Syd's Thoughts

I decided to do the story lab TedEd Videos: Language because most of the corrections that I have had to make on my stories have involved some sort of grammatical error.  I really liked the semicolon video because honestly I graduated from a small town where we never even discussed the proper formatting of writing and grammar. I learned that the semicolon can be used to join two complete sentences. I honestly thought that the semicolon was used for one complete sentence and one incomplete one. I'm not really sure why, but I am happy to be corrected.  I also learned something cool about apostrophes. They can actually be used in 3 different ways. The first way is to mark possession of something. For example when I say Chloe's purse. The second way is to mark contraction. This is what we do when we say "don't" or "can't". The last way to use apostrophes is to mark plural of single letters. I had no idea they could be used this way but apparently they ca...

I chose to read Beowulf for the second reading this week. This is a hero story (which I love). All of the small stories from this category were written as poems which made them pretty easy to read and fun. My favorite part about Beowulf was his battles. He first had to battle a monster named Grendel who was terrorizing his home. Beowulf bravely went and tore his arm from his body (that is one strong man), but then Grendel's mate came to avenge his death so Beowulf once again had to battle to protect his people. I thought the story was over when he then defeated Grendel's mate, but then a dragon came into the story because someone stole his treasure.  You can tell in these older British and Celtic stories that battle or war is a very common theme with them which makes sense because that is exactly what was happening in the real world around these authors. The whole world was at war with each other; constantly fighting over land and resources. It seems like the only issues in the...

The section I decided to read from the British and Celtic unit was Robin Hood. I feel like a lot of people probably picked this story section because most of us have grown up hearing about the Robin Hood stories. These were very different than the ones I grew up hearing however.  Honestly, the only enemy that I recognized was the Sheriff of Nottingham. The others were brand new to me which was a nice surprise. I did not know what a ballad was before reading this unit. A ballad is basically short stanzas that tell a story that are passed on orally from one tradition to the next. It really gives a structure and a rhythm when reading. I really liked the ballad shape of writing over some of the other things I have read for this class. I also noticed that some of the stories had capitalized words or italicized words kind of randomly. Of course they were not random, but at first they seemed like it. They were really used for emphasis to show something important.  I also noticed that...