Herb,
   It was a "ploy" I used at a 4 C's talk, comparing a list of those terms
with Constance Weaver's minimalist list. (Weaver recommends Hacker, but
doesn't explain how a student is supposed to read the advice without a
shared metalanguage.) The more I got into Weaver's book, the more the
talk evolved into a critique of its all around weaknesses. One problem
is that her book is touted as an approach to grammar, not as a way to
avoid it, which is what it amounts to. (If grammar is harmful, but we
can't wish it away, what's the least we need to have? Something like
that.) For a long time now, energy has been directed at schemes to
learn grammar without real time spent on it and without taxing the
intellect, and these need to be seen as anti-grammar positions.
   I'm not sure where I can post your article so that we would all have
access to it. Anyone have a suggestion? As time goes on, we should
append materials to the ATEG site, but these would be more like working
documents.

Craig>

 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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