Grammar, Language and Good Writing

     After reviewing Douglas Cazort's Under the Grammar Hammer and considering our discussion in class, I found that although I do not tend to make many grammatical errors, there are a few "common mistakes" I can more or less identify with making. Usually, my biggest problem with writing involves overly complex sentences and structures. One of my first professors here told me that as one of his professors once told him, I write like I "have three PhD's." And this, of course, is not a compliment. One important skill is the application of simplicity when your topic is simple, and complexity only when the topic or your thesis demands such a form of discourse. But anyways, back to grammar.... I chose #15: "vague pronoun reference" as my most frequent blunder. The example they give in the book is straightforward - using "which" or "that" instead of a more specific word such as "practice" or "function" or whatever. This weakens writing because it forces the reader to continually go back or at least to consider the surface level of what we are writing far more than what we might actually be trying to say. Nevertheless, we must be careful when replacing these words...if we replace them because we think we have to, we will likely choose a word that sounds good. In that case, I think "which" or "that" probably served a better purpose. We must know what we are writing about and use language to harness our ideas onto the paper; language, itself, cannot create ideas.