Do you remember English 101?

English uses the same words in the same form both as nouns and verbs. Unless one understands grammar/syntax, it is difficult to differentiate between them. For example, post could mean a wooden stick set into the ground as a support or a response contributed to this forum as well as the act of responding.

A person who reads on the third grade level generally writes on the third grade level. For most, it is possible to improve their ability to both read and write. Those who continue on the third grade level, however, can not comprehend a daily newspaper which, traditionally, is written at the eighth grade level.

No, the kids can not find a subject when they read a sentence. They will often point to the object of a preposition.

What you claim to have been telling me is something different.

Sure, think what you want. If you want to think I don't understand grammar, it is fine with me.

I read enough bad writing during the week. I do not need to read it on a Sunday morning.

They don't change form.

That is a problem. Their subjects and predicates often disagree.

This entire discussion is about people who do not reach full literacy. I am glad that you finally caught on.

Part of my job should not have to exist. We all know that. That is why we want a return to sentence diagramming.

At this point, I will no longer respond to any of your posts. I have had you on ignore for months. I have said that I do read those I have on ignore.

I simply do not like to open a thread and face one of their posts without a bit of preparation.

I am not going to answer you because ...

As a result, 1) my opinion on Strunk and White has been reinforced

No, the kids can not find a subject when they read a sentence. They will often point to the object of a preposition.

Setanta wrote: "Which" is only referentially the subject, and it refers to salamanders, which are the subjects of the sentence.

Both you Pom, and Gargamel obviously know so little about English grammar that you aren't even able to enter into any discussion on such topics. And you two teach students writing!

saying something doesn't make it so.

The rules people learn (or more likely, fail to learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought" to talk.

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules.

...

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations.

The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

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Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about "correct English" for the rest of us. Who? There is no English Language Academy, and this is just as well; the purpose of the Acade'mie Francaise is to amuse journalists from other countries with bitterly-argued decisions that the French gaily ignore. Nor was there any English Language Constitutional Conference at the beginning of time. The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits.

Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.

All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

I wonder why some people take some threads and statements within threads so personally. I know I have taken some of the things said here too much to heart, but, how does the judgment of a group of people who teach writing interfere with the life of JTT? He's gone at the general issue of teaching grammar and the particular issue of using some from of diagramming as a tool as if we came into his home with intent of regulating his diet and his sex life!

I have read essay exam answers, by college students, that were so poorly written and conceptualized that it was almost impossible to tell whether the student even understood the material that was the basis of the essay. These students could manage multiple choice exams, but they could not discuss the material in essay form. They not only lacked linguistic skills, they lacked the ability to organize their thinking so it was coherent for a reader.

Look at some your own replies. Your writing lacks focus.