(31st
class meeting, Friday, was a writing assignment; no class Monday, May 9th)
Class activities: Today Chris discussed pronoun errors.
Chris carried a garden analogy theme throughout his slides (a well written paper is a clean and lovely garden; the errors—other than fragments, run-ons, and big-ticket items such as verbs—are weeds cluttering the garden—one slide shows the exterminator with his pesticide pack).
First he emphasizes that pronouns create problems with run-ons.
Then he goes through pronoun problems:
1) Shift in point of view (what I term “inconsistent person”) (slide: the guy with binoculars)
“I like Blockbuster because you can use discount coupons”
Slide: “Hey YOU, don’t change your point of view”—there’s a face around the “o” and “u” with glasses on those two letters (like eyes)
Exercises
2) Unclear reference (what I term “ambiguous pronoun”)
“When the plane hit the building, it exploded.”
“Our dogs had fleas, so we got rid of them.”
Exercises
3) Pronoun agreement (what I term “inconsistent number”) {slide of a handshake}
Indefinite pronouns: “Everybody hopes their dreams will come true.”
He suggests using just one gender and sticking with it to avoid the he/she/him/her clumsiness, OR change the reference to something plural so that “they” or “their” works.
Exercises
The slides were effective in reinforcing the motivation to clean up their writing, and the arrows on the ambiguous pronouns clarified why the pronoun was ineffective.
The only difference in what I would do (not with technology, but with content) is this:
I usually break my lessons up differently: When I teach pronouns, I have students do vague, ambiguous, and repetitious pronouns (and spend a couple of days on it—however, I do this in English 191). I teach a lesson on INCONSISTENCY when I teach parallelism, and we cover inconsistent tense (shifting verb tenses—Chris covers this when he does verbs), inconsistent person (which Chris covers with pronouns), and inconsistent direct/indirect quote wording.
Also, when I cover indefinite pronouns (during inconsistency in number), I think it’s easier to tell them that any word ending in “one,” “body,” or “thing” is singular.