Dogs scratching fleas and stinking apostrophes spice up First MC Grammar Championship

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The victorious White team: Matt Gomez, DJ Romero, Dawayne Johnson, Nick Toppel, and Ivan Strmic.

Did “Mount Carmel’s Chess Club members walk passed the Football Team,” or did “Mount Carmel’s chess club members walk past the football team”? What’s wrong with “Who’s smart dog is scratching it’s own fleas?”

On Wednesday April 17, two teams of Mount Carmel students in Mr. Haggerty’s Journalism class debated these questions and other diabolical sentences containing grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling errors in competing for the First Mount Carmel Grammar Championship. Team members were given 30 minutes to edit 11 sentences. Teams were encouraged to collaborate and research tricky usages by going online.

The teams

Jack Hightower, Hrvoje Juric , Pablo Iglesias, Jordan Koyn, and  Ray Moore  were on the “Strunk” team.   Matt Gomez,  Dawayne Johnson, DJ Romero, Ivan Strmic, and Nick Toppel comprised the “White” team. The teams were named after William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, the persnickety authors of The Elements of Style, first published in 1919. All team members are on the staff of the Caravan which will be looking for a few good men for next year’s newsroom.

Both teams nailed the first official sentence in the competition. “The Mulcahy’s are at there door” was properly changed to “The Mulcahys are at their door” which pleased assistant instructor Mr. George Vrechek who has been known to exclaim, “Plain old plurals don’t need no stinking apostrophes.”

The teams (and their computers) went head to head.
The teams (and their computers) went head to head.

Heated controversy regarding the rules

Controversy immediately surfaced regarding how the White team dealt with sentence #3: “Mr. Haggerty if I had Five-cents for every punctuation error I made,” Nick said “I’d be rich”.

Both teams were able to recognize that a comma was necessary after Haggerty, both teams changed Five-cents to five cents, and both teams recognized that the final period needed to move inside the quotation mark.  The Strunk team lost a point for not getting in a comma before the second direct quote, but the White team took the unallowed liberty of rearranging the sentence to put Nick’s entire quote together. This was a clear violation of the rules in Mr. Vrechek’s opinion, and he deducted two points from the White team. The White team  threatened to play the balance of the competition under protest. Mr. Vrechek was delighted to see students so enthused about grammar regardless of the reason.

Both teams had trouble with sentence #4: “Potential All stater Don Butkus limped into Memorial stadium in Champagne, Illinois on a Saturday nite but waltzed out with a trophy.” While it was a memorable evening and the sentence left a vivid image, it contained seven errors. The Strunks found five of the errors; the White team found the same errors but then lost two points for making Don Butkus parenthetic which was inappropriate. Both teams missed making Illinois a parenthetic element.

Ray and the coaches, Pablo watches soccer

Sentence #5 was sneaky: “Ray’s arriving at the coaches’ offices was unexpected.” Teams wasted energy (and lost points) trying to find fault with the possessive before the gerund “arriving” or in using the punctuation as it appears on a sign outside a room containing offices for several coaches at Mount Carmel. While the sentence was clumsy, it was grammatically correct. The Strunk’s lead, which had been 11 to 8 over the White team, shrunk to an 8 to 7 lead. The difference between the teams stayed at one point as they both nailed sentence #6 involving DVDs and Dawayne.

Sentence #7 was “Pablo, who is President of the Student Council was at Matt’s and Hrvoje’s soccer game.” Despite the important position occupied by senior Pablo Iglesias, he is a small “p” president as used in this sentence. Another comma is needed to enclose the parenthetic clause ending with Council. Finally, since Matt and Hrvoje were known to be on the same team, Pablo was attending Matt and Hrvoje’s soccer game. Both teams did well on this sentence. However the Strunk team, perhaps because Iglesias was a key member of the team, overestimated the prominence of the president of the Student Council by capitalizing President, resulting in a 11 to 11 tie between teams after sentence #7.

Mr. Vrechek works on the exciting totals.
Mr. Vrechek works on the exciting totals.

Last second victory by the White team

Time was running short due to the late start schedule and pressure was on both squads as they quickly scratched their heads on sentence #8: “Mount Carmels’ chess club members walked passed the Football Team.” The 10-word sentence had 6 mistakes. Both teams got the possessive Carmel’s and used small letters for football team. Both teams missed the need to change “passed” to “past.” The championship was won at the last moment by the White team when they properly capitalized Chess Club and scored a 16 to 14 last-second, come-from-behind victory.

Winning White team members won bragging rights over the Strunk squad for the balance of the year and will be forever known as the first championship team in the history of the Mount Carmel Grammar Championship.  Earlier threats of protest were soon forgotten. As the bell rang, the White and Strunk teams were happy to not deal with the final problems in sentences 9, 10, and 11 involving Jay-Z, will.i.am (each of them listens), Illinois’s, Arkansas’s, and the Junior Class.

 

Correct answers to some of the problem sentences (according to Mr. Vrechek):

Mount Carmel’s Chess Club members walked past the football team.

Whose smart dog is scratching its own fleas?

Potential all-stater Don Butkus limped into Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois, on a Saturday night, but waltzed out with a trophy.

Caravan writers will be submitting several individual versions of the competition to replace this breaking-news version.