Prepositions Plus Further English Matters That Cause My Downfall

You may have no idea how I end up getting buried under the weight of my wrong grammatical turns and past lexical errors.

Cranking out a blog post and doling out comments on co-bloggers’ sites can give me trauma when after pressing the Send button, I discover, to my terror, either a grammatical blunder or a spectral misuse of an English term. Hardly a way is there to take things back so the accompanying mark of shame could only follow me for years to come.

My attempts to work a few good expressions into my composition tend to backfire, moreover, with disconcerting regularity — as my adventurous nature continues to soldier on to my spirit for bold writing. You gotta understand, I’m a wanna-be writer.

A previous blog pal’s sophisticated implementation had switched on my fascination for phrasal verbs, yet to this day I keep blanking out on their apt usage. He once wrote: “Play on, my friend.” Well, that one definitely made me scratch my head.

And please don’t start me with idioms: “Why keep flogging a dead horse?” (Seriously, why would anyone want to do that…to a lifeless horse?).

Nor should you remind me of the innumerable cases of redundancy in my blog posts which I’ve yet to find both time and expertise to mend.

When writing, I get in a bind inevitably as to my choice of prepositions. Let me give you a few examples: Should it be —

on a street or in a street

on the beach or at the beach

angry at or angry with

at WordPress or on WordPress or in WordPress?

Then there are the prepositions I have tried to work into my compositions until I am literally blue in the face:

across, upon, along, beyond, amid

I believe they stylishly elevate your sentences by a few notches. Take an illustration:

“A smile spread across her face.” — more tasteful compared to the prep “over,” don’t you agree?

“Her reputation fell in value amid suspicion of her chicanery and promiscuity.” Amen.

Perhaps I’d better enumerate my additional issues with the English language that keep consigning me into a vague degree of semi-literacy:

• The use of would and could still boggles me the same way a nude dude should. (Hey, I simply aimed for some rhyme there)
• Past perfect has always been painful for me. Because my past had never been perfect in the first place.
• Relatives can indeed be a pain in the #%$. Don’t nod your head — I’m talking about relative clause and relative pronouns here.

An ESL teacher that I am for a neighboring Asian country, imagine my toil and the bunches of knots on my students’ foreheads the minute I spell out to them grammar jargons such as subjunctive, modals, infinitive, and gerund. Ouch.

I remember somebody once said to me, “Let’s chill out!” To which I replied, “Come again?” Yeah, like I’m supposed to be hip in catching all cool expressions.

I’d hate to admit there’s more to bring up with regards to my punctuation, idiomatic and vernacular boo-boos 😦 .  Maybe in the end, we could all agree it’d be best if I just scoot off to a remote island in Southern China and learn Cantonese instead.

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I am a poor, poor (old) girl. Nevertheless, I love singing along to this wonderful song “Rich Girl” by one of my fave artists of the 1980s — the duo of Daryll Hall & John Oates, who also happens to be the top act of the said decade. C’mon, sing this with me.