Talk:Rhetoric and Composition/Grammar and Mechanics

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A few notes here. First, we don't want to spend too much time working on this section. We don't want to make grammarians out of people. Instead, they need to know just enough to stop from doing things that will detract from their ethos as writers. They don't really need to know all the terms for things; just how to write sentences that are free of errors. Many of us love grammar for its own sake, but it tends to scare students. Most students will try to use these pages to figure out problems their teachers have identified in their writing. We should write clear explanations and plenty of examples--all the while avoiding jargon. --Mattbarton.exe 01:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I changed some terms and some capitalization in the headers for the errors list because of inconsistency and logic problems: if we're going to call them errors, "subject-verb agreement" isn't an error, it's a topic area. "When subjects and verbs don't agree" is an error. I agree to a certain extent about the jargon, but some terms are unavoidable and are helpful for clarity and brevity, both in presenting and learning; a few select terms and brief definitions are helpful tools to arm writers. -- Parrhesia

Sounds good to me. BTW, if you look at the toolbar that pops up when you edit the page, one button looks like a signature. It's a useful tool for leaving your name and time. --Mattbarton.exe 17:14, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links

I think the links at the bottom could use some brief annotations. --Mattbarton.exe 19:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other stuff

I was wondering about the possibility of adding sections such as: who/whom, "to lay versus to lie", "affect" versus "effect" -- just some common errors writer's tend to make. Comments? Are they located somewhere else in the book? --Kyoung 03:31, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

They may be in the editing section, but seems like a "usage" or "common mistakes" section would be a good addition. --Mattbarton.exe 20:26, 29 November 2007 (UTC)