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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