Pages

10.1.14

Writing--It's what I LIKE to do.

Every time I move I, of course, meet new people. And while every new person is different, there are some things about meeting new people that are basically the same wherever you go. The main thing that I find to be the same about almost every new person I meet, is the questions that they ask: 

"Where are you from?"
"Why did you move here?"
"What do you do?" 

It's that last question. "What do you do?" I always have to think about how I’m going to answer this one. Of course, the quick answer is that I’m a stay at home mom to three (soon to be four) children. But recently I’ve been getting the question, “Yes, but what do you like to do?” And truthfully, while there are many things that I enjoy doing, I think the one thing that I really like to do that stands out to me is writing. 

I have loved writing since I was a little girl. I used to write poems, songs and stories when I was growing up. I loved using my imagination to create beautiful expressions through words. As I grew, I learned to love writing essays, book reports, journal entries and more poetry.

I was homeschooled in a family of writers. Every single person in my family is a talented, inspired writer. Therefore, for every thing I wrote, I had four editors ready to listen, encourage, and also make their corrections. As I reached high school, it became evident that while my writing talent was budding, my grammar skills were lacking. I struggled with basic rules of grammar and often made grammatical errors as a result. The beauty of being homeschooled, though is that I was able to take a couple of weeks to focus on strengthening my grammar. My sister, who is excellent at English, took me to “grammar bootcamp”. I can remember sitting in her room for hours at a time with flashcards of different grammar rules. She quizzed me, tested me and drilled me until my grammar was [almost] as good as hers.

As I’ve grown, I believe that my grammar has suffered again. The truth is that in this age of blogging and online articles, much of what we now read has not gone through any sort of rigorous editing process. Without reading edited material, and without having proper grammar “in our faces” so to speak, we are losing the basic rules of grammar to someone’s quickly typed and posted work. 

Also, writing is an art form. You wouldn’t steal someone’s art to call it your own, would you? You wouldn’t use someone’s photography on your blog and pass it off as your own image. You wouldn’t hang someone’s painting on your wall and tell all your friends that it’s your original work. You wouldn’t play someone a pre-recorded song and tell people that you sang it. But would you share a quote as your Facebook status without crediting the author? Would you copy and paste a paragraph from an informational site to your own blog post?


I was very excited to receive an email about a partnership from the company Grammarly. Grammarly is a website dedicated to finding mistakes and detecting plagiarism in your writing. Grammarly is your own family of editors, right at your finger tips. Grammarly is an avenue to have authentic, grammatically correct writing in an age of articles without editors. Grammarly is a way to ensure that everything you are saying is entirely original, so you can ensure that you are not stealing anyone else's work.

We all communicate on a daily basis through our own written words. Learning good grammar is essential to making yourself heard, understood, and credible. My advice for improving your grammar would be to switch off the screen for a little bit and crack open a good, old fashioned book. You know, the kind that's been proofread and edited and revised. Go over your basic grammar rules from middle school. Remember them, practice them, and use them. And use Grammarly the next time you post something online.


*This is a promotional post for the company Grammarly. I was reimbursed for my inclusion of Grammarly in my post. 
All opinions and endorsements for Grammarly are my honest assessment and original work.

2 comments:

The Fair Melissa said...

Yes, I've always thought of you as a writer! I had never really thought about the art of grammar being lost with all of our advances in technology. It is so true! I'm not perfect in grammar, but I know I received a good education and have tried to maintain it. It's actually one of the few things I am way better at than Jamie! I really loved A Beka's English curriculum growing up, and I think it's the one piece of my education I would like to duplicate for our children.

Julia Robert said...

English Grammar is an important part of English Writing and you can clear the concept of grammar through examples..

Conjunction and types of Conjunction with examples