I will write better. I will write better. I will...

I always delight in hearing my boyfriend's story about how his handwriting was so atrocious in elementary school that a teacher made him stay in from recess and write "I will write better" over and over again on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, his printing has not gotten any better. I still find it atrocious today how he scribbles carelessly and squashes his letters and makes lowercase e's by drawing the curve first, then inserting a haphazard line.

I was also thinking about handwriting this weekend while we were up in NH for the wedding of one of my boyfriend's childhood friends. We were browsing through some of his old yearbooks, and as I read the "autographs" of girls in his class, it seemed exactly the same as the handwriting my friends and I used to have. I wondered - 'is handwriting trendy?' Are some types of handwriting "cool" at times, and others not? Was it "cool" to write in swirly, bubbly, big letters that conjured up images of giggly girls with braces? It might have been, because I remember striving to that effervescent handwriting... though I could never quite get it.

And now with all this texting and emailing, will kids not even regard handwriting as a form of communication anymore? What does the "cool" handwriting look like today? (And don't say: Times New Roman.)

This article doesn't really answer that question; it's more about how cursive is a silly way to teach kids to write. But it is what inspired this post, so check it out: here.

Delighting in grammar!

Those of you who know me know I am a stickler for correct spelling and grammar. I frequently take pleasure in pointing out mistakes in the New York Times or other venerable publications, and when I make a mistake myself I'm often quick to correct it lest I end up looking foolish in front of the literati with which I keep company.

In today's world, however, inventions such as texting and Twitter seem to dumb-down our lanugage abilities and turn communication into something that is done in short, carelessly abbreviated bursts (u gng 2 movi 2nite?). It makes me a little bit depressed to think that proper language and all it's beautiful intricacies may be flushed down the toilet. I mean people are writing NOVELS on their CELL PHONES... Dickens must be turning over in his grave!

Amidst all the semantic turmoil, I was happy to stumble across this website: English Grammar Revolution. It's all about learning parts of speech and diagramming sentences--I know it was tedious in elementary school but for adults it's a great way to procrastinate and do your part to perpetuate language correctness.

So please don't let words become obsolete in favor of three-letter abbreviations. Don't let commas become a thing of the past. Don't wait until it's so bad that you get a letter (or more likely, a text) from your child at summer camp that looks like this:
omg mom plz snd sox feet stnk fuds gud mis u

Instead, go here and diagram a sentence. Encourage your kids/friends/illiterate neighbors to do the same.

Oh, and check out the preposition song, it's pretty sweet.