Living Grammar Scrapbook

(40% 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

· give you the opportunity to control and shape evidence of your learning (i.e., "knowledge display")--in effect, creating your own test and answers,

· 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

· create a teaching resource for your future classroom, a binder chock full of authentic (and sometimes really funny) examples

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.

Kind of examples NOT ALLOWED

o no typographical errors

o no creative writing

o no advertisements

o no headlines (unless the headline is a complete sentence)

Section descriptions:

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 (on purpose): 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 explanation.

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

Number of examples and types

o ERRORS IN PRINT: 30 examples, 10 types of errors

o BREAKING THE RULES (on purpose): 5-10 examples, 5 types

o GEMS: 5-10 examples, 5 types

o HOUSE STYLE: 1 example for each question (11 types)

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).

o Your explanation also needs to be "scrapped"--that is, written clearly on white or light paper, with contrasting pen and then pasted either on its own background or directly onto the page.

o Your analysis must show your command of the grammatical concept, although you may use non-grammatical explanations.

Presentation

o Group your examples by type as much as you can.

o Cut out examples (preferably with enough of the paragraph for context) and paste on colored paper, which will be placed in a plastic sleeve.

o Ditto with your analysis: write on a white or light-colored piece of paper and paste in.

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

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 Each section needs its own title page.

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

o Put your name on your Table of Contents page

o For each section, indicate how many types and how many examples you have

o List each example, using the name of the error or concept, briefly, and page number. Indented below each category, you must also briefly indicate the key words of the error or example that you're pointing to.... not the whole sentence, please. Like this:

Errors in Print (10 types/30 examples)

subject-verb agreement

--none...is ………………………............1

apostrophes

--Jews's……………………………………...2

--Lands' End……………………………….2

homophone confusion

--who's vote...................................3

o Put your name on your TOC.

o Do a paper copy and an electronic copy, the former for the scrapbook itself, the latter sent to me at bjmonroe@wsu.edu

Due Date

Due: last day of class. BUT we will have Scrapbook Checkpoints, with approximately 10 examples due at each checkpoint, toward the end of the semester... so you won't try to do the whole scrapbook the night before it is due.

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

homophones