Donut Days/Applesauce Cake Day/D-Day Anniversary/I Love My Dentist Day/Juggling Festival (West Virginia)
2008-06-06 @ 7:49 p.m.

Okay, so the cringeworthy paragraph from yesterday's entry turned out to be a genuine mistake on my part. From what I've read, I figure that the last two paragraphs of each entry are really intended as some sort of reflection on the whole chapter and are not part of the character's diary, which itself is sprinkled with grammatical and stylistic errors. I think what my tutee needs is an intensive dose of reading. I wonder how much kids these days actually read? I know I read a fair bit when I was younger, and it was that reading that shaped a lot of my early vocabulary and sentence construction. It also gave me a fairly intuitive grasp of what's grammatical and what isn't, simply because something ungrammatical will sound wrong to me. To this day, there are definitely finer points of grammar that elude me in their specifics, but I get by, quite literally by ear. My philosophy is simply this: Singlish is perfectly fine, and I think all Singaporeans should pick up a smattering of it, but at the same time, they should also be capable of switching to a standardised, intelligible English when the situation calls for it.