[HPFGU-OTChatter] Mr. Rogers -- crayons -- grammar

[heiditandy]

Melody wrote: 
> 
> ...and oh, oh, he had this one video where he
> showed about how
> > crayons are made.  Now I was so sure that *that* was
> the coolest 
> thing
> > I had ever seen.  Zillions of little red and blue
> and yellow crayons
> > zooming around in conveyor belts.  I do so love to
> color you know.
> 
> ::happy gasp:: i had COMPLETELY forgotten about that
> until now!  I remember that video, and they had the
> mounds and mounds of crayons -- and i remember being
> so jealous of the people who worked in that factory,
> because as everyone knows, being the first person to
> handle a fresh crayon that still has the nice little
> point on it is one of the best things in the world.  
> 

I saw this last year a few times. Back last Fall, the Miami Museum of
Science had a special Mr Rogers exhibit, and although Harry (my 3 year
old) had never seen the show (it's only on here while he's at school) we
went a few times. He loved making the trolly go, and playing with the
puppets - especially Daniel Striped Tiger - and looking at the
letter-boxes along one of the walls - and they had a few segments from
the show on perma-play, including the crayons one. 

If you have kids - or want to borrow one for a few hours - see if the
*The Sky Above Mister Rogers Neighborhood* planetarium show will be at
your local planetarium or if the Pittsburgh Children's Museum traveling
exhibit will be in your town - they're great shows and I highly
recommend them.

******************************************************

On the issues of grammar and spelling...

As one of the fic-intake people at FictionAlley, I probably see more
teens' fictional writing than even the teachers here do, because we get
about 800 - 1000 submissions per week, and about 50% of them are from
13-18 year olds. That means that the intake team reads through chapters
and one-shot stories by about 400 junior high and high school students
each week.

And I'm not talking out of school to say that the grammar and spelling
in many of the submissions is perfect, at least in terms of the basics.
No, someone might not realise that there are three periods in an elipse,
and there's a lot of use of hyphens where, technically, a semicolon is
correct, but for things like punctuation, use of commas and periods, and
yes, the problematic apostrophes, most submitters get it right. If they
don't get it right the first time, when we send the fic back to the
author for editing, we give examples of the correct and incorrect ways,
and they get it right the second time, and from them on, it's usually
smooth sailing. 

Of course, we're not talking about average teens here. All of them have,
or at least there's a presumption that they have, read the HP novels, so
they've seen at least fifteen hundred pages of properly "grammaticized"
prose. And that's why it amazes me that they don't all get the
punctuation of the quotations, at least, right from the start. I mean,
how can someone read books that never improperly punctuate a quotation
and still write a story which includes something like this:

"It's  a sunny day today." He said.
"Yes, very blue sky." Hermione replied.

Where does the idea come from that this is the right way to do it? I
read my son books for 3-6 year olds, and they do it properly, even for
that age group, at least in terms of the comma-vs-period issue (although
they sometimes have two characters speaking in the same paragraph, which
is technically incorrect, but, well, it's Thomas The Tank Engine, and
one can make allowances).

I think that while many schools do teach the rules, a large number of
them don't explain the rules in context. I don't know the process for
teaching this, but it seems to me that giving the rules and then having
the kids find the applications of those rules in books helps them build
the context for it. But maybe this is just because my Harry can already
tell the difference between a period and a comma....


Heidi, who didn't realise that there should be four dots in an elipse at
the end of a sentence until she started beta reading