Perhaps we could ask those who are either unsubscribing or considering
unsubscribing why they are doing so.  Maybe many recent subscribers out
there have expectations about a grammar listserv that are not being met; if
so, let's hear about them.  Or perhaps it's just a matter of summer vacation
and crowded mailboxes.

Bob Yates was right to correct me a few days ago when I was thinking about
the passive as something people can correct easily because it's an issue of
easily observable word order. It clearly requires knowledge about some core
grammar. But the discussion has raised questions for me about when, and why,
--in an ideal world, educationally speaking--we should teach the passive.
Students don't need to know about it to write acceptably and comfortably in
formal standard English (I'm working off of our proposed scope and sequence
objectives here).  That is, writing a passive sentence is not a mistake in
usage or an error in conventional terms--and we wouldn't want to create the
impression that it is, would we?  (In our culture, it is impossible to talk
about passive and an active anything without connoting values--active good,
passive bad.)  So knowing the passive seems related to the second proposed
3S goal--for students to have the ability to analyze grammatical structure
and to show knowledge of the relationship between grammatical structure and
text-level issues.  Okay, so students should know about the passive to
better understand rhetorical and stylistic options.  But at what grade
levels is it appropriate to learn the passive for these reasons?  Senior
high/college? or is it too late then?  Elementary? But is it necessary then?
It seems to me the issue is a pretty good example of the need to sort out,
and the difficulty in doing so, what sentence grammar issues should be
taught in what order.  How and when do we teach a point about sentence
structure that involves the words "active" and "passive" to millions of
young people and show them succesfully that it's a matter of style, not of
"don't"?

Brock Haussamen
[log in to unmask]
Raritan Valley Community College, NJ