Because Craig Hancock addressed his post to me, I am replying to his thoughtful
post.   As I indicated in my last post, Jim Kenkel and I have also been interested
in
the relationship of grammar to text.

Craig Hancock wrote:

>      Mechanical tests for adherence to traditional grammar are not the
> right way to search for the sentence/whole discourse connection.

Of course, this is right.  I never claimed that such tests exist.  In fact, the
fact
that such tests don't exist is evidence for my belief that sentence-level grammar
discourse are very different kinds of knowledge.

>  The mechanical test you refer to (which I don't think will work
> in all cases, though that is from memory) is a substitute for a deeper
> and more functional understanding of the kinds of meaning being created.

You should consult the teaching tips on the ateg.com site.  These tests do not
reflect any "deeper" understanding.

>  I have students, and I'm sure
> you do also, who have been led to believe that good writing
> has to have a thesis.  That the world is full of wonderful writing that
> is not thesis driven seems to have escaped their teachers.  A mechanical
> test for ideal text might be the presence of a thesis statement, by
> which we could then throw out of the canon of nonfiction countless works
> of priceless value.

Sure, the world is filled with all kinds of writing.  I am not teaching my students
to
write poetry or fiction.  I am preparing my students to write research papers in
their
academic subjects and reports when they get jobs outside of the academic community.

That kind of writing does have a clear thesis.

>   Like well formed
> sentence, the idea of a well formed text is not as simple as it may
> seem.

I am not quite sure what you mean here.  There are sentences that are more elegant
than other sentences.  Is that you notion of well-formedness?  If so this
observation is right.

On the other hand, we have tests which can establish whether a string of words has
an independent clause or not.  Those tests are very robust.  You are correct that
no such tests exist for texts.

>  One
> notion that distorts our understanding of this is the idea of the
> sentence as complete thought.  Another notion is that form at this level
> is somehow neutral or that these are mere matters of correctness or of
> style.

Absolutely right.  The "complete thought" definition for a sentence is terrible.

>
>      We are probably all familiar with the interconnectedness of form
> and meaning at the level of whole text.  If I talk to a student about a
> paper, I might achieve the same result by talking to him/her about
> content (I think this material doesn't fit your narrowed sense of
> subject) or about form (why don't you cut the last half of the second
> paragraph?)  And surely no one would argue that a poem's meaning is not
> intimately connected to its images or that a story's meaning can be
> disconnected from its plot structure.  This same interconnectedness is
> there at the level of the grammar.

And, here is where we part company.  The kinds of interconnectedness in a text are
very different from the kind of interconnectedness in grammar.  That is why the
teaching tips work and no such tips exists for texts.


>      SFG presents three kinds of meaning as encoded in the clause, and
> these three kinds of meaning -- expressive, interactive, and
> representational -- have been with us as whole text concerns since
> classical rhetoric. As literature teacher and as teacher in writing
> workshops, I can attest to the usefulness of looking at a whole text
> through these lenses.  What is the writer trying to say?  Who seems to
> be the intended audience and what relationship to the reader is being
> established?  What does this text reveal about independent happenings in
> the world?

These are wonderful questions to ask about a text, but you have just left the realm
of grammar.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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