Prose to S-V-O

Background knowledge: this paper was for another English class looking at advertisements and how they affect nature. Nature could be defined however I wanted it to be. This was my introduction and I had to break up my thesis to make to S-V-O sentences. I only did one paragraph because Blogger will not let me copy anything onto new posts. It is really annoying. So I have to retype all the things I intend to copy and paste, i.e. my prose for this S-V-O workshop. So Google, if you are listening, please fix this feature with Blogger. It's really annoying. Thanks.

Intro paragraph revised into S-V-O
De Beers, a diamond company, has been using the slogan "a diamond is forever" for more than fifty years. Can a geological gem last forever? De Beers is promising quality diamonds and quality relationships. The relationship itself will last forever if you have one of their diamonds to support it. Relationships are often defined by material possessions exchanged, particularly with the exchange of diamonds. A person's desire for diamond jewelry is natural. The ideology, pathos, ethos and logos in diamond advertisements promise that diamonds make relationships healthier and happier.

A note about the original:

This is the first paragraph for a creative writing paper I turned in for Eng. 302. Let's see what happens when I add some brush strokes to it.

Original:
She looks a lot like her mother, except for her blue eyes. Steel gray somedays and almost green on others; her eyes are exactly like her father's were. Amanda was in the kitchen getting her favorite Hi-C juice box out from the refridgerator when her mom came into the kitchen. Amanda kept quiet and slowly turned to face her mother. Closing the refridgerator door, Amanda immediately felt her body starting to sweat with the cool air gone and kept behind the buzzing silver doors behind her. She has not done anything wrong but she might as well have. Her mother, Marty, who now goes by Martha, is as unforgiving of Amanda's eyes as a woman would be of her husband's murderer.

Original with Brush strokes:
She looks a lot like her mother, beautifully similar (appositive), except for her blue eyes. Color changing (absolute), steel gray somedays and almost green on others; her eyes are exactly like her father's were. Amanda, beyond reasonable thirst (appositive), was in the kitchen getting her all time, favorite Hi-C juice box( adjectives out of order) out from the refridgerator when her mom came into the kitchen. Heart racing and closing the refridgerator door (absolute), Amanda immediately felt her body starting to sweat hot and balmy beads (adjectives out of order) once the cool air disappeared behind the silver, buzzing doors behind her. She has not done anything wrong but she might as well have. Her mother Marty, who now goes by Martha, is as unforgiving and unkind (adjectives out of order) of Amanda's lovely and bright eyes (adjectives out of order) as a woman would be of her husband's murderer.

And the mini lessons begin...

On Wednesday, Shannon and I braved the front of the classroom to teach introductory elements. I won't lie; I did get confused when Barbara made a mention that a lack of comma in one specific sentence was wrong. I thought the author had simply made a grammatical choice and that he hadn't made any errors. I appreciate that we had a workshop day and spent the time trying to find errors in print. But as it turns out, a lot of the "errors" I found weren't errors at all. They were sometimes pieces of grammar that were "breaking the rules," but mostly, they were errors because I had made them so. It is getting frustrating to think I will have to turn in a final product for this scrapbook. I can only hope that I can manage finding ten suitable errors in print. However, I will rely on the helpful hints from Barbara and Nitty Gritty, and I am sure I will find my way.
In all honesty, I am hoping that my future students are so good at grammar by the time they reach my class, I am merely making a few check marks near where punctuation and grammar use that could improve. I don't want to feel like an imposter about grammar, for the sake of future students, I hope I get with the current program. I say current for a reason, and that is because it seems that my grammar choices are ok if you are using the old grammar structure and rules. But apparently, we are now of the more modern, new way of using grammar and its rules. One thing that has been helping me get up to date on modifying my grammar into the correct form is our workshop, white board list. The FANBOYS and other rules are only going to grow, and I intend on making a HUGE list once I am done. Perhaps that will help keep my grammar in stride!
Here is my question for this week: is anyone else still using "older" grammar techniques, and do you find yourself confused? Is it ok to keep some, if not all, of the "old" grammar ways? Can it count as a style choice, rather than an error?

I hope everyone has a nice weekend.

Comma, And

Barbara was right, she did rock our worlds. At least, Barbara rocked mine. I was taught to leave the comma out before an "and". That usually, they were completely unnecessary. And then Barbara came along and told me "nope, it's grammatically correct to put the comma in." But now I am confused. People have said that it can be a matter of style of choice. Others have said that it matter and the comma should be there in most (if not all) cases. I am going to need more explanation on that. For now I am going to watch my writing and see what happens. Even in that last sentence I am almost positive the comma I left out is a correct way of writing my sentence. As I understand it, it seems that there must be a second thought/a complete sentence that follows the "and" to have a comma before the "and" in the sentence. For example, if I a were to write: I like English classes that have fun reading and I love a good book", I should insert the comma before the and so that it reads, "I like English classes that have fun reading, and I love a good book." This is my question: can either way be written? Is it okay to break a rule such as this since it seems others do too?
In class for the Socratic circle, we talked about breaking rules. But I feel like it wasn't established when we are supposed to break them. Sam mentioned that you have to know the rules to know how to break them. But then Barbara suggested that we must break the rules to know the rules. So after we know the rules, is it okay to break them? And is the rule I heard growing up "when in doubt, leave the comma out" even a legitimate rule? Was it once okay but now the dominant style has changed? Is everything left to the dominant style or were the rules written a long time ago and they have never changed, only writers have? I guess I have a lot questions bubbling in my head as I write this post. Because as promised, my mind is blown!

Socratic Circle Fun and Grammar Greatness

Today, I am going to begin this blog post with talk about the two Socratic circles. Since there have only been two, we will see how much I can say about them. First, I would like to mention I liked the second one better than the first. The first wasn't lacking in discussion or critical thought; however, the first one was limited. My limited I mean that people on the outer circle weren't allowed to talk. They could have had several great contributions that got overlooked because they forgot or couldn't find a way back to the topic by the time it was their turn to talk. I liked the idea of maybe having a "Jesus" chair so that if there were to be two groups to be taken one group at a time, then a least someone could sit where Jesus would, add their two cents and return to the outer circle. In a class I had not to far back, we had four to six people sit in the middle of the class and then anyone on the outer circle could tap their shoulder and take their place in the discussion. That might be fun for this class because it would ensure the outer folks a chance to talk and it would be a good way to promote participation.
As for the grammar part, I am still learning. However, I would like to note that this class isn't taking the boring approach. Seriously, this has been the best way I have learned to use proper grammar in a while. I think it is because of the newspaper headlines that we circle and write out its grammatical structure. I was kind of struggling with some of the sentence patterns, but once I could see them broken down in a newspaper, it made sense. When we had to do the rock and roll (or at least when I used the rock and roll) magnet exercise I got a little confused. It was because I had to build the patterns first. If I could have done the newspaper grammar seeking structure exercise first, I may have been better able to develop the sentence structures we were practicing with the magnets. Either way, I am feeling better about S-V-O structures and the such on page 4 in our course packs.
However, I wouldn't mind a little extra help. I had trouble with the plural second person part on the worksheet from last Wednesday. Can someone help me out with that section? I feel kind of silly asking, but otherwise, I am going to say it's the "you both saw the cat" and such things like that. Hope you guys had a good weekend!

And I'll Just Keep on Learning...

There has been a lot of learning to do in English 326. I am really enjoying the Nitty Gritty book; it's entertaining and educational. Within the recent pages of required reading, I've learned that when I have written "would've" I mostly like was supposed to write it out as "would of." For example, instead of saying "I would've gone to the market if I had money", I should write, "I would have gone to the market if I had had the money." However, even now I am not totally sure I wrote that sentence correctly. I also learned much more about intransitive and transitive verbs. I really liked the class we had last Wednesday. The magnetic poetry (mine was rock and roll) workshop was interesting. I obviously have some work to do because I confused the intransitive and transitive verb sentences I created.
Last Wednesday we also learned three major sentence patterns. We learned about subject-verb, subject-verb-direct object and subject-linking verb-subject complement sentence patterns. Though not all of my examples were wrong, I thought I would practice in my blog. And instead of a question, I thought I would ask anyone who is reading to check my examples for accuracy.
Examples for S-V sentence pattern:
The stacks crumbled.
His glasses fell.
Examples for S-V-O sentence pattern:
The host took our jackets.
He ate the cookies.
Examples for S-LV-SC sentence pattern:
The muffins look delicious.
Her house is messy.

Now that I am done with my examples, I am hoping that I am leaving this blog as correct piece of grammatical awesomeness. If anyone is out there reading this blog, please drop me a comment so that I can see if I am writing my sentence structures accurately.

Forgot to ask a question...

... In conclusion, can someone give me an example or explain where they feel comfortable putting semi-colons and/or colons? Thanks!