Week 4, Derrek Ballard

Week 4, Derrek Ballard

This week's homework I feel was a little easier than the previous weeks' work.  The "Its/It's" assignment was especially easy for me because I learned a fool-proof tip: "It's" can be elongated to say "It is."  If "It is" doesn't fit into the sentence, then the correct option is "Its."  This writing rule seems to be the exception to the possessive definition.  For example, we are used to using "Sally's" to denote something that Sally has or something she is doing.  "Its/It's" is the opposite.

I also found the "Run-Ons" assignment easy because if you sound out each possible answer, it's easy to tell which sentence actually makes sense.

The most overwhelming part of this week is realizing how many different kinds of verbs there are.  Holy cow!  I can construct sentences pretty easily, but I wouldn't ever be able to pick a part the verbs and label them as transitive, past progressive tense, infinitives, etc.  That's definitely going to be my pain point on the test.  Does anybody have any tips on how to remember these and pick the right verb form from sentences?  I'll gladly take any help I can get!

The mistake I found this week is the picture below.  My weekly mistakes will almost always be found on Facebook because I am scrolling through my news feed far too often.  Anyway, this picture says "Oh your 'hungry'?  Maybe you should have ate the dinner I made, or the lunch, or the breakfast........"  There are several mistakes with this writing.  The first sentence should read "Oh, you're 'hungry'?" and the second part should read "Maybe you should have eaten the dinner, lunch or breakfast I made..."  Here is an explanation of my corrections:

1. The "oh" and "you're" need to be separated.
2. "You're" is possessive, "your" is not.
3. The word "eaten" fits better than "ate."
4. The second half of the second sentence is not parallel - the phrase "I made" should follow the whole sentence fragment of the verb.
5.  An ellipsis is only three periods ("...").