would cause the hotel to collapse, so he danced.

Not only were we blown away by the sheer creativity of the “dice words” chosen and the sentences created, we were positively delighted to see that each and every one of the sentences created is an amazing beginning to a STORY.

Writing with a purpose.

It works.

Brainstorming Your Brain

Brainstorming: to generate creative ideas spontaneously. Sounds simple enough. This is it. You’re sitting at your desk, fingers poised over the keys, eyes trained optimistically on a clean, white, blank screen (or clean, white piece of paper if you happen to be a Luddite). You’re ready to write. Right? Wait. Not so fast. Um, WHAT DO I WRITE ABOUT?

 Perhaps a better question is: WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS? It’s called BRAINSTORMING and it can be fun. No, really. The secret to brainstorming is to let your imagination take over about 98% of your brain functions (leaving just enough for breathing and blinking). Try a few of these suggestions:

o   Look out the window:

§    Pretend you’re on the other side of the window looking in/something suddenly crashes through the window/someone taps on the window/the window is really a porthole and the waves are rising/the window is in a spaceship and outside you see… You get the idea.

·         Spread the Grammar Punk Constructing Writers™ Cards (or the K-3 Elementary Cards, the 4-9 Story Cards, 9-12 Idea Cards, or the GP Creative Cards) across a table. (See www.grammarpunk.com) Look at them very hard.

·         Read. Something. Someone. Anyone. Read what and who you like.

·         Observe, eavesdrop, listen, experience, daydream, speculate, question, doodle.

·         Play with words, expressions, sayings, ideas, clichés, things on your desk . . .

·         Write down any idea that pops into your head. Then the next and the next.

The writing ideas are in there, the challenge is to find that mysterious place where ideas hover, float, fidget, meander, wend, wiggle, gather, flitter, and live. And wait to be discovered. And pieced together in a gathering of words that will, with work, perseverance, and a bit of luck become story. A story. Your student’s story. Or even your own story.

To winnow out those free-floating, often elusive bits of flotsam that are ideas is easier—and harder—than you think. But like any hard-won skill, it takes practice, as does anything worth doing.

Because the ultimate goal of brainstorming is to formulate an idea that will grow and develop and hopefully resolve itself in the form of a story with a beginning, middle, and an end, it is helpful to at least attempt to tame the flurry of ideas that, once awakened, can bounce around your brain like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. How to wake up those ideas? Ask them questions.

How?

What?

When?

Where?

Who?

Why?

How did the what happen when and where and to whom and WHY? Answer those questions and you have the beginning, possibly the middle, and even the end to story.

Teaching Grammar With Blogs!

I’ve blogged about blogs before, am doing it again, and will no doubt blog again about blogging sometime in the future. Blogging fascinates me, and not always in a good way.  But for the purposes of this particular blog entry we’ll go with the good kind of fascination.

According to Wikipedia—yet another source of constant fascination—a blog (a portmanteau of the term “web log“) is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Much as I might wish to go off on yet another nonsensical word added to the dictionary tangent I’ll restrain myself and stick to the topic of blogs at large.

When we first created Grammar Punk™ it was ostensibly in an effort to make a difficult subject a bit more palatable, okay, a lot more palatable. And we succeeded. Big time. Grammar Punk™ not only makes grammar more approachable, teachable, and learnable, it manages to make it fun. Laugh out loud fun. Wrack your brain to think of a cool word that contains a specific consonant and vowel fun. Creating sentences that while reaffirming the rules of the comma also happen to be the jumping-off point of a story fun. Why? Because writing, the reason for a sound basis in grammar, is fun. Should be fun. Can be fun. Will be fun. With Grammar Punk™. And exposure through things like reading and teacher enthusiasm and practice, lots of practice.

Practice with things like blogging. Things like good blogging, as in trying hard to add something substantive as well as simply entertaining to the great void of online offerings. Teachers you should be blogging. Why? Here are just a few good reasons and a few more actual suggestions.

      Start (or continue) a classroom blog

      Start a Grammar Punk™ Blog (http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/ffjh/thompson/gphalloffame.htm

      Encourage students to blog weekly. Select a topic (by teacher design or by committee)    

      Assign blog entries with students working alone or in small groups

      Encourage students to research their topics with cross –education (history, science, social studies, etc.)

      Select a Genre from one of the Grammar Punk™ card sets and have students to write their blog entry using Genres specifications

      Select an Emotion from one of the Grammar Punk™ card sets and have students write their blog entry using those specifications

      Select a character type from one of the Grammar Punk™ card sets and have students write their blog entry from that character’s (type) point of view

Blogging can be an invaluable way to steer students towards practicing their writing skills under the guise of something they enjoy. This is the age of technology and instant information, tap into it to create stronger writers.

Be sure and check the Grammar Punk™  Blog at www.grammarpunk.com regularly as we continue to talk about teaching grammar, writing, and whatever strikes our fancy.

I may have mentioned that I walk in a cemetery. Or maybe not. I do. I walk for exercise in our local cemetery which sits atop a hill some five or six blocks from my house. It’s a nice cemetery, as cemeteries go with lots of nice walking paths and, as you can imagine, it’s quiet. Of course I’m not the only one who finds this a nice place to take my daily exercise so it’s a lot of nodding and smiling and good mornings all around.  Fairly non-scintillating. Most days.

So, there we are—my Mom’s with me this day—and I see something out of the corner of my eye. Did I mention there are assorted critters that come along with their owners of the canine variety? Therefore, I thought I was seeing a dog loping across the cemetery—a decidedly odd-looking dog.

Deer! A whole tiny family of deer! In my cemetery! A lovely little doe and two amazing little fauns that couldn’t have stood more than three feet tall. Twins! And standing no more than twenty feet away from us!

Having seen them before my mom, I grab her arm and hiss at her to freeze! So, there we stand, frozen in place as our the little fur family. Mama Deer is staring right at us, her little tail twitching madly, ears pointed and rotating like wee little radar dishes. The two fauns also freeze a few feet behind her, standing so close together they look velcroed. We all stood there staring at each other for a least a minute before Mama decided we were harmless and went on her way.

Now another thing about this cemetery is that it is parallel to a rather busy three lane road. Across from this road is a very overgrown section of hill leading to a small valley that looks like a wee little wilderness. We knew this was her ultimate destination—what she was doing in the cemetery we’ll never know—and this is where the heart attack part comes in. I may have heretofore mentioned that I am a total animal lover. Big time. Therefore, the idea of standing there watching this little family flattened by several cars at once was about to kill me. Literally. Yet as we watched, this incredibly savvy Mom stopped at the entrance to the cemetery—having aimed right for it unerringly, and I swear, looked both ways and started across. And just as astonishing, we watched the vehicles coming both ways ease to a stop—no screeching brakes or chaos, just seeming to be in sync and the three of them were gracefully across this very busy road and disappeared into the trees in a split second.

And I remembered how to breathe again. And tried to get my heart rate back to a normal level as I leaned on a convenient headstone. I will never forget that precious glimpse into an everyday jaunt for that little family. I’d just appreciate it if they didn’t visit again.

“How come” We Teach Grammar?

We told you about Sam’s recent television appearance, what fun that was. We also received several interesting comments from fellow teachers relating mainly to the sad state of communication. And they weren’t talking just about their students!

As has been harped on before and will be again, teaching grammar is about so much more than just the insertion of dry bits of fact and rules concerning punctuation symbols and the 8 parts of speech. The first definition is: the system of rules by which words are formed and put together to make sentences, so okay, we can see where the boring recitation of facts thing comes from. The second definition: the rules for speaking or writing a particular language, or an analysis of the rules of a particular aspect of language, hits closer to home. The third is right on the head: the spoken or written form of language that somebody uses with regard to accepted standards of correctness.

It would be the last one that gets my—and the several teachers who wrote into us after the show—fur up. And yes, I know I just ended that sentence with a preposition, nyah.

One of the more interesting comments/questions we received was about the ubiquitous idiom, How come? One teacher remembered being taught, quite specifically, that “why” is the correct way to state a question, not “how come.” I too recall that particular idiom being frowned on long ago. Not so much anymore. Not at all, anymore. “How come” is indeed an idiom, the way of using a language that comes naturally to its native speakers, or a colloquialism. In other words, it’s a shortcut, an easier way of saying something (which is really odd because it replaces the simple “why.”)  But I digress. Of the many comments we received there seemed to be a distinctive common thread running through them: What happened to good grammar?! What happened to caring about good grammar? To say I was gratified and not feeling so alone in my ranting is an understatement.

Thank you teachers. Thank you for all your diligent and tireless work as you continue to teach grammar in the face of ever widening and growing apathy. We must all stem the tide by continuing to be good examples to students and fellow humans alike. Keep up the good work!

http://studio5.ksl.com/?nid=71&sid=11651990

Yesterday Grammar Punk Creator, high school teacher, Sam Beeson appeared on a local television show talking about our favorite subject: the sorry state of grammar in everyday use. And we’re not just talking about kids, shoddy grammar is becoming epidemic.

It’s easy to pshaw the concept of proper language usage once you’re out of school and no one is grading your papers any longer. Bad idea. Writing—which is why we teach grammar in the first place—is communication. Go watch the video, Sam is very entertaining–yes, even talking about grammar!

Sam had a great time on the show and the hosts were great fun. Thanks to all the viewers who tuned in. Grammar Punk rules!

Here is a snapshot of what Sam talked about as well as a link to the show itself.

People slur. We mumble. Sometimes we say things incorrectly, but we understand one another. Because writing requires exactness, the things we say often need to be corrected when they hit the page. The following ten examples clarify some of the frequent oral offenders:

Should of: Incorrect.
Should have: Correct!

Anyways: No such thing.
Anyway: Correct!

Acrossed: Just plain wrong.
Across: Correct!

Alot: Nope.
A lot: Correct!

Alright: No. No.
All right: Correct!

Grammer: Commonly misspelled
Grammar: Correct!

Judgement: Misspelled
Judgment: Correct!

Quote / Quotation: Quote is a verb. Quotation is a noun. This commonly misused term happens daily in classrooms. Teachers erroneously say, “Write down this quote, then respond to it,” or “One of my favorite quotes is this: ‘to be or not to be.’” The correct thing to say is, “I am going to quote my favorite quotation which is this: ‘to be or not to be.’”

Good / Well: These two words may be the two most misused words in the English language. Good is an adjective. It can only modify nouns and pronouns. Well is an adverb. It can only modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.

I scored good on my spelling test. (incorrect) The new car runs good. (incorrect)

Both need to be replaced with well.

English: Always capitalize the word English. Always, always, always.

And finally, Grammarsam reminds us to know where to go for punctuation help.

Punctuation often gets in the way (through its absence or superabundance) of the content. Never allow poor punctuation skills to thwart your reader from reading. EVERYONE should have someone they trust who can proofread well, and give honest feedback. Beyond a human helper, the following Web site and book are my bread and butter as a teacher of English. They answer all my questions when it comes to grammar and punctuation:

Web site: grammarpunk.com (wonderful local resource and blog with FAQ and easy-to-use, inexpensive curriculum)

www.grammarpunk.com

Teaching Grammar With Alliteration, Deux

I told you I love alliteration. As we’ve already established, alliteration is the repetition of the same sounds or kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or on the stressed syllables. Giving students the tool of alliteration in the context of teaching grammar will open the door to a new way of looking at writing—and reading. Alliteration is one of the oldest rhetorical devices, an early stab at poetry that is pleasing to the tongue and the ear. It’s fun! And as fun as it is to read, it’s even more fun—and easy—to write.

The really great thing about alliteration is how it pushes, prods, and propels not only student imagination but student vocabulary. The second cool thing about alliteration is that there is no age limitation. The youngest students can glom onto this concept with enthusiasm. Even the simplest words can be joined in an alliterative allegory. Give it a go!

Once students have tried their hand at twistingly twining tongue twisters, move on to temptingly tantalizing tall tales of tomes. Think Seuss, think Poe, think Pooh!   

You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch.

And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.

Oh the Places You’ll Go –Dr. Seuss

This is not to say that effective alliteration is simply a string of words beginning with the same letter or sound; there can definitely be too much of a good thing. The key to having fun with alliteration without pushing it to the limit of human endurance is to temper it with regular speak.

The Grammar Punk Programs and our incredible Constructing Writers Kit offer lessons and cards to introduce your students to the joys of alliteration.

Grammar Punk Alliterative Tale To Be

Always a tad whimsically weird, Gwendolyn was nevertheless a particularly popular porcupine. Thus, when she set off with great abandon and alacrity on her journey she had quite a cadre of compatriots ready to join the adventure.

Share your alliteration with us!

www.grammarpunk.com

Teaching Grammar with Alliteration

Alliteration is one of my favorite rhetorical devices; probably because it fits so well into so many other rhetorical devices. Alliteration is the repetition of the same sounds or kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or on the stressed syllables. Alliteration gives a poetic or literary effect. Alliteration is also referred to as “head rhyme.”

Alliteration is also great fun when it comes to teaching grammar, and anything that adds fun is a good thing.

Alliteration is fun to teach because it’s fun to learn. Challenge your students to an alliterate-off by introducing a sampling of tongue twisters, a wonderful—and fun—example of alliteration. Once students are comfortable with the concept, challenge them to create their own tongue twisters. Then once they’ve come up with a bunch—and you’ll be surprised at how easy, not to mention fun it is—have them read the tongue twisters aloud. As fast as possible, of course.

Alliteration rocks!

pre·var·i·cate

/prɪˈvær ɪˌkeɪt /  [pri-var-i-keyt]  

–verb (used without object), -cat·ed, -cat·ing.

to speak falsely or misleadingly; deliberately misstate or create an incorrect impression; lie.

Use prevarication in a Sentence

See images of prevarication

Search prevarication on the Web

Origin:
1575–85; < L praevāricātus,  ptp. of praevāricārī  to straddle something, (of an advocate) collude with an opponent’s advocate, equiv. to prae- pre- + vāricāre  to straddle, deriv. of vārus  bent outwards, bow-legged

The funny thing is that I was intending to do procrastinate today since that’s what I’ve been doing a lot of lately. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, prevaricate came out instead so I’m going with it.

The thing I find most interesting about this word is its origin. Prevarication has a pretty straightforward definition: you lie! To prevaricate is to deliberately misstate. Don’t you love that? So, if you didn’t actually intend to lie you’re not prevaricating. In any case, back to the origin. To bend backwards or straddle an issue, especially that of an opponent’s advocate, in other words to side with an opponents fan. Which really doesn’t make much sense in and of itself, but also has little to do with the word itself! Okay, so I didn’t have a hand in the dictionary-creation process, but still… Anyway, isn’t it much cooler—and meaner to call someone a prevaricator than just “liar, liar, pants on fire”? Or maybe that’s just me.

Grammar Punk Sentence: T E 4

Stevie has always been adamant about never telling a lie but she is the first to admit to prevaricating on occasion—don’t get me started.

You give it a try. Write a sentence that contains at least 4 words that contain the letters T and E and the word prevaricate or one of its variations.

Teaching Grammar With Diction

Wolf and Woof

Yes it all gets rather complicated and rule-laden and what’s next, but it’s all important. And it’s all good. And it’s all part and parcel. Or should be. Diction, people! How you say it is at least as important as how you spell it and how you use it in a sentence. Right?

Seriously, listen to your local or not so local newscaster sometime. I’m constantly astonished (and horrified) by the badly mangled pronunciations that erupt during a typical newscast. It was just the other night when a particular reporter was doing a report on wolves that had me throwing things at the television. Why? Because the woman kept calling wolves woofs! Seriously! Woof! Now this could conceivably be a sound made by one of the wolves, but I doubt it. Like Jewelry and joolery this is a common and entirely unacceptable pronunciation gaff.

How you pronounce something can be as important as what you say.

Okay, climbing off my soap box. Diction: the clarity with which somebody pronounces words when speaking, should (must) go hand in hand with the teaching of grammar. And you guessed it, diction was one of the sooo important aspects of teaching grammar that we had in mind when creating Grammar Punk. Diction without pain. Because a part of the teaching (and learning) process with Grammar Punk is about reading aloud the sentence just created. This not only gives teachers and students the chance to read the sentence aloud (thus showing off their creativity) it also allows a chance to polish that diction. 

Just remember, there are no Woofs in the Wild!