| I first met these Junie B. Jones books when tutoring elementary school students, They horrified me. When a book is presented to a child she assumes as she/he has every right to do, that these books are worthwhile. These books though, are filled with serious grammatical errors, poor punctuation, wrong spelling and slang. Sentence fragments abound in astonishing quantities, confusion in the correct use of parts of speech shows up repeatedly, mixing objects and subjects occurs again and again, and misspellings pop up. Stylistically also, the writing presents a poor example for young students to follow. A large proportion of the sentences commence with 'And', while the majority of paragraphs contain no more than one sentence each. The writing is choppy in a misguided effort to simplify the language, but the result of having sentence fragment after sentence fragment ends up confusing meaning. Do not use these books for children whose primary language is not English. Do not use them if you want your students of any origin to learn how to write well and read well-crafted prose. The presentation of a book to a child is a serious matter, for as you do it, the child assumes you are presenting something good, of which you and the school approve. They believe that they can safely emulate the kind of writing they read there. Excellent books throng in the market which commit none of the grammatical offenses of the Junie B. Jones books, and yet are funny and light-hearted, with delightful characters.Junie B. herself is depicted as an abusive young lady, happy to treat acquaintances and even friends and family with offensive dismissal and verbal abuse. She's never given any consequences for these behaviours. I personally do not like the example Junie B. sets, but it is the murder of the English tongue that I cannot bear. Books of this low standard are why neither Johnnie nor Junie can write. |
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