Johanna says that I'm being too hard, both on the members of this list,
and on teachers, but she also admits that most of her students probably
forget most of the things they learn in her course. I used the example
that I did because fifteen years ago, when two experienced teachers took
my grammar course, they said that they had been marking such sentences
as comma-splices. My course enlightened them, and I doubt that they
forgot what they learned. The difference is simple -- I don't teach
grammar; I teach how to analyze sentences using grammatical, especially
syntactic constructions. Having noted that, I will readily admit that
most of my students didn't master syntax nearly as well as I would have
liked.
     As Johanna says, one semester is not enough. Unlike Johanna,
however, I'm not calling for more college course work. Most of the
students in my courses have problems because they come in unable to
identify subjects, verbs, prepositional phrases, and clauses.
     From the beginning of this group, I have argued that it should
suggest some NATIONAL standards, for example, that high school seniors
should be able to identify the clauses in a typical passage written by a
high school student. Such ability would enable them to avoid many errors
(comma-splices, etc.) and to discuss a wide range of stylistic questions
(clause length, embedding level, etc.) I won't go into more detail here
because that is the purpose of my web site. The problems here are that
most ATEG members themselves do not apparently wish to see such
standards, minimal as they might be, and, of course, that ATEG members
themselves cannot agree on definitions of those minimal concepts.
    I appreciate the responses to my question, especially since they
help prove my point. Like Dick Veit, I use the traditional term
"nominative absolute." I would suggest, moreover, that if members spent
more time analyzing students' writing, (and less time reading grammar
books?), they would find a fair number of student's sentences that
contain the construction, which is, by the way, developmentally
advanced. In other words, if teachers are to use grammatical concepts to
improve their comments on students papers, then the construction is
necessary. [We can't just tell teachers that the examples are not
comma-splices because they are "something else." ] But do we really want
all those different names? As I have said before, some teachers think
that there are four kinds of clauses -- subordinate, main, dependent,
and independent. Too much terminology simply confuses them. That
confusion, moreover, is not their fault -- it is ours. My wife and son
constantly tease me about my inability to remember medical terms -- I
don't remember them because I am not particularly interested in them.
Ironically, this group moans about its inability to attract middle and
high school teachers, but it attempts to do so by presenting them with a
basket full of terms taken from different types of grammars. If we want
to attract these teachers, we should be more attentive to their needs.
     If ATEG really wants to be helpful, it should settle on one term
(nominative absolute?) in its suggested standards. Instead, we have
linguists from numerous different schools, each wanting to teach what
they want to teach. In general, I agree with Bob Yates, that we still
need to do more thinking about  "why there should be any teaching of
grammar."

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