Craig,

I have no objection to making my SitS article available.  I can email
you a .pdf if you'd like to post it somewhere where all of us can access
it.

By the way, you introduce an interesting ploy, totting up the technical
terms in a handbook section as a way of showing just how much knowledge
of grammar is actually assumed by handbook authors.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 8:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Grammar Certification vs. scope and sequence]

Johanna,
   I have no objection to including those rhetorical concerns; in fact,
I
think we need to include practical ways to use a knowledge of grammar
in writing and reading (beyond correctness), especially since these are
so readily available. By cohesion in a text, I would include given/new,
the way information is portioned out (and emphasized) within intonation
groups, lexical cohesion, use of structures like cleft sentences,
marked themes, and passives to keep topics in focus, various kinds of
conjunction, and so on. I think cohesion works quite differently within
narrative than it does in explanatory or thesis driven texts, and
English classes tend to concentrate much more on the former than the
latter. We should do both. We should include nominalization, even if we
do it in the Joseph Williams way, discussing ways to put "actors" in
the noun phrase slots as a way to keep prose clear. One problem,
though, is that technical texts seem to need to break those rules.
Nominalization has an important role in a technical discipline and in
building a shared meaning within a text. That may sound intimidating to
some people, but I find that students pick up on it very quickly. We
can include some of the usual "style" advice, like the difference
between effective repetition and redundancy. The way that modals and
modal auxiliaries function in establishing relationships with an
audience. The goal, I think, would be to have an understanding of
grammar that helps us see how effectiveness happens within a text, and
you can't do that without measuring it against its rhetorical goals and
without looking at how grammar works beyond the flexible boundaries of
the sentence.
   Herb had a wonderful article in the ATEG journal (when it was still
Syntax in the Schools) on tense and aspect in the verb system, and I
thought at the time that it was a wonderful model for a reformed
approach to the topic. If he's willing, perhaps we could all take a
look at it.
   I would certainly encourage anyone and everyone to draft out portions
of this. My only concern is that it will be inconsistent in principles
and in terminology, but it might be helpful to have inconsistencies to
resolve. For example, if we decide that aspect is not "tense", then we
need to carry that across to other parts of the document. If a
participial clause is a clause (or phrase), we can't have it be one in
one place, the other in another. Somehow, as with "parts of speech", if
we go with a nontraditional terminology (for reasons of accuracy, i
would think), then we need to acknowledge that people will see it
referred to differently in other texts. We have similar tough decisions
to make about the various verb complements, since they have different
labels in different systems of grammar.
   One of the delights of a systematic presentation of grammar is that
when you finally do get to something like the punctuation system, it's
so easy to talk about. I found 64 technical terms in Diana Hacker's A
Writers Reference. My students have the book, but can't really follow
the discussion without much background. But it seems to me important
that we have a technical understanding in place that we can use, that
there is a consistent carryover. We can talk about the difference
between a compound sentence and a compound predicate and expect that
people will understand what we are talking about. Nowadays, a typical
college student would have trouble with both. >

Craig


 What's the objection to h, i, and j?
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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