Bill,

    I'm very happy to join in this consensus perspective, especially 
with Bill McCleary's fine point added in.
Current MLA practice is to encourage students to use "signal phrases" in 
citing sources, in part because it makes a survey of various positions 
an integral part of the paper.  Students make "errors" with these forms 
until they become practiced with them.  Far and away, though, the 
problem seems to be with critical reading, sometimes an inability to get 
their bearings while listening in on professional talk. They certainly 
don't come to college with much experience in this area, and "term 
papers" generally don't help.  Redundancy isn't the biggest problem, by 
a long shot, but it's certainly predictable.
     In our own prefreshman summer program, we ask students to write a 
"synthesis" paper, drawing on readings that we have done together as a 
class. The readings are focused on "growing up in America" and generally 
intersect the students' experiences in important ways.  Like Bill, I use 
these intermediate assignments to help them get a better feel for what a 
successful paper might be like. When they misquote or mislead by taking 
something out of its true context, it's much easier to point that out.  
They tend to come to college believing that the answers are monolithic, 
and that they can draw "facts" out of context from anything they see in 
print. It helps to give them assignments on subjects to which they feel 
some connection.  Signal phrases help give them the sense that positions 
vary, and it's partly their responsibility to present (or at least 
consider) a range of views.
   I don't think we can remind ourselves enough that correcting a text 
is not an end in itself.  It's hard to do this well when we have too 
many students and not enough time to individualize our responses.  I'm 
sure I'm guilty of overstepping all the time.  But it's good to remember 
that error often comes from trying something new.  If students fall back 
on what they can already do, they won't grow as writers. Awkward 
attribution might be a huge step for someone not practiced in it. I know 
as a writing teacher I might let it slide simply because the next step 
for that writer is something more important.  
   Johanna, of course, was objecting to these sentences in graduate 
student writing.  Perhaps the typical undergrad hasn't had enough 
writing to work their way through it.  Writing is hard work for a 
teacher, and I suspect we don't demand it nearly enough. Is it an 
immaturity for the writer or a failure in our school system?  
    I have been looking at the first sentences of articles in various 
publications just to see how widespread is the practice  of starting 
sentences with adverbials.  Because it is right in front of me, I just 
looked at The Council Chronicle (NCTE newsletter) for September and 
found four of the first eight articles start with sentences that start 
with adverbial clauses or phrases.  I found similar percentages in the 
New York times and in my hometown paper (The Albany times Union.)  
   I suspect we would find an unusual number of attributive clauses in 
certain kinds of reporting and in much research writing.  It would be 
interesting to see how many are placed in sentence opening position and 
whether those choices are more than stylistic. I don' think good writers 
vary sentences for the sake of variety, but to take advantage of a range 
of rhetorical options. Once writing is set in motion, the choices become 
sensitive to context.
 
Craig
   
Spruiell, William C wrote:

>I'm going to toss in a gratuitous recap before trying to reassert a
>point --
>
>This thread started with a discussion of constructions such as (A) "In
>his essay on interpretation, Aristotle commented...." and has since
>moved to wider discussion of structures such as (B) "According to
>Aristotle, he says..." and "In Aristotle's essay, it/he says...."
>Discussion has since focused on the similarities and differences between
>preposed adverbial PPs and topic/comment constructions.
>
>At this point, I'd like to argue that (A) and (B) are quite distinct for
>reasons in addition -- and unrelated -- to their basic status as
>constructions with preposed structures. The difference is stylistic and
>rhetorical: (A) adds crucial information in the preposed unit that
>cannot be recovered from the rest of the sentence; structures like those
>in (B) do not -- they're redundant. While there are (arguably)
>functional reasons why a student might wish to set up a redundant
>topic-comment-ish structure, the customary bias against redundancy rules
>them out in mature writing. There's no pressing reason not to say
>"Aristotle said X."
>
>When we find constructions like (B) stylistically "immature," we can do
>so based on the redundancy without ever objecting to topic-comment
>constructions. And I suspect that the redundancy, not the phrase-level
>grammar, is the primary reason writing instructors and mature authors
>avoid such constructions. Quite a few other types of topic/comment
>constructions are unproblematic.
>
>Bill Spruiell
>Dept. of English
>Central Michigan University
>
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