Ivy English: The teaching of archaic grammar rules - rather than modern grammar

Checkout  today's Ivy English broadcast  including the discussion of misplaced time spent teaching antiquated English - - dinosaur English.

Beyond Beauty: Above Taiwan 看见台湾 - - Haven't seen it? Check out below

Beyond Beauty

Grammar Mavens: Archaic & Deleterious

Today's Ivy League English Broadcast  reveals much about the pragmatics of grammar, especially the deleterious effects of English mavens who though perhaps in English teaching positions, perpetuate archaic English forms much to the frustration of students and colleagues who are in more continuous touch with contemporary English.  National Taiwan University's Karen Chung uses good judgment in striking the balance of when not to be overwhelmed by assertive mavens.   Check it out!

The Benefits of Reading English Novels: Ivy Broadcast 12/9/2015

These last two days have featured some very fine topics and commentary associated with the topic.  Again, make 30 minutes of your day meaningful: buy Ivy English (on my to-do list) and listen to the broadcast (by Internet, if you can;t @ 6:30am)!!     Ivy League Analytical English

Congrats to 9th graders Allen and Joanne in their success with the 1st level of the GEPT Middle-High test!

12/10/2015:  Among other commentary points, learn about using Google translate to aid in your pronunciation of a work in its original language - one of many useful tips by Dr. Karen Chung of NTU, Taiwan:    Dr. Karen Chung: Ivy League Analytical English

Adjectives and Comma Use: Grammar Girl

A favorite blogger of mine is Grammar Girl.  She's got style and verve, and as such has developed quite a following over the years.  Her blog is found at Grammar Girl .

Grammar Girl provides instructive guidance on the use of commas when using adjectives.  I reproduce what she writes below, but if you also want hear her voice, go here:    Commas with Adjectives

Commas with Adjectives:  When do you put commas between adjectives?

 

When you use a string of adjectives, you often separate the adjectives with commas, as in “He is tall, dark, and handsome.” Sometimes, though, you don’t use a comma between two adjectives. 

Coordinate Adjectives Versus Cumulative Adjectives

The comma rule comes down to the difference between two kinds of adjectives: coordinate adjectives and cumulative adjectives. Coordinate adjectives are adjectives in a row that each separately modify the noun that follows (1), as in “heavy, bulky box.” Both “heavy” and “bulky” modify “box.” You can even rearrange the adjectives and say, “bulky, heavy box.”

Cumulative adjectives, on the other hand, don’t separately modify the noun that follows even though they are all stacked up before the noun too (2). Instead, the adjective right before the noun pairs with the noun as a unit, and then adjective before that unit modifies that. An example will make this more clear: In the phrase “exquisite custom houseboat,” “custom” modifies “houseboat”—they become a unit—and then “exquisite” modifies “custom houseboat.”

If you try to rearrange the adjectives as we did for “heavy, bulky box,” you’ll run into a problem. The phrase “custom exquisite houseboat” is awkward, and it’s awkward precisely because you can’t rearrange cumulative adjectives.

Let’s say you have two adjectives in a row before a noun and you’re not sure whether they’re coordinate or cumulative. You can perform a simple test: Add the word “and” between the adjectives. If the phrase makes sense, the adjectives are coordinate; if not, they’re cumulative. For example, “It’s a bulky and heavy box” makes good sense but “It’s an exquisite and custom houseboat” does not.

Here’s a quick review so far: You can rearrange coordinate adjectives, and you can stick an “and” between them. As for cumulative adjectives, neither trick works.

Use Commas When You Could Add an “And”

OK, I can tell—even from far away—that your head is spinning because of this esoteric terminology, when all you really want to know is what do commas have to do with these adjectives? Agreed. You don’t have to remember the names unless you want to impress your friends. Commas are what matter here. 

To determine if we need a comma between two adjectives that precede a noun, we need to return to the “and” test. I’m sure you remember the tall, dark, and handsome man we mentioned at the beginning of the show. You could be wordy and say, “The tall and dark and handsome man.” If you can separate the adjectives with “and,” then you can separate the adjectives with commas. Also, if you can rearrange the adjectives, then you can separate them with commas. We started with “The tall, dark, handsome man,” but “The handsome and tall and dark man” works just as well.

A Comma Can Change the Meaning

Sometimes, a pair of adjectives can be both coordinate and cumulative. Let’s take the adjectives “deep” and “religious” and pair them with the noun “experience.” If we say, “She had a deep, religious experience,” we’re using coordinate adjectives: She had an experience that was both deep and religious (or religious and deep). Now, let’s get rid of the comma: “She had a deep religious experience.” Here, the religious experience was deep. The adjectives are cumulative. Granted, the difference between the two is quite subtle.

Summary and Practice

Just remember that if you can reverse your two adjectives or can place an “and” between them, you need a comma.

And now our interesting, (comma) illuminating lesson has come to a close. Hope you had a grand old time (no comma there).

Answers to the Audio Quiz: 1) It’s an easy five-mile hike. 2) That was a long, hard run. 3) They endured a tough marital situation. 

The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier & Grammar Girl

This article was written by Bonnie Trenga, author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier, who blogs at sentencesleuth.blogspot.com, and read in the podcast by Mignon Fogarty, author of the New York Times bestseller, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

References

1. Lutz, Gary, and Diane Stevenson. 2005. Grammar Desk Reference, pp. 209-210. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books.
2. Lutz, Gary, and Diane Stevenson. 2005. Grammar Desk Reference, pp. 209-210. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books.

- See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/commas-with-adjectives?page=1#sthash.75azuoZU.dpuf

- See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/commas-with-adjectives#sthash.FanW0zM9.dpuf

Ivy Analytic English Materials & Broadcast

Over the last several months, I've been greatly promoting Ivy Analytic English's daily broadcast that is on ICRT radio @ 6:30am (TPE) weekdays.  It's also accessible via the Internet 24/7/365 @  http://www.ivy.com.tw/broadcast/

It can be tricky for some to access, but if you choose the left column of the two column & choose a broadcast date, you'll get to the specific lesson content of the broadcast you're interested in:

http://www.ivy.com.tw/broadcast/

Example:

Example of a Specific Lesson:  Good Writing Examples on Thursdays:

You'll see the broadcast button at the bottom.  I regard this to be greatly worthwhile, so fit it into your schedule to become a better writer.

Best wishes for your day!!

At the same time, be sure to subscribe to Karen on Ivy League Analytical English through Facebook:    FB: Karen-on-Ivy-League-Analytical-English   (Press on this link)

Karen is super smart, pleasant and gives quick, considered and down-to-earth questions to many English questions.  There is much in her blog that is so helpful!  She's a popular professor @ NTU too.

Students,
I subscribe to several different blogs or services to keep my writing sharp, and to pass on ideas to you.  One of those worthwhile daily email services about writing is:  
Daily writing tips @     http://www.dailywritingtips.com/

Good-paying Jobs Posted: 24 Nov 2015 08:01 PM PST A reader questions the expression “good-paying jobs”: I’ve just come across ‘good-paying jobs’ in a report I’m editing by a highly regarded organization. (It has also been used by some politicians lately.) I was wondering if you could address the use of this phrase instead of what I would expect – “well-paying jobs.” I believe it’s not correct. The OED tells us that good is “the most general and most frequently used adjective of commendation in English, and one of the most common non-possessive adjectives in all periods from Old English to the present day.” Consider only a few of the uses of good: good food (wholesome) good books (well-written with worthwhile content0 good money (not counterfeit) good soil (fertile) good English (grammatically correct, well enunciated, and pronounced according to current national conventions) A good question is thought-provoking, a good friend is loyal and dependable. Captain Ahab hopes for a good wind and Yenta looks for a good match for a client. Someone, if not Chief Crazy Horse, may have said “It’s a good day to die,” and some scriptwriter came up with an episode of Desperate Housewives called “What’s the Good of Being Good?” The OED entry for good identifies the word as adjective, noun, adverb, and interjection. Thegood page of the online edition I use scrolls seemingly into infinity. My Compact Edition of the OED shows fifteen columns for plain good and another fifteen columns for words that have good as the root. We speak of good-tasting food (food that tastes good), good-looking people (people who look good), and good-meaning do-gooders (people who mean well). Note: American speakers are more likely to say “a well-meaning person,” but the OED includes “good-meaning.” Why shouldn’t we speak of “good-paying jobs” to mean “jobs that pay well”? The OED includes good-paying in its list of hyphenated “good words” for special uses, although the earliest citation (1834) doesn’t use the hyphen: Sandy, this has surely been a good paying job; for, when you were in the Calton, your little ones could not come out for dirt and rags. A Google search indicates that the two phrases are in about equal use. The Ngram Viewer shows both forms, with “good paying” higher on the graph than “well paying.” “This job pays good” is undeniably nonstandard usage. On the other hand, the following usage in an obituary written by Steven Greenhouse and published in The New York Times does not ignite my grammar nerve: From 2000 to 2002, Mr. Herman headed the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Working for America Institute, which promoted labor-management partnerships to create profitable businesses and good-paying jobs. I think that speakers who prefer “well-paying jobs” to “good-paying jobs” should use it, but unless house style demands one or the other, a writer’s choice should probably stand.

Using Dashes to improve your writing clarity

This comes from the Daily Writing Blog which is an excellent resource for improving your writing:

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/some-thoughts-on-dashes/


From the Blog:

A reader wonders about the use of dashes to replace colons:

More and more I see dashes (of various sorts) used to do the work you say that the colon should do: introduce a word, phrase, clause, list, or quotation after a complete sentence. Is either acceptable?

I can’t find an example of a dash used to introduce a quotation, but its use in place of a colon to introduce a word, phrase, clause, or list is common:

“Nonetheless,” he added, “just having these recordings is not going to be sufficient” to make any definitive conclusions about the cause of the crash—a process that could take weeks, if not months.”
Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals—mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like.

Coming at the end of a sentence in this way, the use of a dash is not as jarring to me as its increasingly popular use to replace commas or parentheses within a sentence:

The study’s authors hypothesized that material gains made through early agricultural success—a proxy for wealth—gave smaller groups of related men the reproductive upper hand for generations.

Boko Haram has widened its efforts from capturing foreigners—who can be ransomed off for big bucks—to targeting mass numbers of young women and children who can be put to other uses.

Commas or parentheses would do just fine in each example.

The choice to replace commas or parentheses with a dash should be made with a clear understanding of the effect desired.

Explanatory information meant for readers who may need help with a concept can go in parenthesis:

The study’s authors hypothesized that material gains made through early agricultural success (a proxy for wealth) gave smaller groups of related men the reproductive upper hand for generations.

Information relevant to the sentence, but of secondary importance can go between commas:

Boko Haram has widened its efforts from capturing foreigners, who can be ransomed off for big bucks, to targeting mass numbers of young women and children who can be put to other uses.

Dashes are appropriate when the purpose is to startle the reader with an unexpected interruption that provides a peripheral thought:

His chisel was one of the weapons used—not that he could help that, poor fellow—and no doubt you will want to ask him questions.

The dash is an attention-getting punctuation mark that can be used to change the tone of a sentence. Dashes are like the unexpected chords in The Surprise Symphony: they jerk the reader into wakefulness. They are most effective when not overused.