Skip to main content

Stumped By Grammar

My grammar has always been lacking and I have yet to make any effort to correct this gap in my education. I never knew that there were en dashes and em dashes let alone that they were to be used for different reasons. I did know of a blog named Emdashes but the significance of the name never registered with me until now. There are some lapses in our education that we learn to work around and live with - grammar is one of them for me.

I am surviving for sure but the quality of my life is definitely lacking for not being able to string together a paragraph with no grammatical errors - that makes me a pseudo-literate almost. Depending on the standards a piece of writing is held to, I would make closer to failing than passing grade with my poorly structured language. In my defense, I would say where I went to high school, grammar was not considered awfully important. They believed that if you read and wrote enough, it would come to you naturally.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Vikas Gupta said…
You are not the only odd (wo)man out! I too belong to the tribe!

I had probably heard of en dashes and em dashes but did not keep them in mind. The WordPress visual editor has these dashes in the custom characters option.

By a rule of thumb, one can say that 7 out of 10 people are not aware of it! That grammar stifles creativity is a common allegation; I do not subscribe to this view, however.

I want to improve my English (both grammar and vocabulary included) but to date it has only remained a noble intention with little execution.

Last but not the least, to use the popular Indian phrase, you are being harsh on yourself! Self analysis and criticism is a good thing, just the same!

The editors wielding the blue pencils will be rendered unemployed if writers achieve grammatical perfection! ;)
7:34 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more