A Midsummer Homework Nightmare

This posting was edited on 9/11/08.

We have posted on this thread our English teacher?s daily exercises in editing, grammar, and style. Because the exercises are not in our school?s grammar book, we thought that the teacher wrote the exercises. Today, we learned that the exercises are in:

Jane Bell Kiester. The Chortling Bard. Maupin House Publishing. Gainsville, Florida. 2003.

Because the exercises are copyrighted information, we won?t post any more of them, but if other people want to continue the conversation by referring to the exercises in Kiester?s book by page number or by referring to exercises in similar books page number, we would be glad to read about how other people edit the exercises, and we will offer our opinion about how to edit the exercises.

One way to correct post #1

This is the earthy tale of love, impending nuptials, trickery, mistaken identities, passion, and celebration. It involves fairies, sprites, noble men, and hard-handed laborers. It takes place in the ancient Kingdom of Athens, Greece where men?s words were the law; and women were subjugated to their will.

Theres so many grammar mistakes there!!

Look at the captials, etc theres none!

Inserting commas and such, I find 15 corrections made:

This is the earthy tale of love, impending nuptials, trickery, mistaken identities, passion and celebration, which involves fairies, spirits, noble men and hard-handed laborers, that takes place in the ancient kingdom of Athens, Greece, where mens words were the law and women were subjugated to their will.

According to our English teacher the paragraph must be at least two sentences. We're not really sure why "that takes place" becomes "It takes place."

This is the earthy tale of love, impending nuptials, trickery, mistaken identities, passion, and celebration, which involves fairies, spirits, noble men and hard-handed laborers. It takes place in the ancient kingdom of Athens, Greece, where men's words were the law, and women were subjugated to their will.

If you have to make two sentences of the one (in order to call it a paragraph), replacing the word 'that' with 'It' will give the second sentence its subject.

I remember those. I found a few right off the bat!!!


View Image


martian leader

This is the earthly tale of love, impending nuptuials, trickery, mistaken identities, passion, and celebration.
Which involves fairies, sprites, noblemen, and hard-handed laborers, that takes place in the ancient kingdom of Athens Greece.
Where mens' words were the law, and women were subjugated to their will.

We had intended to ask the teacher for a better explanation as to why the need for two sentences, but we both forgot. Our best guess is that there is some problem with the grammar as written, but we don't understand what grammatical error it is. So maybe tomorrow.

This is the second paragraph. The first paragraph is in post #1.

our jovial and mirthful story commences when theseus the duke of athens and his bride to be hippolyta the comely queen of the amazons was planning the pageantry for there forthcoming wedding

The teacher pronounces the name, Hippolyta, hip-po-LEE-ta. We don?t know if that is right because we have also heard, hip-POL-it-a.

Instead of talking about the story that takes place, the first sentece describes the story, and the second tells you the origion of the story. Though, I'd have made it "The story takes place..." rather than It.

Grandma Dee's version for paragraph 1 & 2

This earthy tale of love, which involves impending nuptials, trickery, mistaken identities, passion, and celebration, as well as fairies, sprites, noble men, and hard-handed laborers, takes place in the ancient Kingdom of Athens, Greece, where men's words make men's law and subjugate women to men's will.

Our jovial and mirthful story begins when Theseus, the Duke of Athens and his bride-to-be, Hippolyta, the comely queen of the Amazons, planned the pageantry for their forthcoming wedding.

Maybe Grandma Dee is a closet feminist.

Somewhere you should be able to find a rule about the insertion of commas; as I recall, it was not necessary to insert a comma if the conjunction 'and' already separated two nouns.

Some publishers have a thing about commas: "fairies, sprites, noble men, and hard-handed laborers" can be written "fairies, sprites, noble men and hard-handed laborers." We always put in the extra comma because that's the way Grandma Dee does it. We think she had a good reason, but right now we don't remember what it was.

Some publishers leave out the comma after the introductory adverbial phrase. We always leave it in because of sentences like, "When it rains cats, and dogs barking is heard under the tree; punt." "When it rains cats and dogs, barking is heard under the tree."

This is the second part of paragraph two, which began in post #10.

they were impatient as would be any red blooded middle aged couple for they're nuptial day to arrive five days hence on may 1 1600 theseus had just ordered philostrate his master of revelry to devise some diversion to distract he and hippolyta until their wedding day

Hint: According to our English teacher, colors should not be separated from other adjectives by commas.