doug — off the record

If you read my post from yesterday, you would have seen this sentence.

I also remember the big setups for television to start an activity with the knocking over of the first domino and then it cascades into knocking down the rest.  

Those long in education will remember the endless activities of analysing sentence construction.  Quite frankly, I can’t remember the actual rules but do remember that it involved wavy lines, single lines, double lines, parentheses, and braces.  (although we called them round brackets and square brackets)  Then, there were arrows so that you could point various constructs to others.  

It’s all just a blur to me now.  Maybe I should have paid more attention?  

I never dreamed that I’d be so writing so much as I fidgeted in class.  I guess my English teachers were right after all.

Recently, I played around with the FoxType website.

A lot of memories came back!

For example, the site will tear apart a sentence for you showing each of the component parts.

There were lots of memories of the jargon of writing.  Prepositions, adverbs, subject, verbs, pronouns, … I was actually quite surprised and impressed with what I was able to remember.  There were new terms too like “Determiner” that I’d never used before.  However, the diagram above is quite nice in its explanation in context.

That’s not the only feature.  I was curious to see how “Polite” my sentence was.  So, I gave it a shot.

I guess I’m not as polite as I thought I was.  

Or, maybe from a philosophical perspective, a blog isn’t meant to be polite.  At least, doug — off the record doesn’t pretend to be an objective research source.  It’s always written in the first person and always includes my opinions. 

If you’re interested in language and writing, I’ll bet that you enjoy a wander through the website even though some of the features are still in beta.  

It’s free for limited use and then there’s an option to pay what you think it’s worth.  As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and thoughts in YOUR first person are always appreciated.