 GRAMMAR: “I FOUND A DOLLAR WALKING HOME”—SOLVING COMMON SENTENCE PROBLEMS • Program Objectives: This program is designed to help students identify, correct and avoid the following common sentence problems. 1. run-on sentences and sentence fragments; 2. mistakes in subject-verb agreement; 3. mistakes in pronoun-antecedent agreement; 4. ambiguous, general and weak reference of pronouns to antecedents; 5. misplaced and dangling modifiers 6. violations of parallel structures. • Part One: Summary of Content The first part of the program concentrates upon run-on sentences and comma splices. 1. A selection from Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel introduces the difficulty of reading sentences that are run together without any punctuation or capitalization. Run-ons and fragments are further analyzed, using a variety of visual parallels. 2. Run-on sentences are compared with pairs of pictures that overlap each other, so that is difficult to determine where one ends and the next begins. Comma splices are visualized as pairs of family portraits, mounted too closely together to be completely clear. Strategies of locating and correcting these problems are presented, such as reading sentences aloud, and analyzing them for subjects and verbs. 3. Comma splices are visualized as pairs of family portraits, mounted too closely together to be completely clear. 4. Strategies for locating and correcting these problems are presented such as reading sentences aloud, and analyzing them for subjects and verbs. 5. Sentence fragments are likened to pictures that are divided up into parts, or in which important details are omitted. 6. Typical sentence fragments such as prepositional phrases are presented and two basic strategies for “repairing” fragments are discussed. • Part Two: Summary of Content This portion of the program uses several visual metaphors to make clear common problems of sentence construction and deals specifically with problems of making sentences internally consistent. 1. Mistakes in subject-verb agreement are compared with illustrations in which one part does not match the remainder. 2. The special problems of “parade” sentences—those in which the subject and verb are separated by many other words—are explained and illustrated. 3. Collective nouns are discussed and illustrations are used to distinguish cases in which collectives are followed by singular verbs or by plural ones. 4. Problems with pronoun agreement are clarified by graphic devices that highlight the relationship between pronouns and their antecedents. 5. Ambiguous, general and weak references of pronouns to antecedents are illustrated and the absurdities that can result from misplaced and dangling modifiers are shown (“I found a dollar walking hom”). 6. Finally, the visual metaphor of model railroad tracks is used to help clarify the concept of parallel structure. A complete sentence contains a subject and a predicate containing a verb. The way to spot sentence fragments is to look for subjects and verbs. Sentence fragments are likened to pictures that are divided up into parts, or in which important details are omitted. Typical sentence fragments are presented such as prepositional phrases; subjects without predicates and predicates without subjects; and clauses with incomplete verb forms or with subordinating pronouns or conjunctions. Two basic strategies for “repairing” fragments are discussed: attaching them to nearby complete sentences, and replacing missing or subordinating words. Prepositional phrases, and fragments with incomplete verb forms, can also be attached to other complete sentences. Finding and fixing sentence fragments may seem slow, hard work. But when you have solved these common sentence problems, you’ve come a long way toward writing that is sound and whole. |
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