Reading Response 10 Bryson

Before You Read
3.  Technology has made communication much easier and quicker.  We can now instantly speak to someone anywhere, anytime.  People usually don't use proper grammar when texting or talking on the phone.  It usually does not affect my understanding of what the other person is trying to tell me because most of the people that I text text legibly.  There are many new words such as friend (verb), facebook, and tweet. 

Summary
In his article "Good English and Bad," Bill Bryson questions the rules of grammar in the English language.  He asks how many of the rules came to be and argues that they are based on the teachings of grammar scholars that may not have had the merit to make decisions for a language.  Many rules exist for no reason, they just are because they are.  Also some do not make sense.  In an example that Bryson uses, "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is incorrect but when you change "are I not" to aren't, a contraction that means the same thing, it is correct "I'm hurrying, aren't I?"

Synthesis
This article is similar to James Porter's article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" because both challenge a common construct.  Porter challenges the construct of plagiarism and argues how all texts are derived from other texts so plagiarism rules should not be as strict as they are.  In the article Bryson argues how grammar, like the rest of the English language, is fluid and changing so therefore we should accept not think as something being right or wrong.  It also relates to John Dawkins' article "Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool" because it challenges the construct of punctuation and how it should be used more freely.

Review
I found this article more interesting than most of the articles that we have read so far because it was short so I did not have to pay attention as long and because it offered a new way to think about a subject.

QD
2.  Bryson says that English has such a complex grammar structure because the rules are based off of Latin rules but English and Latin have very little in common.  English also consists of words from many different languages and it even contains words that are derived from multiple different languages.

AE
2.  By Fluid Bryson means that the language is ever moving and changing.  By democratic he means that it changes as a result of how everyone uses it.  Rules of the language have changed just because people start talking in a new way.  I have seen fluidity in language in the some of my friends' papers in high school.  They may have used grammar that was technically incorrect, but it made sense in the context and therefor they were not penalized for it.

MM
Verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, and article are some of the parts of speech.  I do not consciously think of them as I write or use them.  I learned them in school and had to memorize all of the parts of speech in middle school.  Knowing the parts of speech will make you better at using proper grammar but it will not heavily impact the content of your writing.