ESL, the intricacies of english, and editing

What is a gerund? How do you properly use the past participle? When do you use the active voice and when do you use the passive voice? These were questions that I was asking my students even though I had just learned the answers the day before.

English is an extremely hard language to learn. Before one can even learn how to put a sentence together, he or she must learn the parts of speech like nouns, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, etc., etc. Then there are the silent letters or why certain is spelled with a "c" and not an "s". Oh, and don't forget the rules that apply to verbs and the million exceptions to these rules.

Learning english as a second language is not an easy process. It's not like languages, like French, where there are concrete verb rules and feminine and masculine forms of words. English is all over the place. It's a free-flowing language that is evolving every year. There is also an ever growing demand for english language instruction all over the world. It's estimated that 750 million people speak english as a first or second language.

I taught ESL to students in Taiwan for roughly a year and a half. I taught students from kindergarten all the way up to adult business students. They all shared a common will to attempt to master a language that did not share an characteristics with their own and whose wild irregularities caused frustration on a daily basis. I'm amazed at what it takes to learn english as a second language.

Teaching ESL helped me to understand english better as well. Growing up, grammar wasn't emphasized in education. Because we begin speaking english at home when we are young, the nuances and rules come natural to us, but we don't know why we speak like this or the terminology behind our language. Teaching ESL gave me a strong education in grammar, sentence structure, and the written language in general.

What does this have to do with editing? The answer is everything. Strong editors need to be well versed in the building blocks of the english language. Structure and grammar are essential aspects of what goes into editing. In order to be better editors, a great knowledge of the inner workings of the english language is needed. I understand why Chris Petty drilled grammar rules into are head for half a semester.

To answer the opening question, a gerund is when a "ing" verb is used as a noun, like swimming.