Great Grammar Projects

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and evaluating the Great Grammar Projects for WR 330. The assignment challenged students to select a set of texts and within them locate a number grammatical structures. The range of sources was impressive: from the Brontes, Poe, and Shakespeare to Elle, People, and Fitness Magazine. One team analyzed the grammar of cartoons, which they discovered to be a tough place to locate complex and compound sentence structures. Closely related was the project that looked at the graphic novel, Maus. Mallory and Jennifer studied the screenplay of Dead Poets’ Society, while DeDe analyzed her mom’s newspaper columns and Matt looked at his own Barometer columns. Jonathan and Jennie had fun with the irreverent website The Onion, while Kyle took on the complex language of mathematics books. The Onion and math projects are both posted online at writingcommonsone.blogspot.com. Alec made a story using sentences from New Yorker articles, an odd combination of Biblical commentary and borderline porn. His is not posted on the blog, but he has a great sound track. There were so many good projects: I wish I could discuss them all.

One of the most fun to read was from Kevin, a Microbiology major, who took his examples from the poetry of Donald Justice. Reading Kevin’s project reminded me of how much I like Justice’s poetry. In one stanza of “The Evening Mind” Kevin found a simple sentence, a participle, apposition, and a gerund:

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;…
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
You name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and coming on…

I noticed the difficulty a lot of folks had finding an appropriate sentence for the pattern S+V+IO+DO. It is important to remember that to have an indirect object, you need to be using one of the “give” verbs. Aimee and Kelly found a good one in “Calvin and Hobbs” when Calvin describes the news organizations:

“They give me what I want: antics, emotional confrontation, sound bites, scandal, sob stories and popularity polls all packaged as a soap opera and horse race.” The IO is “me” and the DO is the clause “what I want.”

It was also tough to find ellipsis. I’d like to find out the history of the ellipsis. I’m not sure they were even in use during Shakespeare’s day. Kaelyn and Jessye weren’t able to find any in the plays they studied. I just checked the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is available on the library website under Online Resources. The first OED reference to “ellipsis” is 1612, but the first that seems like our usage is from Cowley dated 1667. Alexander Pope (1727) wrote “The ellipsis, or speech by half-words [is the particular talent of] ministers and politicians.”

I was glad that several people found the project fun. Playing with language is a good thing. Laura and Lindsey H. said that while they were working on finding examples in People Magazine, their friends kept stopping by to try to help. The only problem was that their friends couldn’t recognize any of the grammatical structures that were needed.

I want to thank my students for all the work they did on these projects. They demonstrated impressive understanding of English grammar.