Sunday, October 25, 2009

Pain, two types

Son of a bitch.

I said, "Hold me to it" on my blogging three times a week pledge, and then I fouled it up. The problem is, you see, that as far as my back is concerned, sitting on my computer chair is the most painful thing I do, so I have to limit my computer time. It has cramped my style. And I am starting to believe that my back pain is not a muscular problem after all, but rather a return of my disk problem from a few years ago. The pain has sharpened and changed, and it is now all too familiar to me. So I have another doctor appointment on Tuesday to see what's what. Fuck.



I started the second course in my grad program, and my new professor (who likes to post supportive comments on Glenn Beck's blog) said that the most important rule in writing (" . . . just ask any English teacher") is that you can never start a sentence with a pronoun.

Excuse me, sir, but that is not a rule, and the reason it is not a rule is that is makes no sense. Now I can see having a rule about not starting a sentence with "filler" pronouns like this and it, but no, he means all pronouns. So I said, "Sometimes the antecedent comes right before, at the end of the preceding sentences, such as in a sentence pair like 'Progressive education started with John Dewey. He believed that . . .'"

The prof responded that such sentence structure was unacceptable. Instead, he suggested that we should begin all sentences with subordinate clauses. Well, he was a parochial school history teacher and a football coach, so I'm sure he knows more than I do about grammar.

This will be a long eight weeks.

Son of a bitch.

1 Comments:

At 12:17 PM, Anonymous Alan Snider posited...

Yikes. Talk about a mind-paralyzing, dumbfuck of a rule.

 

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