Thanks for the upcoming site and thanks for providing this beta forum to provide help while we wait. Will the posts on this forum be moved to the new one?
you're welcome. We're wrestling with that very question and haven't come up with a solution. Here's a wild hare: Would people who wrote here be willing to cut and paste their posts over to the new forum? I'll create a categorie that says "archive" or something along that line.
A short cut could be to transfer only the last post in a series that quoted the earlier posts. Any other ideas?
I don't know how time consuming this would be. It didn't take me very long to do the one below but it was a short topic. Maybe if quite a few people could volunteer to do a few topics it might be possible.
I just copied the entire page of the topic subject errors and then deleted unecessary text (nothing frm the actually posts) and moved the name to the bottom of each post and put some kind of line between posts.
This is what it looks like.
Just an idea,
Kendall
Elocution:Topic:Subject errors
In looking through Elocution Worksheet 1: Subjects, I am confused. I don't know what Error 3 is unless it's really like Error 2. And I have trouble calling Error 2 a subject error since I have always referred to that kind of thing with my kids as a verb problem since it is using a passive verb when active verbs are preferable. That appears also to be the problem with the sentence used for Error 3. To me talking about using the wrong subject seems to be a roundabout way to deal with the problem.
I see exactly what you are saying here. I have always taught error #2 as a verb problem: choosing passive voice insytead of active voice. And error 3 seems to be a variation on this... It all seemed to make sense to me when I was listening to Andrew teach it...
When I look ahead to the "verb" errors, they are not so much "verb errors" as they are like verb weaknesses. Maybe making this contrast explains why #2 and #3 are considered problems with the "actor" rather than problems with the verbs.
Maybe someone can help us both out with the disstinctions here...
The best way to explain this would be to say that subjects and verbs are intimately related and what happens to one affects the other, often directly. I don't have my materials in front of me so I can't answer the specific question, but I can say this much: since the first sentence is true, it is also true that sometimes subject errors will be caused by or cause verb errors. And thus to fix one is to fix the other. Verbs are almost always easier to fix than subjects.
As for the distinction between verb weaknesses and verb errors I would contend that to use a weak verb is an error. No grammatical or rhetorical principle is always right or wrong. They always involve judgment. So sometimes these three subject and three verb errors won't be errors at all. But the student can only learn to judge that rightly if he learns that they are usually errors - and why.
I think I'd vote for some of us cuting and pasting things. We have some very foundational ideas that we've talked about here and I think it would valuable to have them in the forum to reference. I like Kendall's idea of compacting the questions and answers-this would certainly make a handy reference point.
I've posted a few of the Elocution threads on the new forum. I will work on the remaining elocution threads and the Arrangement topics as well. I have so little spare time but this is a job I can do with one hand while feeding the baby:).
