Thank you, Johanna.  I've had much the same reaction to this thread.  I
suspect Fish did himself a disservice in the way he wrote his column,
but he pretty obviously wanted emphasize the learning that arose from
the language building task he assigned.  He didn't really have much to
say about how he incorporated that task into a semester-long class, but
nothing he did say about composition methods precludes him from having
spent significant time in class dealing critically with writing issues.
What he was opposing was the sort of general, rhetoric-only approach
that seems to predominate these days with the paucity of teachers who
know anything about language.

This thread has nicely distinguished between the ditto-sheet model of
grammar teaching, which should be dead if it is not, and the kind of
discourse and sentence-based grammar that can make a huge difference in
students' understanding of clear and effective expression as well as
clear and effective interpretation of texts.

One of the things I like to do in my UG grammar courses is get the
students to use the grammar we are studying to analyze texts.  Doing
this in terms of topic continuity and the given-new contract isn't all
that hard, but what's fun is get them to discover how syntactic pattern,
like basic verb+complement patterns, also get manipulated interestingly
by skilled writers.  An example I used recently is Frost's poem "Choose
something like a star".  We had just finished a week on simple sentence
structure and verb patterns, and I had them analyze the verb patterns
Frost used.  In the first half of the poem, where he is trying to talk
to and negotiate with the star, there're a lot of ditransitive verbs,
with the star a referent for the indirect object.  In the latter half,
after he has decided that the star is a remote, aloof object, the
ditransitives stop and he uses simple transitives, indicating that there
is no indirect object, no speaker-hearer relationship with a star.  He
even uses some of the same verbs in both parts, but in ditransitive vs.
transitive senses.

I suspect what we confront in composition teaching is the assumption
that grammar can't possibly be relevant to writing (based on a very
narrow conception of grammar) rather than the rather more plausible and
productive assumption that it is but that you might have to work at it a
little to see the very important relationships that do hold.

Herb


Subject: Re: Response to Fish piece

Hi, Craig,

I don't understand why you say that the descriptive approach to 
language cannot "work in
harmony with composition".  This approach describes all levels of 
language, including the text/discourse level, and it is how we find out 
how successful texts work. We cannot teach about good writing unless we 
know how it is structured in reality -- knowledge that can be 
discovered only through descriptive research on actual discourse. 
Relying on things like logic is not enough: the concerns of formal 
logic are relevant, but impoverished compared to the amount of 
information that is relayed by structures that emerge from the 
particular way the human mind and body work with respect to things like 
where to locate focus points, breath groups in relation to phrase 
structure, iconicity in phrase structure (which is what motivates us to 
put modifiers near what they modify), things that are important to 
humans, but not to logic, such as whether information is first-hand or 
second-hand, etc.

It is absurd to think we can teach anything about language without 
being grounded in how real language is structured -- it would be like 
teaching biology without worrying about what biologists have discovered 
over the last few centuries. Many of the problems associated with 
grammar and composition teaching stem from inadequate training of 
teachers in how language actually works.

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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