At the fairly traditional Catholic high school I went to in the eighties, we were not allowed to use linking verbs for English essays in our freshman year. Writing assignments that year focused on descriptive writing, and I think that the brothers had found that students overused linking verbs with that kind of writing writing in particular. At the time, I thought it was "stupid, and even now, it doesn't fit my view of how to teach writing; what Herb says about teaching all the tools of effective communication, rather than banning some because they are oversued," appeals to me much more. (Just now, I almost wrote "is more appealing to me," but Brother Leahy, my freshman English teacher, appeared in my mind's eye and scowled at that "is.")
Despite my preference for a more strategic, less rule-based way of teaching and learning writing, I have to admit that the ban on linking verbs probably worked helped me learn to think about when to use linking verbs and when not to. After I got past freshman year, I started using them again, but with Brother Leahy's scowl lingering in my head, I found myself asking whether I was using each linking verb for a good reason or just using the default option.
I would have been good, on the other hand, if at the end of freshman or the beginning of sophomore year, someone had worked with us explicitly on how to use linking verbs effectively; maybe they could have shown us something like that Annie Dilliard passage containing the sentence "A weasel is wild," which Martha Kolln talks about at the beginning of Rhetorical Grammar. I was really surprised and felt enlightened when I eventually read that discussion in Kolln--and my surprise probably showed that my training had stuck with me more than I thought.
Also, I don't know if Brother Leahy's rule would have done me any good at all if I hadn't already been interested in grammar and writing. As a math phobe, I know that if someone had made me follow rules that made algebra artificially difficult, I just would have been confused and turned off.
Brian O'Sullivan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Director of the Writing Center
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Montgomery Hall 50
18952 E. Fisher Rd.
St. Mary’s City, Maryland
20686
240-895-4242
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Fri 4/17/2009 10:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr 2009 (#2009-86)
Different types of verb fulfill different functions in discourse, and, while linking verbs can get overused, just as passive voice can, they exist in language because language needs them to communicate effectively. I suspect coaching writers on how to use linking verbs effectively would produce better writing-and writers-than banning them.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Linda Comerford
Sent: 2009-04-17 19:05
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr 2009 (#2009-86)
Much to my dismay, I used to recommend using adjectives and adverbs for more colorful writing--until I learned that the two most powerful parts of speech are the subject and the verb. Now, I emphasize using active versus linking verbs. When I used to teach at our local university, one of the professors used to give his students an assignment of writing a paragraph without any linking verbs. Although the students struggled with it, they valued their resulting learning from it. I'm now a true fan of active verbs! (Ooops, I just noticed I used a contracted form of a linking verb in my previous sentence.)
Linda
Linda Comerford
Comerford Consulting
317.786.6404
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www.comerfordconsulting.com <http://www.comerfordconsulting.com/>
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 6:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr 2009 (#2009-86)
For the record, although I never analyzed this in any statistical or methodical way, many of my (high school - honors level) students' papers seem to run into trouble when they get carried away by adjectives and adverbs (I'm talking about academic, not creative writing here). I wonder if anyone else has any experience with this.
Paul D.
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (_Twelfth Night_ 3.4.127-128).
________________________________
From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 9:05:43 AM
Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr 2009 (#2009-86)
Bill, Scott,
If the corpus grammars tell it accurately, writing with nouns and verbs is good advice for fiction (Biber found a negative correlation for attributive adjectives), but not for journalism or academic writing, which build lots of meaning into the noun phrases. Of course, saying adjectives should be used sparingly is not the same as saying they are unimportant. The lone adjective may be the most important word in the sentence. But English teachers especially seem to equate literacy with literature.
I thought Pullum was a bit arrogant in the review, a bit disrespectful of the writing teacher's perspective. And it may very well be that linguists are much to blame for not giving us a discourse friendly grammar to work with. There's some good advice in the little book, but enough problems to negate that out. I usually tell students who own the book not to pay attention to anything but the style sections.
Craig
Spruiell, William C wrote:
> Scott:
>
> I've had similar students --- but the advice they need is more along the
> lines of, "use specific nouns, not fluffy ones." The problem really
> isn't the adjectives and adverbs. And at least some of those students
> aren't deliberately being verbose, or displaying signs of functional
> illiteracy (they probably know a fair number of highly specific
> nouns...but they're part of the students' passive vocabulary, rather
> than being part of the active pool that is deployed when writing).
> Instead, they've adopted a common strategy of marking out a general area
> with the noun and then using modifiers to home in on a particular spot
> in within it.
> In fact, it's the same thing professional writers do when they come out
> with sentences such as "The fact that these results have been observed
> indicates that the phenomenon is real." "Fact" is fluffy -- but since I
> know the genre, I know when I can get away with using it (if that
> sentence bothers you, all I can say is that amazing numbers of articles
> have been published with near-equivalents). Students pick up on that
> kind of practice, but they don't yet have enough exposure to scientific
> genre to know which words can be used in particular cases without coming
> across as "gauche."
>
> This simply highlights one of Pullum's points: One of S&W's major
> injunctions is that writers should be clear and concise, but they wrote
> THEIR OWN RULE in a way that attacked a side effect of the actual
> problem rather than the problem itself, and implied there was something
> wrong with entire classes of words that are only problematic when
> they're used as part of a compensation mechanism. It's as if I watched
> someone using glue to connect two pieces of wood that should instead
> have been nailed together, and then proclaimed that glue is a bad thing.
> I'd probably figure out my mistake once I saw people trying to nail
> wallpaper.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott
> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:08 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr
> 2009 (#2009-86)
>
> Pulliam is the stupid one if he does not understand what The Little Book
> means by "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they
> insist.
> (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
>
> Anyone who had ever graded English themes, especially descriptive
> writing,
> has been exposed to students who use plain verbs and generic nouns, both
> of
> which are accompanied by a plethora of adverbs and adjectives
> respectively
> when more descriptive verbs and nouns would do a far better job with
> less
> effort. The only explanation that I can give for such students is
> either
> functional illiteracy or sheer laziness (many theme assignments have--or
> used to have--a minimum number of words). The slovenly among them use
> any
> gimmick to expand their impoverished thoughts and expression.
>
> I cannot believe that Professor Pulliam has taught English without
> having
> encountered such students: his extreme prejudice towards The Little Book
> seems to have blinded him to the extent that he can only see vices and
> never
> virtue. The Little Book has its faults; however, I would trust Shrunk
> and
> White over a "grammarian" who has had too little contact with writing to
> understand the motivation for the very sound advice:
>
> "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs." (The motivation of this decree is quite clear to me and has been since
> Freshman English.)
>
> Scott Catledge
> Professor Emeritus
>
> During the "God is dead" fad of the 60's, I had a bumper sticker that
> said,
> "My God is alive--sorry about yours."
>
> My understanding of the "motivation" is clear to me--sorry it's not
> clear
> to him. Perhaps he should teach a Freshman English course sometime.
>
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