Identifying Basic Grammar Patterns

In this post, I will be referring to my grammatical analysis of my longest paragraph in my QRG draft. In this exercise I evaluated this paragraph for parts of speech, sentence patterns, subordinate word groups, sentence structures, and sentence purposes. In this post I will reflect on this evaluation.

Schu "Superhero Grammar" 03/19/08 via flickr. Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.0 Generic

This exercise overall told me that I have some LONG sentences.I already knew that I was wordy, but wow, all the commas. There were so many times where I hardly knew how to identify the sentence type because of how complex they were. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing in all cases. However noticing it made me want to simplify some of them just for variety's sake. 

Also, I had to change a declarative sentence into a question so I would have more than one sentence purpose. I think I could benefit in having some other sentences besides declarative, because I think for the most part my work is just declarative with the occasional imperative. Especially in QRGs, I think it might be sort of necessary to have a lot of declarative sentences since it is so information based. 

I actually didn't have any problem at all finding all of the parts of speech. That makes me feel like maybe I'm doing alright with the variety in that aspect of my writing. 

Overall this activity just added on to the overall constant feeling of "but wait, there's more!" in this project. Just when I don't think I could possibly evaluate my writing in any other ways, I am surprised. I actually really like that about this project, because we are getting to analyze our drafts in so many different ways. It keeps the process of going over and over your work more interesting, because we're (at least I am) constantly finding new ways to improve our QRG.