D#6, HW#10, Grammar Assignment

For this grammar assignment I focused on sentence fragments; recognizing them and understanding how to fix them. I completed all of the exercises in section 24 of The Wadsworth Handbook about fragmented sentences. I chose to specifically work on this area of grammar because it seems like I sometimes have trouble leaving out fragments in my writing. I think I just don't know how to say what I'm trying to say properly so I jsut add it in as a fragment. This section of grammar was a good reminder of what is considered a fragment and how to correct a fragment. I also went to http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/620/01/ and read about sentence fragments on their website. I also completed Sentence Fragments: Exercise One on that website. My revised paragraphs are....

• Personally I went to a high school that was greatly influenced by the predominant religion of the area. This particular religion is extremely conservative to say the least. Because of this, sex education was not encouraged. I had one week of abstinence-only education that came at the end of my driver’s ed course; a course that was not even a requirement for all students to take. This week long lesson focused chiefly on abstinence and saving yourself until marriage. The instructor also informed us about sexually transmitted diseases, but not how to prevent yourself from contracting one. The lesson was… if you have sex before marriage you will get an STD and live with it forever if not die. It was as if they were using scare tactics to teach us not to have sex. It was completely un-educational. It also was designed to make teenagers that were sexually active feel bad. Not only did we never hear about contraceptives, but if we asked any question the answer always came back to abstinence. An example would be if someone asked what could they do to decrease the chance of getting pregnant the only answer given was abstinence. This just forced kids to have sexual intercourse without any real knowledge of what they were getting themselves into. I personally had to research any questions I had on my own, but most teenagers are not that driven.
• My perspective is that abstinence-only sex education does not work. It is in no way beneficial. In fact I believe abstinence-only programs to be very harmful for today’s youth. The method of teaching abstinence-only sex education does not educate. It forces teenagers to look elsewhere for information and they either are not taking the time to look for it or are going to the wrong places. I do not think that teenagers should be encouraged to go out and have random sex (safe or not), but I do believe they should be given the proper resources to protect themselves and keep themselves safe if they do chose to be sexually active.

From the readings and exercises I completed I learned how to recognize different kinds of sentence fragments such as prepositional phrase fragments and dependent clause fragments. I also learned how to correct them and make them better/correct sentences. With the previous paragraphs I made minor changes to correct fragments that made the paragraphs weaker. Honestly sentence fragments may seem like a stupid thing to focus on, but personally I think they are very important. They are important because they can creep up in our writing so easily we might not catch them if we are unaware of how to identify them. I think these exercises were a good reminder to me of what to look out for when doing my writing.