Grammar has always been a subject in school I have never really learned to keep in mind. Although I have had new light shed on the punctuation of ellipses. All through my schooling I was taught it was not a real punctuation but rather something "lazy" writers use to write less; I was taught to believe the ellipses should never be used in any writing what so ever. Teachers also went to great lengths as to not use the name ellipses but rather call them “the three consecutive periods”. I was extremely relieved when I learned that ellipses are acceptable punctuations . . . when used appropriately.
Along with this, the one concept I want to teach my students are the ellipses. I do not want my students to be afraid of looking “lazy” or unprofessional when using ellipses; so I will explain to them the appropriate times to use them and when they get the hang of it, maybe intentionally bend the rules when using them. I have to be completely honest; I will be using the “More Nitty-Gritty Grammar” book when teaching my students. In explaining to them what ellipses can be used for I will start out by simply telling them to use them when: indicating you are omitting information, shorten a sentence, or to indicate a hesitation of some sort in your writing. Once the students understand the basic I will get more detailed and answer their questions when they have any. If my teachers took the time to teach me about the appropriate way of using ellipses my writing could have been less restrained; but now that I know, I am more willing to write what I think and feel.
I still have difficulty using the colon and semicolon so I thought I should use it in my “pattern-of-the-week”. I understand what they both do but I still struggle to know as to when to use which punctuation. Ellipses are now my favorite punctuation so I also threw it in my blog and I hope I used it correctly . . . let me know if I did or didn’t.
Vanessa,
ReplyDeleteI LOVE how you used the ellipses at the end of your first paragraph. Very appropriate.
You have the basic sense of when to use a semicolon, but remember that both sides need to stand alone. Now that we've studied coordinating conjunctions (CC or FANBOYS), you can see that the second half of the sentence, the part right after the semicolon, can't technically start with a CC. Instead, you could make a more traditional compound sentence with a comma and a CC, or you can revise the sentences so that both sides can stand on their own (and no side begins with a CC).