| deldred
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| Self portrait, using the Sony Sketch app
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| Born: Massachusetts, U.S.A.
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| Nationality: American
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| Occupation:
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 | This user has been on Wikipedia for 20 years, 4 months and 12 days. |
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deldred@wiki:~$ I'm an English language teacher originally from the Unites States. I use my knowledge to improve the readability of English Wilipedia.
My varied career includes working at an ISP in tech support, a life insurance company, working in robotics, and in the nuclear power industry. I obtained my Bachelor of Science from a small Massachusetts liberal arts college, majoring in Education. Currently I am working in Prague, Czech Republic privately as an English language teacher, and privately as a school tutor. Although I am a native speaker of American English, I teach British English. I also sometimes copy edit academic papers for non-native English speaking university students to make their work grammatically correct and more readable. I also sometimes do copy editing for various businesses to make their English language content grammatically accurate and more readable.
I am able to write, teach, and edit both American English and British English in terms of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, prepositional usage, article differences, and differences that are collocative in nature.
I plan on keeping userboxes to a minimum; only showing ones that showcase relevant skills related my goal of improving the grammar and readability of Wikipedia.
Public Domain Literature
[edit]Books, Book Pages, Author Pages, etc,
[edit]I love them! But I don't keep books. Many people have a large library of both read, and unread books. When I am finished with a book I either sell it, donate it, or give it to someone. I am somewhat of a minimalist and tend to not keep things, including books, that aren't something that I use daily or regularly. I do however have one book that I don't plan on getting rid of - my copy of The Handmaid's Tale I got signed by Margaret Atwood at a book signing in Prague.
In Prague, I am a member of a book club that meets every other week. We pick authors who occasionally upon my research don't have up to date Wikipedia pages. This presents a good opportunity to update the author's existing wiki page to be more recent. I hope to add value to Wikipedia this way.
In looking at various userboxes, I found a few in the grammar category that I have an opinion on. This first one reminds me of a story from when I was in college.
ubiquitous | This user feels that if a person cannot concisely describe what they mean without using so-called big words, then they should not be identified as being truly intelligent. |
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In my junior year of college I was friends with a girl named Karen who upon hearing me use the word "duplicate" complained, "Why do you have to use big words like that?" Yes, she considered the word "duplicate" to be a "big word." This userbox reminded me of that interaction. I don't know how someone could consider "ubiquitous" a big word. I agree with the premise of this userbox, but please pick a word that is more fitting of the idea; an actual "big word."
Check out this doozy.
| Majority ≠ right
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This user recognizes that even if 300,000,000 people make the same mistake, it's still a mistake.
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It's advocating for something impossible in the world of grammar. Literally impossible. This userbox is using the argumentum ad populum fallacy and applying it to something that evolves; something fluid. Basically, people who take this stance are saying, "Although grammar was different 100 years ago, and will be different 100 years from now, the grammar that I learned has reached peak perfection. Stick a fork in it. Keep things exactly as they are from when I personally learned the rules." It's a preposterous stance. These people would make horrible time travellers.
A parallelogram is a parallelogram. 300,000,000 people claiming that a triangle is a parallelogram would be wrong. Grammar is created by humans, not nature. We made the rules, and we can change the rules. "Rules" aren't bound in some sort of universal truth like geometry. Using the argumentum ad populum fallacy to argue your point is ironically a red herring.
People believe this one because of bad schooling.
Your teacher who interrogated, "I don't know, CAN you go to the bathroom?" also told you that you shouldn't use passive voice. These "rules" pass through American elementary schools in a similar way as urban legends do. "Can" is both a modal verb of permission or ability,[1] and the passive voice is fine to use. And in some cases, it's preferable. Try writing an academic or scientific[2] research paper where you had focus groups, questionnaires, and experiments and write it entirely in the active voice. Your teacher will think you sound like a narcissist, and will wonder why you were the focus of your writing, instead of the focus group, questionnaire, or experiment.
Values, Beliefs, etc.
[edit]Black Lives Matter
Humanitarianism
Nonviolence
Hobbies, Interests, etc.
[edit]Literature / Reading / Books
Public domain books
Travel
Digital art
Linux
