Third blog post for my class

Well, with the second blog post I've officially passed the class, but I'm planning to keep on doing the homework. It's actually pretty interesting to see how they collect content and have peer grading. I got dinged last time for writing only 300 words, but since the assignment said "write a 300 word blog post" I'm not sure I get that. Oh well.

Here's my third and final post for the class:

One of my fondest grammar memories, and yes those exist, occurred on the first day I was in fifth grade.  My teacher drew an upside down “e” on the board and asked for a show of hands for people who knew what it was.

I raised my hand.

Now, I’ve never been a popular kid but that pretty much sealed the deal that I was one of the biggest nerds and possible teacher’s pets ever in the history of the world.

You see my dad, who taught English for several years, had just explained what that symbol meant the previous night at dinner. Less than 24 hours previous to her asking the question.  How could I not raise my hand?

For those of you who don’t know, the upside down e (and I can’t get that symbol to work right now) is called a schwa. According to Merriam-Webster the schwa is “a vowel that has the sound of the first and last vowels of the English word America.

That moment saved me tons of time for the rest of the year. She assumed I knew what was going on most of the time and so I got to do lots of fun things in the room. She had a box of starter sentences. If you needed to write an essay but didn’t have any ideas, you could go pull out a card and finish the topic. I loved that. It was a great idea generator.

Someday I hope that I can write a novel or a series of short stories. When I try to get my thoughts on paper I often catch myself creating first sentences, just like that box, as a way to get started. Helping my own kids get through school limits my time right now, but someday I think I’ll get it done. But, I did manage to do one thing for my kids, just like my dad did for me. They all knew what a schwa was on the day their English teachers asked. 

EDX Post 2

So, the second post is due today and I decided to share my story about proofreading. Publishing it here again just to prove it is my original work (if that ever comes up).

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As we move through the EDX course I am being reminded about information I learned long ago and am being challenged to improve my writing. Years of being asked for short summaries at work and writing for social media have hampered my creative writing abilities. I am going to try to write more after this course and see what I can create. 

That said, the most valuable thing about this class so far was reading blogs from the class. I do some freelance work and spend time proofreading papers for individuals for whom English is not their first language. I’ve read some really amazing pieces of work and am pleased when I can help turn a phrase or make their meaning clear.  

My favorite example of what I do for those clients came very shortly after I started that job. I was reading a paper from someone whose primary language was Asian.  They were describing some individuals and were trying to portray enthusiasm and exuberance in their account.  As I was reading along a phrase appeared just wasn’t right. They had written “it was above the wall.”

For the life of me I went blank. I knew that wasn’t right but I really struggled to determine the meaning. I ended up flagging the line, finished the chapter and then went back. Upon the second review it dawned on me that what they wanted to say was “it was over the top.”

I finished editing it and believe that I maintained the spirit they wanted to portray. It was an eye-opening experience of how sometimes terms just don’t translate well.  I hope it has made me a better editor and listener in that I want to hear what a person is trying to say even if the words come out jumbled.

EDX update

I scored 9/10 on the blog post. Got some decent feedback and now have to write another one. Debating my schwa story or my favorite example of how hard it is to translate idioms. That post is due Monday so I guess I'll stew about this for a while. Maybe I'll just write both :)

EDX courses

So the Marvel course got me sucked into EDX MOOC courses. I'm loving them. I've done three now.The Marvel course, one on coding and one on HTML5. I'll be honest, I'm mostly doing the homework and tests without watching all of the videos, but I'm learning and applying the skills to my job.  This time around I'm taking an editing course with a focus on grammar. This is the homework for this week. I decided to publish it so that I can claim it as mine in case of any plagiarism. Sad but true. 

As this week’s topic in my EDX class is about verbs, I’ve decided to focus on a news article for my blog post.  If the assignment was allowed about any grammar topic, I was going to write about the schwa, but with this change in topic, that will be a future post. 

According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, there is a new verb being used by German teens. The verb “merkln” appears to be based on the politician Angela Merkel. From the article, ““Merkeln’, which means being indecisive or failing to have an opinion, is topping a poll to choose Germany’s favourite new ‘youth words’” (read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/angela-merkels-influence-now-extends-to-german-slang-merkeln).

The most interesting thing to me about this topic is the evolution of words, how new words enter the lexicon and how quickly social media shares these new terms around the globe.  And while newspapers in the traditional sense are dying, they still manage to have a luster and authority with their online posts. I am willing to consider this discussion because it was published by them as an article and not just because I saw a tweet using it.

Also from the article “The competition has been held by Langenscheidt for the past seven years and aims to reflect the evolving nature of the German tongue. On 31 October, a jury will choose 10 winners – ranking the top five – which will be included in an ever-changing e-book.”  Langenscheidt is a publishing company and I love that they are getting people excited about language.  I think that many languages are open to new words, such as English and German, whereas some languages are protected (i.e., French) and others die from a lack of change (i.e. Latin). Every three months the Oxford Dictionary updates a list of new words (read more: http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/)