Week 4 - Amy Williams

This week was actually a bit of a challenge to me! I thought the passive vs. active part was fine, because I just took a magazine writing class in the spring that emphasized this idea so much.  It’s vs. Its was cake for me, because that’s something that I have obsessed about getting right in the past. In middle school, it made no sense to me, so I studied it and studied it until I got it down one hundred percent. Run on sentences was easy enough, even though I am ALWAYS writing run on sentences in my writing classes and getting called out for it. All of these things were fine, I learned a couple things, but didn’t struggle… but then… VERBS.

I’m glad we had to do the exercise where we defined the verbs and gave an example, because most of these verbs were things I hadn’t even heard of before! However, the idea I struggled with the most was “participles.” Participles are verbals ending in -ing or -ed, used as adjectives. The book uses the example “Writing under the pen name of Currer Bell, Charlotte Bronte gained literary fame with ‘Jane Eyre.’” Though this particular example made sense, I had a hard time thinking of an example. So, I decided to check out owl.english.purdue.edu to see if with the addition of their definiton/example, it would be a bit more clear. Here’s what I found, and I hope it helps anyone else who is stuck!

The grammatical error I found this week was from a critique from one of my English classes. The person sent me an email with their critiques, and this was part of it:

He quoted my writing, but within that excerpt, there was also a quote. It should be written, “I saw the old fallen tree, its intricate system of roots still covered in a deep green moss. The leaves and branches had fallen away from the path, as if the tree were lying down for a nap and thought, ‘I shouldn’t block the footpath.’”