The training I’ve been attending this week is a Technical writing class. The University of Washington has a Tech Writing certification program. Many people in my dept have gone through the program, and they all say the very best part, the thing that made it all worth it, was a grammar class taught by particular professor. So we decided that we should have her come in, and teach just a few pared down classes, because maybe our skills could be sharpened. Or something like that. So, usually, when we are in some kind of training, it feels exactly like that – Professional Training. Taught by “trainers.” There’s a difference between trainers and teachers. This class feels like school, and Jan is a teacher… a professor. And I am enjoying the heck out of it. We started with ways to organize technical data. Because we have to write a lot of tech emails to non-tech people now, we knew we could use some help with that. Now we are into style, then we’ll do grammar. And it’s so much fun, I can’t tell you. I must be a geek, but I am am so enjoying the language play. And we were talking about clauses on Wednesday. Independent clauses!! When’s the last time you even considered splitting infinitives? The best part was… I found out… it’s ok to end a sentence with a preposition!! All modern grammar books say so. The old grammar rules were based on latin, I guess. And they are all crap! That’s the other thing, I can start sentences with AND if I want to. Not like I wasn’t already. The problem is, people still hang on to the rules, so if you do end your sentences with a preposition, they might think you are a little challenged, grammatically. But who cares? Silly grammatical dinosaurs with their archaic rules.
I feel so free now.