Grammar...

I always feel that I'm struggling with my grammar, as well as my spelling. I know, for a fact, that my education has huge gaps in it, both from missing a lot of school due to illness and incompetent teachers. {I'm not cutting down all teachers or schools, just some that I've dealt with in my life.} I found my biggest missing chunks are in grammar, sentence structure {I never learned how to map a sentence and have no clue what modifiers, declarative clauses or determiners are!}, spelling and spelling rules, and history {world history, US history, any of it}. I have tried to supplement my education with my own research, but I learn better in a formal setting.

I was at {groan} Quizilla a few minutes ago - Let me explain before you think I'm a big-bar-hair idiot! Those horrible quizzes can be really great for getting to know your characters. They are great for filling out some of those little things about your characters that you don't even think about. {Also one of my favorite character questions for when I 'interview' my characters is - What's in your purse/pockets? I've learned great things about characters with that one.}

So, I was at Quiilla working on my un-formed FMC for my '07 NaNo-Novel and I came across a grammar quiz. Just on a whim I took it. I was impressed! It was harder than I expected and really made me think. I must admit I guessed on a few of them. I figured I'd done horribly as - as mentioned before - I have huge missing chunks in my education.

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise! I did well, very well. It named me a 'grammar god!' I almost fell over when I read that. I guess my grammar isn't as bad as I thought {even though I'm a known comma princess}. It's really help my ego and made me feel better about my writing over all. I know it was just a silly little quiz, but it showed me I know more than I thought I did.

No, I will not be posting all sorts of quiz results and crap here. This blog WILL all be about writing and {hopefully} getting published. I will be posting good writing links, ideas, books and other interesting tid-bits. While I did talk about quiz results here, I also told you a great way to work on character development. It's amazing how much quizzes can help you get to know your characters. I also posted this because it shocked the holy heck out of me!

Hope this was, at least a little bit, informative.

Later days,
Ken