Bob,

You are not a "silly prescriptivist" about the structures in 
question. They are not the patterns found in mature writing. I, too, 
have seen them many times in student writing.

However, it seems to me that they are intermediate structures, those 
of students who aren't yet experienced in writing what I call 
"speaker tags." Many students arrive in college with little or no 
experience in identifying the speakers or writers they are citing. 
They are accustomed to simply taking information from sources and 
reporting it as if the material were their own. I sometimes think 
they don't even read material such as newspaper reporting that uses 
speaker tags.

Therefore, students have to be taught to use speaker tags, and that 
can take some doing. In the process of learning, they use the kinds 
of structures that you and Johanna are complaining about. Those are 
not terrible structures; most of the time they pose no problem for 
the reader. They are just not the way that mature writers do it. If a 
teacher will keep working on the problem, sooner or later most 
students will learn to do it in the preferred manner.

If anyone wonders why students can take so long to learn this basic 
skill, I think it's because we tend to teach speaker tags in the 
context of term paper writing, where students have many other new 
tasks to learn: research, finding appropriate topics, combining 
materials from many sources into a coherent whole, and so on. For 
students who have not written a term paper before, they are 
overwhelmed.

For this reason, I have found it better to introduce students to 
writing speaker tags by assigning simpler genres, such as news and 
feature writing. For instance, I would give students quotes from 
several people involved in a newsy event and ask the students to 
write a newspaper-style account of the event, carefully citing the 
source of nearly every statement. Other skills can then be added in 
future assignments, building up to an academic research paper at the 
end.

Using such a sequence is not always necessary, of course. Many 
students were taught how to do an academic research paper in high 
school, and some of them even remember it. As always, the teacher's 
job is to find out where the students are and go from there.

Bill

>Discussions advance when we are discussing the same kind of structures.
>
>Unfortunately, Craig did not consider the structures which Johanna (and
>I) find frequently in our student writing.
>
>Here are the two structures Johanna presented.
>
>1) In Deborah Tannen's book 'You Just Don't Understand', she claims that
>... "     or, even worse,
>2) In the book 'You Just Don't Understand', it states that ..."
>
>The point I made is that those don't move as adverbials in mature
>writing do.   
>
>3) *She claims in Deborah Tannen's book 'You Just Don't Understand' that
>  . . .
>4) *It states in the book 'You Just Don't Understand', that ..."
>
>Here is Craig's analysis:
>
>  "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth" is to some extent a
>comment about what happened in the beginning."  Or consider "After
>lunch, we will tackle the big problems", which seems to me a logical
>answer to the question "What will we do after lunch?"  I don't see a big
>difference between that and "In You Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen
>claims...."  To me, that's also highly movable.  Deborah Tannen claims
>in You don't Understand that... It's an adverbial of place, telling us
>where the claim has been made.
>
>It would have helped if he had considered the ACTUAL structures Johanna
>presented.  Perhaps, he has very different intuitions about (3) and (4)
>than Johanna and I do.
>
>Therefore, I could not agree more with this observation from Craig:
>
>   I think you [me] may be absolutely right, that Johanna and I are
>coming from a different frame of reference. 
>
>There is no question that Johanna presented very different constructions
>than the constructions Craig presented in his reply.
>
>Finally, It is always possible that Johanna and I are wrong about the
>structures we are concerned with in her student writing.  We may just be
>silly prescriptivists about them.  I have NEVER seen them in the kind of
>careful writing I read.  If I am wrong on this point, then someone with
>access to data base can provide relevant examples that my reading
>experiences are just too limited.
>
>Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
>To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>and select "Join or leave the list"
>
>Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/