Topical Guide

The topical guide is honestly the only that I’ve used to find anything in the book. Of course, the page numbers are set out for our benefit, but this has been such a beauty for me! This topical guide has shown comparisons between things that I didn’t even know had a difference. For example. The words renown and renowned. Renown is a noun that means “fame or eminence.” And renowned is an adjective that means “famous or celebrated.” Honestly, I had no idea that they even had a difference. It’s these kinds of things that have helped to open my eyes a little bit to things I didn’t know were there.

To be honest, I always thought I was pretty decent with grammar, at least all of the basics. After beginning this class, I now know that I don’t know anything. I’m seriously the worst with this grammar journey, because there are so many things that I had no idea even existed! I didn’t know about dangling modifiers, or homophones, homonyms and homographs. Who even came up with things like that? I will say though, they are very interesting and I hope these things are helping me to improve my grammar.

Something I thought was interesting though was an antecedent. I’ve always heard about them, but I never quite knew what they were. They are a word that a pronoun refers to. A clear connection between the antecedent and the pronoun needs to exist for the sentence to make sense. They are difficult to know at times because with some sentences it’s unclear what the antecedent of a pronoun is, and for that reason writers have problems with the agreement.

I really hope I retain all of this information, but so far, I think I’ve been doing pretty well!