My Pets Were Right All Along

My Peer Tutoring/Advanced Composition professor is very sneaky!  Sure, he's all calm and mild mannered - but so was Superman.  If you remember, Superman only had to take off his glasses and change his clothes and he was a superhero.  My professor goes home, puts on his comfy slippers and creates a take home test that not only tests the grammar rules we've learned in his class, but also asks us to purposely write grammatically incorrect sentences. Sure, many of you regular readers would argue that I do that all the time in my blog entries, but when you have to sit and think of purposely incorrect sentences, it is much harder than it sounds.

Not only did we have to write them, but we had to know why they were incorrect.  Most of the class agrees that as a group of people who like to write and write regularly, we just know these rules though most of us don't remember ever learning them.  Dangling participles?  Nominalized verbs?  Sentence fragments?  Whaaaa?  What you do mean that this is a run on sentence?  The dog barked the cat meowed.  It's true.  Believe it or not a run on sentence does not mean a very long sentence with lots of ands and commas.  It is really just two independent clauses stuck together with nothing to differentiate them.  By actually adding the word and to this sentence, it is no longer a run on.  The dog barked and the cat meowed.

And that my friends, mirrors real life because right now the dog is barking and the cat is meowing.  They both want to go out - grammatically correct or not.