Hello fellow students!
My name
is Rebecca Schmieman, but you can call me Becca. I am a junior in college;
however I have never been to WSU before. I’m from Tri-cities, WA; or more
specifically West Richland. It used to be a small town but has recently been
booming with population. It’s really hot there; it is a desert after all. We
have more sage brush then trees by far. I am married as of March 09, 2012 and
extremely happy. We don’t have any children however; we’re waiting until we
both are done with college and have our careers set in motion. Instead we have
two cats! One is an orange tabby who is five months old and we have a solid grey
kitten that is four months old. They are both boys, the orange one is named
Sherlock and the grey one is named Moriarty, Mori for short. They can be quite
the handful since they are both still kittens but they are so cute, fluffy,
adorable, lovable…
So, on to the more important
information; I want to be an English teacher and I am taking this class to help
prepare for that. When it comes to grammar, I am semi-skilled. I don’t really
understand all the rules that follow each punctuation mark, and I use way too
many commas. My main problem has always been the run-on sentence, for example: “Carmen
loved traveling in Italy she felt Rome was too hot”. Where there should be a
comma or semicolon after Italy. It may be that I’m nervous that I am using too
many commas and then stop, and that is where the run-on sentences come from. I
believe that I rely on the comma too much and I want to learn how to change the
structure of my sentences to include other kinds of punctuation, instead of
relying so heavily upon commas.
I’m not quite sure how to use
semicolons correctly, I understand that a semicolon separates two sentences
that could stand on their own, but I think I need more practice with it. I’ve
never really been taught grammar. I did those dreaded worksheets, but no one ever
really explained the rules of grammar to me. They just gave us a worksheet and
when I got some wrong I never really understood why I got that one wrong versus
why I got the other ones correct, never made sense to me. I would just, put punctuation
where it felt right. If the sentence sounded wrong or felt wrong, I would
change it. I don’t know the actually rules behind grammar, but I can just feel
when the sentence is wrong. For example, “He don’t care about me anymore”
should be, “He doesn’t care about me anymore”; it just felt wrong.
To wrap up my first blog, I would
like to say I am extremely excited to take this class, to further my knowledge
regarding the English language and to become more confident in my grammar
skills.
Sincerely,
Becca
