Re: grammar tricks

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

Maybe we can distinguish between "tricks," or mnemonics and heuristics (or
in my field's jargon, discovery procedures).  I try to get the students in
my grammar class to use your approach to figuring out if the thing in -ing
is a gerund, Wes, as a discovery procedure.  Since I'm teaching this class
as a writing-intensive class this semester, I'm asking my students
to diagram sentences, describe what they've diagrammed, and use tests like
this to demononstrate why their analysis is plausible. It's been an
interesting experiment with its ups and downs.

Here's one of my favorite tricks for getting people to remember which
types of modifiers get commas and which don't.  Since *commenting*
(=non-restrictive) modifiers are the ones with commas, "commas comment."

Sara Kimball

On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Wes Chapman wrote:

> 
> OK, I'm starting to get it.  Here's a trick for figuring out what the verb
> is in a clause (as opposed to a verbal noun, for instance):  change the
> sentence into past or future (whatever it isn't in).  Any words that
> change are verbs.  This rule isn't foolproof either, but it usually
> works, and can be built on to figure out where clauses are (who or what is
> doing the word that changed? who or what is it done to? etc.), then
> dependent vs. independent clauses (any conjunctions at the beginning? If
> so, is it one of the FANBOYS?) and so forth.
> 
> One question I have about all this, however, is when and why is a "trick"
> easier to remember than a more formal grammatical concept?  Is it harder 
> to understand or remember that "who" does the action of the verb
> (determined by the trick above), while "whom" is the one to whom the
> action gets done, than to see if either has a noun after it?  If it is,
> why is it? And at what point do we want to say that a "trick" is in fact
> harmful, as is the too-oft-learned "never begin a sentence with
> 'because'"?
> 
>    ----------------
>    | Wes Chapman  |\           -------------------------- 
>    --------------------------- | wchapman@titan.iwu.edu |
>        | Writing Coordinator |/--------------------------    
>        -----------------------------------------/      \
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> 
> 
> On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Kate Nicole Ranft wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Michael:
> > 
> > Excellent trick.  Thanks for help.  Here are some of mine:
> > 
> > If I want to know when to use who or whom, I look to the word directly 
> > after it.  If the word is a noun or a pronoun, I use whom.  An example:
> > 
> > This is the man _____ I saw at the restaurant. 
> > 
> > 	the word to the right of the blank is "I" therefore WHOM.  
> > 
> > This is the man ____ helped me yesterday.
> > 
> > 	The word to right of the blank is not a noun, therefore WHO.
> > 
> > Another way to check this is to substitute he/him for the main noun.  In 
> > the first sentence I can say "I saw HIM at the restaurant" = WHOM. In the 
> > second sentence I can say "HE helped me" = WHO.  
> > 
> > Please excuse my long explanation.  I use a similar trick to judge 
> > whether or not to use a comma after a conjuction in a long sentence. 
> > 
> > I went to the store_ and I bought some milk.
> > 
> > 	When the word to the right of the conjunction is a noun or 
> > pronoun, I put a comma before the conjunction.
> > 
> > Neither of these rules are fail safe, but they work most of the time.  
> > Student's seem to appreciate a hint here and there.
> > 
> > -Kate Ranft
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 	
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
>