When I received my Grammar Guide assignment, I was already feeling tense about taking the class because it had been almost twenty years since I had had a course in Grammar.  Additionally, I had never heard of the word appositive nor did I have any idea what it meant.  Nevertheless, I began my research by looking for information on my grammatical concept within my Grammar book.  I quickly found a definition and multiple examples of the appositive used within sentences.  While in the ETL library, I found another Grammar book by the same author which included information concerning the appositive's rhetorical usages.  Finally, after searching through numerous books in the UNCP library and failing to find any historical information about the appositive, I was advised to search Chaucer and Shakespeare's works to see if they used appositives.  Fortunately, I was able to find that both Chaucer and Shakespeare used the appositive, but apparently for different reasons.  For example, Chaucer used appositives for detailed description of his characters while Shakespeare used appositives for a comic effect.

    Upon completion of my Grammar Guide, I looked back with a sigh of relief and a feeling of accomplishment.  Although I do not see myself as an expert on appositives, I have definitely increased my knowledge and understanding through research and application of the concept.  I think it was a great idea for each student to present one grammatical concept along with exercises for practice, and I plan to use this idea with my own students in my future teaching career.
 
 

    This project was a new experience for me since I have never been involved in editing anyone's work but my own.  I began this project by printing and reading through the student's entire essay and making corrections to the hard copy.  Many of the errors that I found were easily identifiable such as the need for additional spaces between sentences, apostrophes to indicate possession, and misspelled words.  For example, I placed one additional space at the end of almost every sentence so that there would be two spaces between sentences instead of one.  I added an apostrophe to the name Burroughs in paragraph 3 to show ownership of the word success, and I corrected the spelling of Edgar in the last sentence of  paragraph 4.  However, I also found some not-so-obvious things such as incomplete sentences, sentences with incorrect punctuation, and sentences where the subject and verb did not agree.  For example, the sentence Whether they face opposing humans or forces of nature is an incomplete sentence, and the sentence All of Burroughs' works surrounds survival of the fittest just as our daily lives surrounds it also reflects an incorrect subject--verb agreement.  In addition to these need corrections, I noticed that the essay contained a quotation without an introduction as shown in parapgraph 3 as well as the need for a colon after the introductory word explains in paragraph 6.

    After I completed editing the essay, I was surprised by the number of errors that I had been able to find, and I felt satisfied that I could edit another person's work.  This Editing Project was the most interesting work that I did in English Grammar, because it required that I pull together various grammatical concepts learned earlier in the semester as well as punctuation.  I have greatly appreciated the Editing Project experience since it also gave me an idea of what my job will be like as a future teacher.