I don’t really recall how I learned to construct a sentence, or how I became able to manipulate words. I think that as I become more aware of the intricate parts of writing, I see that I don’t remember much about how I learned to write. I’m just glad that I was able to become one of those individuals who manipulates words and understands the writing process. One thing I do remember about my writing education is that grammar has never been an easy thing to manage.


In chapter ten Lindemann talks about sentences and how to teach students to vary sentences in terms of style. She also decodes the structure of a sentence in this chapter, and one thing that caught my attention was what she had to say on “grammatical terminology” (168). She explains that her students have problems with grammatical terminology because they are too busy focusing on the name for something and not truly being engaged in the writing aspects. In the example she provides, the boy only remembers part of the instructions as well as half of the term, mainly because the part of the term that he remembered had something to do with what he was doing. This is something that bugs me up to this point in my writing education, til this day, I am not able to neither name all of the grammatical terms nor can I easily point them out. Yet when I was taking my undergrad course on grammar, I was able to apply the terminology and was more aware of how sentences work. The problem with that class was that although I grasped all of the material for that semester, none of it was learned. Every exercise was from a work-book, a really good one at that that might be helpful when combined with other methods, and that made it more difficult to store. That semester I was more aware of how and what I was writing, but since then, I have no idea what distinguishes a dangling modifier from an adverbial clause. I would have liked more information on how to teach grammar, but Lindemann is more focused on varying sentences in this section. I find it difficult to ask students to remember grammatical terms and rules especially when these terms are rarely used outside of the grammar class or beyond the section that covers it.