By Zac Kieser & Donna Reish
Welcome to another Punctuation Puzzle! Yep… a puzzle that you solve by putting in the correct punctuation and words/usage fixes—along with explanations and answers about each error!
Perfect for students and teachers alike!
Today’s Puzzle is about Compound Possessives and Pronouns … and it uses an interesting sentence from one of our Write-for-a-Month/Write On books about Mowgli.
We had an interesting conversation in my high school creative writing class this week. One of the students started a sentence with and, and, of course, the more grammarly types thought that he should not.
Being the kind of teacher who does not like to let any potential lesson pass, I delved in. That is what I would like to “teach” here today–but first let’s go back to those earlier lessons on compound sentences and comma use–and, of course, what a coordinating conjunction is to begin with.
I was fortunate to teach my senior high school class of young high school boys how to write an Expository Essay. Since a couple of the boys were sick, I did a Facebook live so that those students could watch it at home and go through their book as I taught. So… I thought I would share it on here and give you some essay teaching tips for young high school students.
The semicolon gets a bad rap. Either people despise it—saying that it is not needed in writing at all. (George Orwell was once quoted as saying “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.”) OR….possibly even worse, people use it incorrectly over and over and over and over and over (you get the idea!). The worst misuse (in my humble opinion) is when people use it as a comma—joining two parts of a sentence, rather than two complete sentence. Just random semicolon insertion here and there—whenever they believe that one of the sentence parts is too lengthy to use a comma there. (Sigh…)
“Conjunction Junction—what’s your function?”
Did you start to sing along? Can you picture the images?
How old are you????? Lol
Most kids today are not raised on “School House Rock,” which is such a shame! Because you really can’t forget the songs, jingles, rhymes—and dare I say—rules learned from those little ditties. (You can still find them on YouTube!)
By Zac Kieser and Donna Reish
Welcome to another Punctuation Puzzle! Yep… a puzzle that you solve by putting in the correct punctuation and words/usage fixes—along with explanations and answers about each error!
Perfect for students and teachers alike!
Today’s Puzzle is about Degrees of Comparison and Commas… and it uses an interesting sentence from one of our Write-for-a-Month/Write On books about Cinderella.
