Nancy, I think there is a lot of truth in what you say about students'
getting awkward with the language when they start doing harder stuff with
it. Yes, it is rhetorical, but many of us on the list don't separate
grammar/syntax and rhetoric, and in fact see them as related and teach them
that way. Hence, Martha's Rhetorical Grammar.
For those of you looking for another book that does this, Michael Kischner
and I have a book coming out--in the fall, I think. Right now the title is
Grammar with Style, A Writer's Choices. However, this morning's email has a
message from our editor at Harcourt asking to change the title to
Writers'Choices--which seems awfully close to Max's et als. book if you ask
me! The book uses a knowledge of syntax, sentence combining, and rhetoric.
In many ways it is like A Writer's Options, but uses syntax alone as the
organizer (noun clauses and gerunds and infinitives used as nouns are in
separate chapters in our book, not together as they are in A Writer's
Options. We have tried to make the book compact enough to be a supplemental
text in a composition class; it could probably be used in 12th grade
too--maybe even 11.

Edith Wollin

-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Patterson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 3:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Deep thoughts


Edith,

I understand what you are saying, but I think the problem may be in student
attempts to mimic academic voice and wrestle with meaning rather than issues
of grammar.  I'm not sure I'm going  to say this right, but the problem with
voice and meaning may show up as problems with grammar, so the issue  either
goes deeper than we think or it is shallower than we think, depending on our
perspectives.  What I may be saying (see, I'm constructing meaning here) is
that the issues may be more rhetorical than grammatical.  Students sense
that academic voice is different.  At the college level they have some
limited experience with academic voice but they struggle.  And as they
struggle with voice they may throw their knowledge of certain syntactic
structures out the window.  Mina Shaughnessy noted something along this
nature, didn't she?  And it certainly fits with cognitive theory that as we
wrestle with one concept we are apt to temporarily lose hold of previously
learned concepts.

I sometimes dig out my papers from my freshman year in college.  They are
dreadful.  Not only could I not make an argument, it seems I could hardly
write intelligible prose, at least classroom situated prose. I was pretty
good at writing when I didn't have to play the "quess what the professor
wants" game.   I was a good writer as a kid, but it sure didn't show up in
those fyc papers.

I sort of hate to admit it in this crowd, but I don't know an aspect from a
hole in the ground.  Way back when I was an undergrad at Michigan State, I
was required to take a transformational grammar course.  This was back in
1972.  I was probably one of those students who made my professor shudder
and wonder what the new generation was going to do with his world.  I had
had 12 straight years of direct and isolated grammar instruction in public
school, back in those golden years.  Those years did not help me make sense
of transformational grammar.

The argument that good writers employ a conscious knowledge of grammar (I'm
defining that word more traditionally) doesn't quite hold up unless you can
argue that the study of grammar would automatically turn those who employ
their conscious knowledge of grammar into good writing.  But that isn't
true.  A knowledge of physiology doesn't turn a person into a good athlete.
And here's where constructivism (which is not another term for discovery
learning, by the way) may come into the discussion.  Constructivists believe
that we learn whole to part.  So a gift for athletics and the chance to test
that gift in many different situations comes before any specific knowledge
of kinesthesiology of physiology. And it creates a connection and a desire
to learn those specific kinds of knowledge.  Constructivism is all about
making connections. (sorry, couldn't help getting that little plug in.)

Nancy

Nancy G. Patterson
Portland Middle School, English Dept. Chair
Portland, MI  48875

"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centers of
culture."
--Roland Barthes

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