Thanks for a lucid and informative post.
Kathryn



-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 8:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: using "before"

Kathryn and Craig,

What we seem to be talking about here is Formal Standard Written
English, a register that college students are required to master and
that high school students intending to go to college need to be well on
the way towards mastering.  It is the great gate-keeper in American
society.  My college students see this immediately when I ask them to
think back to high school classmates who didn't succeed at English and
where they were now.  We talk about this, and it's clear to all that
there are notable exceptions to the rule, but that overwhelmingly
success at FSWE is a prerequisite to other socio-economic success.

The problem with this is that FSWE is constructed in different ways by
different people, be they teachers, editors, employers, school board
members, or parents.  Not everyone's FSWE is the same but frequently
each person believes firmly that his or her FSWE is correct and widely
accepted.  We can't teach to all of the which/that, stranded
preposition, passive voice, ... preferences, so we have to make sure our
students know that these preferences exist and that they may have to be
sensitive to them.

And, by the way, they aren't all old.  As we've discussed before, the
ban on possessive antecedents, which it the news a few years ago, shows
up for the first time in the 1940s and than spreads to nearly all the
standard grammar books, even though even the writers who tout it violate
it often in the same work.  Sentence-initially "hopefully" isn't much
older.  These are more matters of fashion and of societal myth as
matters of grammar.

Herb

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