I’m late today. Just a ton of reading to do, especially now that my Understanding English Grammar textbook finally arrived. Week three and I’m just now getting it in. So much lost time to make up, so far behind. Luckily everyone who had the textbook appear to be as lost as I am. Dr. Walls is not concerned about our inability to grasp the information. She believes we will have a “eureka” moment and all will understand.

Yippee, hooray!

I signed up for this class hoping that it will improve my writing, my grammar in particular. I’m not a bad writer, but I’m aware that I need to polish my writing a bit. I’m regularly guilty of failing to proofread what I write, especially on here, and I’ll catch things days later. I bet people think I’m a bit of a fool. Or maybe just lazy.

So the class pretty much throws what we learned in grade school out the window. We’re not interested, at least as far as this class is concerned, with prescriptive grammar. That is to say, we are not here to learn what the “experts” say we should know. We are here to learn descriptive grammar. We are here to learn  how  people speak and talk. The shock came when we were told there is more than one grammar system. It varies by region and dialect, and even between generations. One big example is how people text. That is its own grammatical system.

Right now we are trying to grasp form classes, and functions. I’m not going to give you an example because I’m still wrestling with all of this. I have three weeks worth of reading to do, and although it’s not a whole lot, there’s still a lot of information to absorb and process. I hope I will have my eureka moment soon. If not, it’s possible my brain will liquefy and run out of my nose and ears. I don’t think anyone will want to clean that up.