Here is some of what I did this week:
I did a little bit of grammar practice by getting an LLM to quiz me on:
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identifying participles (e.g., a winning smile), which led me to notice that participles can also function as adverbs (e.g., He died fighting for his beliefs) (happily, ActiveMind and ET confirmed that participles can act as adverbs)
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infinitives of purpose (e.g., She put a pie into the oven to bake) vs adjectival infinitives (e.g., I need a house to live in)
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differentiating “that” as a relative pronoun (which introduces adjective clauses, e.g., I want a dog that is quiet and well-behaved) vs “that” as a conjunction (which introduces noun clauses, e.g., I think that he is awesome).
- I also briefly took at look at other adjectival and adverbial clauses and related topics like relative adverbs (where, when, why, how; e.g., I went to a place where unicorns exist) vs relative pronouns (that, which, who, whom, whose; e.g., He is the man whom you met last night).
I did Peikoff’s grammar lectures 2 & 3 (including the homework). I quickly listened to lectures 4 & 5 (but didn’t do the homework yet).
- Improper Subordination: I liked the idea (from Peikoff’s second lecture) of putting the main idea in the main clause. I was amused by some of Peikoff’s examples of putting a side issue in the main clause (e.g., “the President took a sip of water”).
But idk if I should practice the more advanced stuff from Peikoff’s course to the point of it being more intuitive. (If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this matter, please let me know.) My current idea is that I should master the more basic parts of grammar before working on mastering the more advanced ideas from Peikoff’s later lectures. To elaborate:
How should I proceed? Master the basics first:
At the moment, I’m still not very good at reading complicated text. For example, before learning grammar, I didn’t really understand the Taggart Terminal quote that Peikoff used as an example in the first lecture of his course. There’s also lots of other text that I still don’t really understand at first glance, e.g., the paragraph from ET’s Steven Pinker video or even other quotes from Atlas Shrugged, e.g.:
Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor—by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence—and every achievement is an expression of it.
I couldn’t immediately comprehend and summarize that. Let alone more complicated sentences.
So I feel like maybe I should master the basics of grammar first and get super good at rapidly understanding, analyzing, and summarizing sentences. That might be more useful to me at the moment than mastering ideas from Peikoff’s later lectures such as putting the main idea in the main clause, parallelism after correlatives, pluperfect vs present perfect tense, proper use of pronouns, etc. I guess Peikoff’s course is intended more for people who want to write correctly rather than analyze text/read correctly. But atm I think I might want to focus more on text analysis. And I feel like I still have a lot more work to do to master basic grammar.
So I might pause Peikoff’s course for a bit and instead refocus on mastering basic grammar and sentence diagramming. (And perhaps have a go at some other text analysis stuff like paragraph trees and paraphrasing.)
I haven’t decided for sure yet. Maybe I’ll work on both mastering Peikoff’s grammar principles and mastering text analysis in parallel. If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts, I’m all ears.