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To the Editor,
Okay dear readers. There is a time when we as young children, were taught the basics in grade school. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. It sounded simple.
But then came along Science. Geography. Religion. Spelling. What else will be coming our way? For me I wasn't sure. But all of those subjects came to me like a tidal wave.
Somehow I survived the onslaught of the books and papers that poured in front of me like a flooded river. But it will be okay. Just take your time. I did. Then…fourth grade arrived.
And some genius professor and his colleagues, came up with a brainstorm idea. Sentence word structuring. WHAT? Structured sentences? Yup. Adverbs, Adjectives,Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs.
And the most fearful of this family was…the Dangling Participle.
Dangling. Participle. What in God's name is that? And all of these other folks with weird names? At my young age, I heard that this strange family with strange names, are part of our English language. They help us discover persona, places, and things.
Now, you can make a sentence out of that. But…and I do say but…it has to be a word structure. Slashes, triangles, slants, hyphens, capitalizations, breakdown. Then after you do your construction on your sentence, you have to explain where this new family fits into your sentence.
Okay, now that this was explained in the classroom to 8 and 9 year olds, the teachers would pick out children in the class. And in my fourth grade class, one of those lucky enough to try it on the blackboard ..was me.
My teacher explained to me what to do on the board, with the sentence that was in front of me. As I started the journey of building this sentence, the finishing touch was that of a trainwreck at Grand Central Station.
My teacher then told me to return to my seat. Ashamed at my disaster, my teacher told my other classmates that this new structuring of our sentencing would take a long time to do.
After a few weeks of trial and error, everyone learned how to do this sentence structure thing. Ah, free at last. Next up, the new math. Algebra. I think I'll be sick tomorrow.
Kevin Neverly
Weirton