Do you remember English 101?

@ossobuco,

Skimmed the article then followed the link to Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who founded my alma mater. Thanks, that provided an interesting diversion this morning to accompany my coffee.

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Is your argument that 101 students are ready to move beyond the formulaic essay? I do think it can be counterproductive to give them the impression that they have to adopt a distinct strategy with a new set of rules each time they sit down to write, as opposed to teaching them to discover their own writing voice, among other fundamentals that apply to all essay types.

I taught EN 101 and 102 for four years, as a grad student. During the first year of 101 I was required to take a pedagogy course--EN 533, which we MFAs fondly referred to as "Five-thirty-asswipe"--in which our syllabus was essentially laid out for us. As such, we had no choice but to instruct our students to write five papers: personal essay, argument (or persuasion), compare and contrast, etc.

After that first year I adopted the strategy out of laziness for, as one of my fiction professors put it, "Worry about your own writing first; publishing, not teaching experience, will land you a teaching position." But I did have the common sense to explain that anything worth writing is something your audience doesn't already know, and therefore involves an "argument." All argumentative writing requires a specific statement in which you comment on your subject, aka a "thesis statement."

I'm saying that while the course was segmented by "types" of essay, I stressed the fundamentals of writing, which of course transcend genre.

We were prohibited from teaching literature until EN 102. That was annoying only for personal reasons. My students didn't give a **** about literature ("Mr. Gargamel, 'Howl' is just typing"). But I certainly preferred to read short stories and poems to prepare my lessons over some Annie Dillard essay about staring at a squirrel.

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@Gargamel,

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as opposed to teaching them to discover their own writing voice, among other fundamentals that apply to all essay types.

Which is exactly what my prof did, which all these years later I look back on as helpful. She was all about how to find something important to say (even if it was important only to us) and then showing us through examples of other work how the written word can be powered up to express that thought. The actual form, and even more so the label (name) given to that form, is far less important.

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@firefly,

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I can't remember exactly how we were taught in college. I know that I probably ignored everything in Strunk and White. I vaguely recall it being extremely dull and not particularly useful.

There's a very good reason you thought that, Firefly.

http://able2know.org/topic/133093-1

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50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

By GEOFFREY K. PULLUM

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.

[read on at]

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm

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@JTT,

"Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less."

Which is probably why I find the book so useful. You can't diagram sentences and also have a straightforward style manual that fits in your coat pocket and in which the authors get straight to the point.

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@Gargamel,

What point, G, obfuscation? Wink

Did you read the whole article? If you did, you can't seriously expect me to believe that you carried that "toxic little compendium" around in your coat pocket.

It should have, long ago, been consigned to the trash bin. Why it was ever printed is beyond me. You hear Strunk & White trash everyday, all over America. The harm these two boobs did will not be undone quickly.

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English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

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@Gargamel,

Was this directed to me? I actually hate dividing essays up into argument, definition, cause and effect, etc., as I think it is spoon feeding and there is too much spoon feeding in education today and too little discovery and initiative.

However, for some students, just telling them that they can approach a subject from several directions is a revelation.

BTW, there aren't rules for the different styles, just examples.

I'm actually grateful for the anthology I am using. I had them read Barbara Tuchman on the Black Death. One student thought it was science fiction.

Far too many of these students are not ready to move beyond paragraphs.

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@JTT,

Let me know when you have a substantive critique handy. Or simply provide an example of "Strunk & White trash." I don't imagine it will be difficult, given that you hear it every day. In the meantime I can't take seriously someone who says The Elements of Style has actually harmed students. Roofies harm students. What self-righteous iron lung of academe is this asshole you've quoted confined to?

If anything The Elements of Style is revered for its simplicity. I know that fact winds up literally tens upon tens of scholars who, in a hilarious ironic twist, can't successfully communicate with their own families, but let's be practical. Those who want to be "right" probably side with you. Writers who want to successfully communicate don't lose sleep over the existence of The Elements of Style.

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@Gargamel,

The irony is that while my teachers praised Strunk and White, we were never assigned the book. I still remember Strunk and White (it was never called The Elements of Style) as the mecca of writing guides, the top of the pile.

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I am bothered by today's text book which comes pre-highlighted. Talk about spoon feeding!

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When I was offered the position, my first assignment was to teach developmental (remedial) writing.

I immediately began looking at text books. Every developmental text book has a unit on teaching the fact that the object of preposition is never the subject of a sentence. I laughed. No one thinks the object of a preposition is the subject of a sentence, I thought.

I was wrong. Those making such a mistake have a problem with reading comprehension. Many faculty members think the cure is to return to sentence diagramming. I made that suggestion here and pilloried.

Alright, then adopt the Montessori system.

Give kids something visual that visual learners can comprehend. Give them something logical to increase critical thinking skills.

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@Gargamel,

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Or simply provide an example of "Strunk & White trash." I don't imagine it will be difficult, given that you hear it every day.

You were given one, Gargamel, and it contains many examples of the stupidity of these two gentlemen. The writer of that article, had you bothered to read it, is one of the authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Notice how you attack but you don't address the criticisms of S&W's abysmal grammar advice. Why? Very likely because it, [and other "instruction"] has left you a grammatical incompetent.

Of course it has harmed students. You now have generations people who know so little about the grammar of English and most of what they think they know is nonsense.

You yourself noted that you thought it good that they were grammatical incompetents. That, according to you, left them free to give style advice in such a chopped fashion that you could carry it around with you in your coat pocket.

If the advice was so clear and concise, and simple, only idiots would need to carry it around?

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If anything The Elements of Style is revered for its simplicity.

That's been the meme, and the reverence is acknowledged to exist. It's simply wildly misplaced. Thousands upon thousands of grammatically incompetent teachers telling thousands upon thousands of grammatically incompetent students that they produced that this little booklet's strong suit is its simplicity.

You've mistaken simplicity for simple-mindedness.

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The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.

"Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

The book's contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don't apply to them. But I don't think they are. Given the evidence that they can't even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like "subject" and "verb" and "phrase," but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

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@plainoldme,

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Every developmental text book has a unit on teaching the fact that the object of preposition is never the subject of a sentence. I laughed. No one thinks the object of a preposition is the subject of a sentence, I thought.

You keep mentioning this, POM, as if it's the only "rule" that has stuck in your head.

Please set out the rule you're attempting to describe and provide examples. Isn't what teachers are supposed to do is make things as clear as possible?

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I was wrong. Those making such a mistake have a problem with reading comprehension. Many faculty members think the cure is to return to sentence diagramming. I made that suggestion here and pilloried[sic].

Those faculty members want a return to the very things that made them grammatical incompetents.

I'm not sure what connection "a problem with reading comprehension" has with the yet to be identified rule but I guess all that will be made clear when you explain.

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@JTT,

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You were given one, Gargamel, and it contains many examples of the stupidity of these two gentlemen.

I understand that you would prefer Geoffrey K. Pullum (whose name alone suggests he's a stuffy linguistics scholar with a personality deficit) to speak for you, but just for fun I'll ask again: please provide me an example of the "Strunk and White trash" you hear every day. Am I really supposed to imagine you on the bus, gritting your teeth as you overhear another passenger unnecessarily going out of her way to use the active voice?

As for the article, half of it criticizes exactly one-and-a-half pages of The Elements of Style. And then there are the glaring inaccuracies. For example, the author cites "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" as one of Strunk and White's "flawed" examples of the passive voice. Yet while that example falls at the end of the section on passive voice, they introduce it by simply stressing "habitual use of the active voice" to facilitate "forcible writing," not necessarily as a remedy for passive voice alone. In fact they are so clearly emphasizing transitive verbs as substitutes for conjugations of "to be" that I can only conclude the author is being dishonest.

Further, he goes on to criticize Strunk and White for the way others interpret their guidelines: "Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done."

How are Strunk and White to blame for that again? Such mendacity continues throughout the article.

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Notice how you attack but you don't address the criticisms of S&W's abysmal grammar advice. Why? Very likely because it, [and other "instruction"] has left you a grammatical incompetent.

Now who's attacking? Feel free to proof this post and tighten up my writing. In exchange I'll lend you some advice in the way of infusing at least a hint of human emotion into your bone-dry voice, likely the consequence of your irrational concern over the proliferation of excellent grammar at the expense of perfect grammar.

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You yourself noted that you thought it good that they were grammatical incompetents. That, according to you, left them free to give style advice in such a chopped fashion that you could carry it around with you in your coat pocket.

Really? You're resorting to putting words in my mouth? When I said "Those who want to be 'right' side with you," I should have specified that underlying all grammar discussions is the truth that at a certain point the rules are arbitrary. They are left to a committee to decide. I don't see the crisis in a student, in the process of learning to write concisely (something Strunk and White teach well--even Pullum admits to having no issues with their style advice), absorbing misinformation about something as trivial as whether or not to use "which" to introduce a restrictive relative clause.

So I cannot take you seriously when you decry The Elements of Style as a serious threat to students. I don't support it as a definitive, comprehensive guide to style and grammar, and I have yet to encounter a university instructor who employs it as such, but I recognize that a student editing a paper at 1 AM is more likely to reach for a tidy and effective resource over the 1000-page Chicago Manual of Style. That's just common sense. What's nonsensical, particularly to someone who's read hundreds of student papers, is the idea that The Elements of Style could actually make their writing worse.

I'll concede that the book is overhyped, but otherwise you're really digging for a problem here.

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@Gargamel,

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I understand that you would prefer Geoffrey K. Pullum (whose name alone suggests he's a stuffy linguistics scholar with a personality deficit) good, normal, predictable Gargamelian humor but not at all accurate to speak for you, but just for fun I'll ask again: please provide me an example of the "Strunk and White trash" you hear every day. Am I really supposed to imagine you on the bus, gritting your teeth as you overhear another passenger unnecessarily going out of her way to use the active voice?

There'd be no need for me to grit my teeth because the likelihood of that ever happening, despite S&W, is next to nil. People know how to use their language. I'm not suggesting [see later comments] that S&W have made people incompetent in their language. They've simply helped to make people incompetent in their descriptions of language. The difference, which you seem to not get, is large.

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How are Strunk and White to blame for that again?

From your own description, "the book is overhyped", it's revered. And from this, you don't think that their vapid advice on the passive and other things hasn't seeped into how it is taught and discussed in the US.

Their "advice" was so useless because they couldn't even follow their own advice.

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The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.

You can read the remainder in my previous post.

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Feel free to proof this post and tighten up my writing. In exchange I'll lend you some advice in the way of infusing at least a hint of human emotion into your bone-dry voice,

Your writing isn't the measure of how well you know about English grammar. That is the distinction you seem to be missing. This isn't about a sense of style. This is about students having been taught erroneous things about the grammar of English and about how English works.

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likely the consequence of your irrational concern over the proliferation of excellent grammar at the expense of perfect grammar.

Quite the gigantic reach, Gar. You've obviously never read my posts on language. Here's another short article that points up just how dumb their advice was.

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THE BLOWING OF STRUNK AND WHITE'S RULES OFF
One additional word on Mark's bedtime reading ruminations, which are on their own a magnificent brief for the prosecution concerning the charges against E. B. White of being a linguistic hypocrite. One of the sternest strictures delivered in Strunk & White's stupid little book is the prohibition on the use of adjectives and adverbs. Simply do not use them, they say: "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71). Now, Mark happens to quote exactly 406 words from the book of White's essays that he fell asleep over. I have been over those 406 words and carefully identified the adjectives and adverbs.

To be scrupulously fair to White, I omitted the New that occurs in every occurrence of The New Yorker, and I did not count items that would traditionally be classified as adjectives or adverbs where The Cambridge Grammar provides evidence that those classifications are wrong. Despite this lowering of the count (full details on request), there are 52 adjective and adverb tokens in White's 406 words. That's almost 13 percent of the total word count (the adjectives alone make up about 8 percent of the word tokens).

As I have said before (and it has made many people quite edgy), it is not just that Strunk & White offer crappy usage advice; it's that they demonstrate that their advice is crappy whenever they write, because they are utterly unable to follow their own rules, even on a bet. And as Mark says, nor should they. White isn't at all a bad writer. But the dimwitted ukases that his book with Strunk promulgates have nothing to do with good writing or elegant style.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001905.html

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@plainoldme,

thread digression, but this is something we have in common so I'll make one more post. I wonder how I would have turned out if I applied to and gone there for school, and could have afforded it. I might have not been so isolated in all my growing rebellion. In any case, money closed down in my family and I worked and went next to the very local university, which was at first entirely scary (that took about two days) and shortly after, a window to the world.

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@JTT,

Why? So you can criticize me without basis?

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@plainoldme,

If I was to do that, you could call me on it and fair and equitable person that I am, I would go to bended knee and apologize.

All in all, we both might learn something, and it certainly couldn't hurt the teeming masses of S&W acolytes.

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@JTT,

what are s & w?

must you all speak as coteries?

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@ossobuco,

I somewhat like digressions because they are conversational. However, sometimes, digressions frustrate me. I have had points to make that were lost to the digressions of others.

The problem with your conjecture is there is no way to find out.

I would not have survived had I begun at the University of Michigan, the school I really wanted to attend. I was to unsophisticated. My mother was a fraidy-cat. Everything frightened her. Everything made her suspicious as well. It was difficult to grow up in her household, although my brothers had fewer problems than I did.

My mother refused to allow me to get a driver's license but told me that I could only go to U-M if I lived at home and drove there, 40 miles one way. Her argument: that she would not pay twice for my upkeep.

I wanted to apply to Radcliffe as well. I deeply regret not having done it. While I don't think I would have been accepted, I have fantasized about not only having been accepted but accepted with a scholarship that would have made it ridiculous for me to turn the opportunity down. I wonder whether my mother would have prevented me from going? OR whether she would have been proud of me? I doubt it. Both parents were angry at me for going to college.

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Do you remember English 101?

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