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Date: | Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:51:21 -0700 |
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Craig,
You're making a lot of assumptions about the way I teach.
I never objected to introductory adverbials. It was the topic-comment
structure that was bothersome. One of my revisions kept the adverbial.
There's nothing wrong with letting students know that they tend to
transfer their natural, perfectly adequate-for-speech structures to
their formal writing as novice writers. That I find these structures
irksome is something I communicated to the list. To my students, I
would point out that it's a speech-like structure, or a structure that
results from the pre-editing thinking/writing process, and that to
achieve a more formal style, they should cut needless repetition. I
also don't know why you keep bringing up nominalization. The structure
in question is not a nominalization. As to doing things without
terminology, many teachers do not have the luxury or background to
teach terminology to students; the difficulties with terminology are
often discussed on this list.
I think you know from my past posts that I agree with your philosophy
of handling grammar in writing. Students do need to ramp up their
writing skills to an academic level, and concise writing is good
writing in most genres. Writing that is so dense as to render
comprehension difficult is bad writing, no matter how syntactically
"mature" it is. Not all academic writers are good writers. Adopting
more speech-like structures in writing is not a good idea; the two
modes are different for good reasons. Developing a concise yet formal
writing style is possible without going back to speech-like spread of
information over a larger number of syntactic structures. I don't think
either of the revisions I proposed was difficult to comprehend. I find
them both preferable in conciseness to the original. assuming a
non-contrastive context.
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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