I think you've entirely missed my points, Bob.  Maybe somebody else understands
well enough to try to clarify?

Connie

Bob Yates wrote:

> Connie Weaver wrote about her experiences before the Michigan's Board of
> Education:
>
> >  I happened to be attending that
> > meeting to speak out on another issue, so I took my allotted 3 minutes to
> > point out that such a narrow focus--mine you, this was one of the twelve most
> > important things students were to learn in K-12--encouraged teachers to focus
> > on teaching correctness at the sentence level rather than teaching students
> > to plan, organize, draft, revise, and edit real pieces of writing, for
> > genuine purposes.  The result?  The standard was revised to read something
> > like "Students will write grammatical sentences, paragraphs, and
> > compositions."  No other language standard remained in the list of twelve.
>
> Unless I have missed something in the recent discussion, everyone on the
> list believes that all students need to focus on planning, organizing,
> drafting, revising and editing real pieces of writing for real purposes.
>
> As someone who teaches the pre-service teacher course on grammar at my
> institution, I readily admit that knowledge about language/grammar will
> not help anyone plan, organize, or draft a text.  I know of no theory of
> language/grammar which will help with those aspects of writing either.
> Is this where there is a divergence in views about the role of grammar?
>
> However, all of the suggestions about writing in the texts college
> students buy talk about the importance of revision and editing.  I am
> sure there are people who can revise and edit texts and not articulate
> why they made the changes they did. For those of us who are not so
> gifted, being consciously aware of possible choices will be more
> successful more of the time than just saying "it just sounds better."
>
> Unless I have missed something, the writing that people do in actual
> jobs away from school is done in collaboration with others.  I know that
> anything I write that has more permanence than posts to a listserv I ask
> colleagues to read and comment on.  Such comments are always more useful
> when specific terminology can be used.  Conscious knowledge about
> possible choices in organizing a text and the nature of language/grammar
> can make those comments more insightful.
>
> Bob Yates