Last semester Dr. Longman suggested I read the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss since I seem to suck at grammar so badly. While on the cruise with Joshlyn this week (Saturday - Thursday) I finished reading the following books:
- Rethinking the L word in Higher Education by Kezar
- My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan
Caught up and am ahead in reading
- Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design; Choosing Among Five Approaches by John Creswell
Thus I felt I could handle, briefly, beginning to read Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I'm about one-third of the way into the book and am delighted to not only be learning more about grammar but Ms. Truss's (I just learned that I can properly do the s's and it be correct) work is qualitative. Throughout her book Ms. Truss provides qualitative data from her research and does so in a somewhat whimsical way that make the book a light and engaging read.
On page 48 Ms. Truss begins detailing some of the qualitative data regarding grammar. She writes, "Hundreds of emails and letters arrived, all of them testifying to the astonishing power of recall we sticklers have when things have annoyed us ("It was 1987, I'll never forget, and it said "CREAM TEA'S"); and also to the justifiable despair of the well educated in a dismally illiterate world. Reading the letters, I was alternately thrilled that so many people had bothered to write and sunk low by such overwhelming evidence of Britain's stupidity and indifference. The vast majority of the letters concerned misplaced apostrophes, of course, in potato's and lemon's.
As I read now, I am enjoying being able to identify the types of data and to consider how I am responding to the data. I am beginning to consider things such as "what type of approach would this be, what type of questions would the researcher ask, what would be the reporting format for this?"
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