Living Grammar Scrapbook

(25% of course grade)

Goals

The purposes of this assignment are to

· serve as summative assessment, rather than a traditional test, to show that you can apply the principles in the course

· provide you a chance to use artistic expression to show learning

· demonstrate the most important method for understanding and improving sentence-level issues: within authentic contexts, rather than through drills on skills that never transfer to a student writer's own writing repertoire

Assignment

Overview

The culminating project of the course, your scrapbook will be a collection of "authentic" examples—that is, examples that actually occur in print or in some other artifact, not ones that you made up yourself or found in a workbook—of sentence-level "errors" or features, along with concise and precise descriptions. No examples of typographic errors allowed. And no examples from creative writing in the first three sections.

Number of sections:

o ERRORS IN PRINT: actual, unintentional errors in print, i.e., apostrophes, plurals, subject-verb disagreements, etc. [see below for more examples]

o BREAKING THE RULES: intentional errors, i.e., starting a sentence with "and" or "but"; intentionally using a fragment or comma splice; using an extra comma for emphasis; etc.

o GEMS: great sentences that you just love, with grammatical description.

o HOUSE STYLE: analysis of one publication's style sheet, which often includes, as we will discover, unconventional conventions

o ANOTHER ENGLISH: an artifact and analysis of an English other than Standard American English (SAE), i.e., a passage from a novel, song lyrics, dialogue, etc.

Number of examples

You need to have minimally 30 examples, total, spread out over the first three sections: Errors in Print, Breaking the Rules, and Gems. For the best grade, however, the Errors in Print section should have the most, while the Breaking the Rules section will probably have the least. The other two sections--House Style and Other Englishes--aren't graded by the number of examples.

Type of examples

o Examples must be authentic (that is, published) and taken from nonfiction or informational texts or advertisements.

o Examples from creative writing, fiction, or poetry acceptable only for Section 3: Gems and Section 5: Another English.

o Examples cannot be taken from headlines or advertisements.

o The specific part of the example needs to highlighted or marked in contrasting ink for easy reference.

o Typographical errors don't count.

Analysis

o Each example must have a succinct analysis that encapsulates the problem or concept. You do not have to use complete sentence; rather, use "notational" style (as appropriate for an informal scrapbook), but your description must be legible.

o Your analysis must show your command of grammatical terms as well as non-grammatical explanations.

Presentation

o Cut out examples (preferably with enough of the paragraph for context) and paste on colored paper in a binder.

o Ditto with your analysis: write on a piece of paper and paste in.

o Examples from texts you could not cut up may be transcribed on notebook paper or typed.

o Pages must be in plastic sleeves (to keep scraps from falling off and getting lost)

o Your Sections must be clearly divided, preferably with tabs of some sort, but minimally with a subtitle sheet.

o Pages should be numbered consequently for the whole book, not per section.

o Your handwriting must be legible.

o Although you may not be an artist, your scrapbook needs to show that you tried.

Table of Contents

List each example, using the name of the error or concept, briefly, and page number. Indented below each category, you must also briefly indicate how your example sentence begins and ends. Here's an example:

subject-verb agreement

--none...is ………………………............1

apostrophes

--it's/its (four examples)…………....4

--Jews's……………………………………...5

--Lands' End……………………………….6

Final Version: Living Grammar Scrapbook Rubric

Due: last day of class

Here are some examples from last year's Errors in Print sections:

dash

faulty parallelism

capitalization

adverb

subject/verb agreement

comma after introductory element

extra comma before and when connecting just two elements

no comma in compound sentence

pronoun agreement

over-punctuated

apostrophe

comma before/after direct address

reflexive pronoun (himself)

run-on sentence

wrong preposition

hyphen/compound word

colon

redundancy

comma splice

missing commas for "extra" phrases

however or because punctuation