Quote me

With our last project and using quotes, I thought I would look over the rules again for longer quotations and how to use them most effectively. Because longer quotes are usually more important and hold more information, you want to have it stand out, so you give it a new line and indent it, so you can quickly distinguish what it is.
For instance, if this was a paper I was writing I would keep writing and then when I wanted to give a quote. Joshua Barton, a geek says says
I like Star Wars. I wish I was a Jedi and then I could run around saving the galaxy and being (indented)really cool. Then me and my homeboy Yoda could kick bad guys around and chicks dig (indented)that kind of stuff. And then, I would be way hot and make David Beckham and the (indented)Twilight guy look like crap and that would be awesome.


The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) says:
Place quotations longer than four typed lines in a free-standing block of text, and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, with the entire quote indented one inch from the left margin; maintain double-spacing. Only indent the first line of the quotation by a half inch if you are citing multiple paragraphs. Your parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark. When quoting verse, maintain original line breaks.

I really liked these poems. The background of the 1st author was interesting to me, that he worked in business, but also wrote poetry. I liked the poems, because usually poems are about nature, both natural and human, or reflection or extremely serious issues like death, war, and death again if your Emily Dickinson.
Money is funny because it can either be the most important thing in your life, either if you have none or have a lot of it. We judge almost everything by money. The paintings that we looked at today all had price tags on them and I thought it was interesting that some that were half the size of others sold for more, and others that had received prizes were worth more than others. So even art now has a value on it.
With all of the politics going on now about money, with the Stimulus plans, bailouts and the rest of the Apocalypse Now that everyone is going on about, money has become a bigger issue than anything else happening now. As soon as the market started to go south (which never made sense to me, because to me going south means warmth and I like warmth. But that is neither here nor there) everything else became a smaller issue. The War on Terror, foreign relations, and even the presidential elections took a seat on the bench.
The first poem was cool to me, because it used almost every saying or term for money. The second sounded like a Wall Street or big business owner watching the man from his office in a skyscraper. The contrast between him and the other man, how he felt that he had "roughed" it, but then realized that he only took some of his belongings with him and left others, while this man has nothing.

Pronouns

I can tell you the basics of a noun, pronoun, verb and adjective off the top of my head, but all of the things after that take me a minute to sort it all out and tell you what it is and how to use it. Pronouns have always taken me longer to think about.

According to Purdue's Online Writing Lab,
"

AGREE in NUMBER and PERSON and refer clearly to a specific noun.

Instead of saying "Karl Malone says, buy this car."
it should be
"I say, buy this car."
Josh thinks pronouns are great.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_pronuse.html

..., pauses or ellipses?

... had always meant a pause in the speech or writing to me for a very long time. It probably wasn't until high school that someone explained to me that they are used to show that the speech or writing has been edited. Whenever I do see them in speeches, I always wonder what they left out. I know we're not supposed to edit it to change the content, but I have always wondered if people in the big media do that. Anyway, here the rule I found, courtesy of Colorado State University
"When omitting words from the middle or end of a quoted sentence, indicate with an ellipse (…) where the omission occurs. When they occur at the end, place a period after the last word and then insert your ellipse. In either case, take care that the wording remains grammatically correct."

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/researchsources/includingsources/quoting/omittingmiddle.cfm

Mrs. Moody

Mrs. Moody had been my English teacher for over a semester but it wasn't until the day that she pulled me out of the principal's office that I realized she cared more about whether I turned in my paper or not. I hadn't chosen to go to the principals office. My friends had, by moving away or finding new friends over that summer. The jump from sixth grade in elementary school to seventh in junior high had left me disoriented, because I went from top of the school to bottom of the trash can.
My math scores had always been low, but it wasn't until they put me in basic English, "applied math" and a reading class because of them that I realized how low they were. I stopped going to reading class because they were teaching a 5-6th grade level and I read at 11-12th grade. This extra time gave me an excuse to get in trouble with the teachers who didn't appreciate my hanging around the halls. It also let me get into trouble with the other students who decided they had better things to do than go to class.
During one of these encounters, I clocked a kid for telling me I was a fatherless son and that my mom was a female dog. I don't speak/understand lots of Spanish, but I understand enough to insult and understood when I'm being insulted. Given my Irish and Italian background, I felt it was my duty to teach him some manners. This landed me in the principle's office.
Mrs. Moody walked in and asked me in her stern voice "Barton, what did you do this time?" After explaining my situation, she shrugged her head and told me to help carry some boxes of paper to her room. She got me out of the principal's office several more times before the end of junior high, and I tried to get sent there less.
Mrs. Moody is a middle age woman who is in charge of the school newspaper and yearbook at Dixion Middle School. Because of this she is always on a strict deadline and anything that seems to threaten her deadline she immediately attacks it. She never wears her glasses on the bridge of her nose, but always on the tip of her nose that gave you the impression that even when she was complementing you, she was somehow still unsatisfied.
She put me to work on the school newspaper staff and convinced me to be a yearbook editor the next year. Partly to keep me out of trouble, but also because she could see that if I am pushed a bit, I can do some decent work at writing. She slowly raised her level of expectations of my writing, so that by semester's end, I could transfer to a normal English class and was able to leave the reading class. I know that if I had stayed in those classes, I would have given up on a lot of things and just bummed my way through high school and not attend college for myself.

The Commas strike back

Luke, I am your father. This sentence is an example of a good use of a comma. I'm going to continue my emphasis on commas.
One of the things that has always gotten me is comma splices. I had never heard of these until my sophomore year in high school when my teacher attacked me viciously about them. For years I just ignored the red pencil and pen marks and kept going. Who cares about comma splices? I'll just take the hit in the grade and keep going. And then I came to college. I never realized how quickly a grade could be brought down because of comma splices. When I asked what a comma splice is, the teacher looked down his nose at me and gave me that look that said, "Are you seriously in my class asking me this question?". I withdrew my question.
According to the Online Writing Center at Purdue, a comma splice and run on sentences are closely related. The two rules they give about both are:
1. Join the two independent clauses with one of the coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet), and use a comma before the connecting word.
2. When you do not have a connecting word (or when you use a connecting word other than and, but, for, or nor, so, or yet between the two independent clauses) use a semicolon (;).

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/02/

Average is as average does

Parts of this essay made me think about things other than than what the author might have been talking about. While he seemed to concentrate on how no one is really ordinary and that we can't really measure what is really going on inside someone's head, I thought about something else. When Rose starts talking about his teacher MacFarland and the difference he made in his life, it made me think of teacher's that also woke me up to the fact that I was just blowing everything off and that I really needed to focus on what I was doing.
I was not a bad kid or anything. I spent my share of time in the hall in elementary and junior high school and more than once I had to have a teacher rescue me from the principal's office. Throughout elementary and junior high I had multiple teachers that went out on a limb to put some knowledge in my brain and some shoes on my feet (figuratively, I had shoes. Cool ones too, the ones with the gel that turned green and blue, except during the summer when it turned black because it was too hot...anyway).
I think it is important to realize that even when we become successful or when we "make it", we remember where we came from. Mike Rose does. If you read the introduction and see his accomplishments, he achieved much more than where he came came from. Not so we can say "Look how awesome I am, and I came from a garbage dump.", but so we can put things in perspective and credit the good people that sometimes risk a lot to help out a kid who everyone else thinks is just average. But average people are the minority, not the majority. Average people are average, and sometimes we need to be average to achieve more later.