Do you have any suggestions? I’ve thought about maybe still trying and doing some trees from Star Beast or something I come across, but I don’t know if I should. I understand your assignment of having me go through the grammar videos as the only thing I should be doing, and I should avoid other stuff until I finish those.
You could do more sentence grammar trees.
You can also do any past assignments you think you could use more practice with or just do something else you want to try.
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Ok. So far I’ve watched Learn grammar trees (they’re better than sentence diagrams), Learn to analyze writing (with grammar trees), and Philosopher breaks down tough sentence | Learn how to do it.
For the first two I did go through them, did the practice, and took notes on them. The last one was something I watched maybe two/three days ago? I was busy and tired and made myself watch at the time to at least get something done. I’ll go back and watch it again soon.
From the Text Analysis playlist I skipped ahead to the Harry Potter videos to get some practice for some simpler trees. I also wanted to skip ahead to there to see if theres anything in particular you did different when going through Harry Potter for the trees.
I intend to read Harry Potter again and make trees for sentences I have issues with. I want to do it partially because I skimmed a lot as a kid (reading the “boring” parts was tiring) and therefore missed a lot. And also because I haven’t been reading (most “reading” as of recent such as the abuser book was done by audiobook) as much, so its a way to get back into reading more at a simpler level. I don’t think this will be a hard thing to do. I liked the story of Harry Potter a lot growing up and re-read it multiple times (all while skipping huge sections that I found boring) so I don’t mind going through it again. We’ll see how much I actually read. I won’t force myself to go through it all.
Some updates and writing to share:
My writing this month has been pretty inconsistent. I don’t feel too bad about it due to being sick and because I’m not used to traveling out of the country and knowing how to deal with how I’d feel.
I wrote out of 20 days so far including today.
I have not been playing Baba is You. I think thats partially due to me playing it a lot initially and finding it hard to build back up the momentum. Also because I’m at some later difficult parts its hard to get back into playing it. I’ve tried, with not a lot of effort put behind it tbh, to use the writing method shared elsewhere but it just feels difficult to do on a harder level. Maybe I could revisit some older levels and try the process? I don’t know. I may pick it back up again soon, don’t know.
Some writing to share:
I don’t know how much of this particular issue I’m going to share is particular to my Starbucks, my Starbucks district, and my Starbucks region. However, I think its probably common around various areas of the company.
The issue I’m talking about is the communication of information. I don’t know if that is the best way to put it, but it kind of captures the idea. Here’s an example of a real life situation that encapsulates this:
Recently we got a new manager (actually we just got another new one soon after, but thats not important). This new manager came in and started implementing some policies in contradiction to my old manager. I don’t know how different management structures work for big corporations but as far as I know Starbucks structure can be described as rule-enforcing management. Most of the thinking behind how to manage your store is done for you, you as a manager just have to follow the policy. Their is some variance available to managers, but not much. Managers have some choice when it comes to matters such as how and when to schedule people. They don’t have the authority, at least in corporate owned locations, to set prices, decide what can and can’t be sold, give deals, and change beverage recipes (among other things). Some of the stuff my new (at the time) manager changed contradicted stuff like that. Specifically, what can be sold.
Starbucks sells cold brew coffee. Its basically just coffee grounds steeping in water for a long time. After the initial steeping/brewing over some period of time. Starbucks then cuts that brewed coffee again with water. This is presumably to cut back on the high caffeine content and strength of the coffee. Starbucks now primarily sells the cold brew always cut with water. However, this (selling it primarily cut with water) came about from switching to a different method of preparing cold brew for customers. Previously, it would be uncut in a pitcher and then we’d cut it on the spot as we gave it to a customer. Now it’s pre-cut and poured straight out of a tap system.
This is where the confusion comes in: previous manager let us sell the uncut stuff, a fair number of starbucks in the area sell the uncut stuff. New manager sees us selling the uncut stuff and doesn’t let us sell it because of “policy” reasons. I ask him his basis for not selling. He says policy, but he’ll look into it since we sell it here. He later communicates to the store that he communicated with the district manager, and his peers, and that they all communicated the same thing (for various reasons I think he’s lying about this, regardless none of what he looked into were policy resources) I look into the resources available to me and try to figure out the policy. The closest I can find is something that says something along the lines that if someone orders uncut cold brew it is not an upcharge. Not exactly saying you can sell it, but not saying you can’t. So I get some clarification about this from our district manager about this and he tells me he can’t find any resources saying one or the other. He then tries to look in some social media/communication app (kinda, its workplace from meta) for Starbucks. He finds no policy to reference and just says to just trust your manager.
There are other issues I’ve had with managers and information they should know. I’ve gone to work at a different store and find the store manager claiming a product has been discontinued. That wasn’t the case at all. I later told him, proved it to him, and he learned that his supervisor was just failing to order some product. He just made the discontinuing up.
I recently had some issues with our meal breaks. Starbucks requires that working over 6 hours that employees take 30 minutes unpaid meal breaks. The issue is that Starbucks requires two people at the store at all times (if theres ever a scenario where its just one person you close the store immediately and leave). If you take an unpaid meal break, its unpaid, you are not working so if its just you and one other person that can create issues. Most stores avoid this by just scheduling short shifts or by having a third person for the meal break. My manager wasn’t doing either. So this created issues: what do we do? For a while we were just taking paid meal breaks in the back. That was ok, but still bothered me. So I talked to the district manager about it. His response: “clock out for your meal breaks even if its just the two of you.” “So since its unpaid can I leave the store” “no, two people need to always be at the store”. I showed him, in real time, that contradicts policy. To his credit, I guess, he corrected himself in the moment. The point still stands that he just made it up.
The point being: I think Starbucks sucks at communicating information, managers suck at keeping up with information, and managers make up information for stuff they have no right to make up information for.
The above was a bit too much to write for me and so I intentionally didn’t try and get the exact details of the stories right (I also realized some of my complaining was purely me related and I think irrelevant to others). I figured the exact way these went down wasn’t too important too communicate my point. I can give more information if wanted/necessary.
20 days in a month is good considering international travel + illness.
Yeah I understand. If I go back to games after a long break sometimes I just start over. I don’t recommend that with Baba but you could replay some earlier levels (but not all). Or I don’t know if the extra levels outside the main game have some easier stuff that’d work well, or if you can download medium difficulty level packs or anything like that.
I think you might be wrong to be bothered. I don’t think you should feel guilty about getting some benefit from coping with other people’s errors and doing the kind of problem solving they favor (low on communication and little concern for getting everything right).
I think that’s most of the world.
In general I agree. To clarify two things: I wasn’t getting a benefit and I only really point out policy exceptions that affect me after all its not my job to figure out the policy for my bosses. It may seem like I was getting a benefit by saying my breaks were paid, but to clarify: the policy, as far as I understood it when I read it, says that we should be getting unpaid meal breaks that managers will schedule another person for, so that there can be two people at all times. The reason that getting paid is not a benefit is that there is a reason its paid. You are still technically on the clock. When I’m working as a regular barista its not a big deal. I’m not in charge after all. If I am in charge however its a stressful thirty minutes where I hope that the person I’m working with is strong enough to do everything by themselves for thirty minutes or that they don’t get slammed, otherwise I am expected to go help them. I am on the clock. So the breaks kinda suck. Plus I can’t leave the store to go get food from somewhere else for my breaks, also kinda lame.
But yeah, I don’t feel guilty about the mistakes at work or of my bosses. The whole cold brew story above started because it was a regular I liked that got told we can’t sell to them anymore.
~yeah. I think I’ve been more observant of this stuff in particular because of you. I personally was still surprised at how bad the communication of this company seems at its higher levels. I get that the working world (and other parts of the world) is a mess, but I still expected a mega corporation to have easy places to find information about certain things. The cold brew thing was just one example but there have been other examples where I have a question on policy I’m confused on and my managers can’t find any good resource to address my concern.
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That makes sense.
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I watched Practice Grammar with Harry Potter Sentences the past three days (including today). It seems you just found a bunch of sentences in Harry Potter and made trees of them. I followed along and did a tree for all of them. Some of them I did the full tree and others I did a partial tree and then watched what you did.
Here’s all of them. I spent around ~30 minutes every day.
Ron glared at her as she left.
The video skipped some prepositional phrases. I think “at her” makes sense as a prepositional phrase modifying glared. I’m unsure as to “as” however. I treated it as a prepositional phrase out of habit (from the last time I did something “as”) and just skipped the conjunction definition section. I used this definition:
during the time of being (the thing specified)
The dictionary uses examples like “as a child” and “as a student”. I don’t think “as she left” falls into that same category of “time of being” kind of thing.
In the video you treated “as” as a conjunction with “glared” as one of the verbs and “left” as another verb. That makes more sense, especially given this definition of “as” as a conjunction:
used to indicate that something happens during the time when something is taking place
Harry peered out of the window.
I think this one is fine. Is there a way to split “out of”? Or is it fine to treat it as a singular thing? Seems “out of” is a preposition, from cambridge dictionary:
We use out of as a preposition to talk about movement from within somewhere or something, usually with a verb that expresses movement (e.g. go , come ). It shows where something is or was going
It was getting dark.
He could see mountains and forests under a deep purple sky.
You had “could see” together in your video. I think my split is fine. From a website called englishalex:
Affirmative: Subject + could + bare infinitive (“He could sing the alphabet.”)
See is a bare infinitive with the objects “mountains” and “forests”. If all that is fine, then the only real difference we had was I had under modifying “see”. You had under modifying the object group “mountains and forests”. Even if I did it your way in the video and had “could see”, I would still have under modifying “could see”.
I don’t know if it changes the meaning of the sentence much. The dictionary definitions don’t help too much. Where could he see? Under a deep purple sky. Where are the mountains and forests? Under a deep purple sky. I guess the second one makes more sense?
The train did seem to be slowing down.
I’ll share more tomorrow.
“out of” as one node is a correct option because it has a definition. Here’s another one: Out of Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
And, in this case, I don’t see a good way to split it.
Yes, the “under” phrase makes the most sense giving us information about the location of the mountains and forest. If “under a deep purple sky” modified “see” then it’d tell us that he did the seeing under that sky, not that he saw that sky.
Yes it’s a finite verb (could) then an infinitive. I was just skipping some details.
He and Ron took off their jackets and pulled on their long black robes.
Ron’s were a bit short for him, you could see his sneakers underneath them.
I think this time underneath is modifying see versus something else. Where could you see his sneakers? underneath them. I don’t think underneath, this time, is giving information about where the sneakers are.
A voice echoed through the train
We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes’ time.
I think the overall tree is fine. I’m unsure as to my tree’ing of the prepositional phrase “in five minutes’ time”. I honestly just went in word order. In what? in 5. 5 what? 5 minutes? 5 minutes what? 5 minutes time. it kinda makes sense to me, but I’m unsure.
Please leave your luggage on the train, it will be taken to the school separately.
Harry’s stomach lurched with nerves and Ron, he saw, looked pale under his freckles.
I didn’t know what to do with “he saw” until I watched the video. I think under works as a modifier for pale here. He was pale under his freckles.
You put “he saw” as a modifier for looked because its giving more information about looked. Harry saw that Ron looked pale. Makes sense.
I looked up interjection on merriam-webster:
an ejaculatory utterance usually lacking grammatical connection
So will interjections usually fit into a tree like “he saw” did? or no?
They crammed their pockets with the last of the sweets and joined the crowd thronging the corridor.
The train slowed right down and finally stopped.
Ok this is where I actually got apparently. I was getting confused near the end of the video and just listened. I’m going to re-try the last trees tomorrow and share (I didn’t listen too closely).
Agreed.
The prepositional object is “time” and “five minutes’” is a modifier telling you how much time.
Adjectives go before their nouns so the last word will be the noun in general for this kinda thing.
Also the apostrophe on the end of “minutes’” means it’s a possessive which means it’s a modifier not a noun.
“he saw” is some kinda special case where you have an extra clause with no conjunction.
yes about “under”.
they may not fit well.
are you finding it useful to go through a larger number of sentences? (less attention on each is OK).
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I forgot that. Ok.
yes.
ok. hmm. my worry is that I may forget how to tree some details. mmm. i could make simpler trees and just think about how to tree some extra stuff. if i find it difficult to do, i’ll probably just go ahead and tree the details i find confusing.
I’m working on some stuff right now, but does stuff like this matter to you? By that I mean me saying I’m going to do something by some point in time and actually doing it later. This has happened quite a few times and I feel like if it mattered that much you would have said something by now. Don’t know tho.
I thought there were multiple, but its just one. Your playlist has two of the same video, just so ya know.
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People pushed their way toward the door and out on to a tiny, dark platform.
Here is what I initially tree’d:
I didn’t know how to deal with the second half of the sentence initially.
From your video I saw that you could “and” prepositional phrases. That makes sense. I don’t think I’ve seen that often:
Harry shivered in the cold night air.
Then a lamp came bobbing over the heads of the students, and Harry heard a familiar voice:
Ok. Next I’m going to work on philosopher breaks down a tough sentence.
Async tutoring is self-paced. Your schedule is your decision.
If I ask/assign you to do something, I’m asking as your tutor. It’s not a personal request, and it’s not for my benefit, so I don’t personally mind about whether it’s done quickly or at all.
If you didn’t do assignments for weeks I’d been concerned as a tutor, but I’m not concerned about smaller scheduling details; that’s up to you.
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Yeah, it’s not super common. But you can “and” or “or” together basically anything as long as they’re all the same type of thing.
Quick update and some writing:
Update -
Been busy the past few days. Just a lot of work and home issues that has kept me busy. Haven’t really worked on anything besides writing for the past few days.
Writing -
The holiday season is starting up at work and I’m reminded of how awful it is every time. I like the holidays. I even like the vibes at work during the holidays. The most annoying thing during this time of year is corporate trying to reach their end of year sales goals or whatever to show to their shareholders. Apparently this last quarter is always very important before we head into the new year. The issue is: every holiday season, during the busiest time of the year, we are shorted on labor to show how “great” our company is performing (they also cut a bunch of other costs too, most non priority work tickets get ignored during this time also).
I always thought this kind of thing bad/fraudulent because the way the company frames its last quarter. They want to end the year off strong. To show that the company is strong. They do it to show that the company was strong for the whole year, but it wasn’t. The whole year they run it a certain way and then the last quarter they run it completely different, but they present it as if the last quarter was run the same as the whole year.
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An update:
Hmm. It says I haven’t posted in the last 10 days. This is the longest break I’ve had so far. I’ll brainstorm why that is later.
Over the past 10 days I have more-or-less kept up with writing (missed three days out of those).
When it comes to my writing I think I’m going to try and share more of the writing I do daily (typically when I share on CF, I write with the intention that I will be sharing this on CF). I saw in the Write How You Speak forum post how you mentioned people not getting feedback over stuff they’ve read:
From what I remember you’ve mentioned similar stuff elsewhere, but this just reminded me of it.
Most of how I do my daily writing is go through previously highlighted quotes/passages from books using the readwise app and write down any thoughts I have because of the quote/passage. There are some things I write down that are quite personal at times, but other times I’m just writing down my understanding of the quotes/passages. I probably have misunderstandings of some of the stuff, so I think I’ll try and share more of those writings.
Also during these past 10 days I did do some grammar stuff though I didn’t share anything at the time. Some possible reasons:
- I do most of my CF assignments on a note-taking app called Obsidian. I don’t (most of the time at least) do the assignment right here on the forum. Sometimes I’m too tired (or rushed on time) to transfer/format the assignments from Obsidian to the forum.
- Some of the stuff I did wasn’t complete, but I intended to complete them at a later time and then post about it. I did complete them, though much later than intended. However, then I felt bad about posting because I felt like I didn’t do enough. So the plan then changed to do more stuff and then post. However, doing more stuff delayed posting.
- Started playing a new game (new to me at least) called Persona 5 Royal. I now have a healthy balance of playing it, but initially when I started I would just keep playing it. It would go something like this: wake-up and get ready like normal, play Persona for a little bit before doing other stuff, that little bit turned into a lot, I now have just enough time to write for a little and then go to work. Tbh, I did this with Baba too initially. I think I was even more into it with Baba because it was assigned for me to play.
- Overall I feel much better after fully quitting caffeine (the biggest benefit for me so far is my eyes are less dry and my contacts feel much better). However, I have noticed that I am much more sensitive to not getting enough sleep. Before, I could kind of function on 6 hours of sleep with some coffee and get some mentally demanding stuff done. Now its just a pain to do anything mentally demanding. Also, previously 6 hours of sleep was fine here and there (multiple days in a row were a problem). Now even one day of not enough sleep messes me up in future days. Overall its fine. I just need to work out a work schedule where I don’t have to do shifts where I sleep little (which I could always manage for myself, I just never took it seriously to actually do it).
- Busy with work + sleeping more after quitting caffeine not leaving me much time.
- I also think part of me is tired of doing this grammar stuff leading me to procrastinate on it.
What I have done so far from your Text Analysis playlist:
- Learn grammar trees (they’re better than sentence diagrams)
- I learned how to do grammar trees from this video, did the trees in this video, and took notes on the video.
- I previously posted about this video.
- Learn to analyze writing (with grammar trees)
- I watched the video, tree’d the sentence (tried to), and took notes.
- I previously posted about this video.
- Philosopher breaks down tough sentence | Learn how to do it
- I watched this video, attempted the tree, and primarily took notes on it. I forget if I was too tired or if it was too hard (probably a mix of both) but I didn’t really tree much and focused on taking notes on the video and seeing your process.
- I did mention just watching this video before in a previous post.
- I’ll share my notes in a different post.
- Demonstrating a type of grammar analysis (dependency trees)
- Same as the above video, I primarily took notes for this one. Will share in another post.
- Practice Grammar with Harry Potter Sentences
- Watched the video and tree’d the sentences. Did this previously over multiple posts.
- Practicing Core Grammar Structure (philosophy prerequisite)
- Watched this today. Took notes on it. Wasn’t much for me to do exactly. I’ll share them in another post.
- Sentence Grammar Tree Practice with a Peter Singer Article
- Watched this today, took notes on it, and tree’d both the sentences. I’ll share them in another post.
What I haven’t done so far:
- Philosopher Does Analysis (Paragraph Tree)
- Philosophical Perspective: Complexity in a Regular Paragraph
- Philosophical analysis of Steven Pinker passage | Everything explained from grammar to arguments
- Writing Critique for “Fintech Community Banking”
Should I go through these last four videos? They seem less related to sentence trees/sentence grammar.
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Some writing I did today:
From the The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:
It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.
Am I miserable in my day to day? My misery is my mind/body communicating to me that something is going wrong in my life. Things like depression/sadness/anxiety are communicating things to you.