Johanna,
I want to make my statement even stronger this time. And I do so because
I worry about what happens if someone takes your ideas seriously without
a strong feel for what's happening to a beginning writer. I am not trying
to criticize your approaches so much as present an alternative view. (I'm
using a generic "you"). Forgive me if I seem argumentative or criticize positions
you never intended.
If you tell students that opening with adverbials is awkward or wrong
and don't pay attention to the cases when it works well, you may do terrible
damage to their writing. Whether we call it "marked theme" (Halliday) or
"fronting" (Perera), the effective use of such structures is one mark of
a mature writer. (Yates & Kenkel make that point also in their article.)
These are important syntactic (and rhetorical) options, not just "mistakes."
Another way we do terrible damage to student writers is by asking them to
write within our style and by doing so with little terminology. I work with
student writers all the time and see the confusion when their writing has
been "corrected" by teachers with little or no explanation, especially when
this seems just a matter of "style." Students don't learn to write by trying
to guess how someone else might say it. Of course, many of these teachers
have no way to judge the correctness of writing beyond whether THEY would
say it that way or not. They have been told that knowledge of grammar is
harmful. If it feels right, it must be right. They want their students to
make the same decisions they would make, with no respect for the impossibility
of that.
If a student is to develop an effective writing voice, it can't be because
they left their old voice at the door. If they are going to build a writing
voice out of their own language, then speech is no doubt where we can expect
them to start.
You can't deal adequately with the way language is "portioned out" without
some sense of the intonation patterns of speech. Marked themes, nonrestrictive
modifiers, parenthetical insertions, subordinate clauses, and the like give
us intonation patterns that often help considerably in the processing of
information. A reader reads the default patterns, and an inexperienced writer
may falsely predict how something will be read or simply fail to "orchestrate"
what they hear in their own minds by effective use of punctuation. What we
call "awkwardness" is often just our need to rewrite the sentence or repunctuate
the sentence in order to process it easily. When we give that information
to the writer (thoughtful feedback), they will adjust and will do so if,
in fact, we take their ideas seriously. We have to make them feel we are
deeply interested in human contact. (This is a wonderful sentence, but I
had to go back and add these commas to make it work. Something like that.)
Many academic writers could improve their writing dramatically by bringing
it closer to speech, and I recommend Joseph Williams for a useful introduction
to that. Halliday and Martin also cover it well in Writing Science.
Nominalization tightens, but it often obscures. When students' attempts at
academic papers don't make sense, it's often because they think the form
of the writing is more important than its substance. They have plenty of
models to show them that. They look for better words and sentences rather
than better meanings.
Writing can be lexically dense without being heavily nominalized (see,
for example, the writing of Annie Dillard), and when it does so, it is often
very clear and rich.
Good writing is thoughtful and clear. Lexical density is not and should
not be an end in itself. So much academic writing is self-important, and
when you translate it into much clearer terms, it turns out to be not worth
the effort. Clarity is one way to test your writing for soundness. If we
don't hide behind fancy words and thick structures, maybe we'll find out
more rapidly how useful (or useless) our ideas are.
Sentence combining is a system that helps students play with lexically
denser structures. But the big payoff comes when we play with (not correct)
their own writing, and we should be very careful about taking editing decisions
out of their hands.
It scares me when people say we can do things "without terminology." Too
often, it means we change what they do without deepening what they know.
A student's writing evolves, and they need to trust that the language they
currently have is up to the task. If we keep them focused on being thoughtful
and interesting and clear and offer new ways to accomplish that, they can
be highly effective writers over time. They have to make it their own.
My own view, against the prevailing "wisdom" of the times, is that we
should try to pass on everything we know about language and not hold back.
Knowledge of language is not just for the specialists.
Craig
Johanna Rubba wrote:
[log in to unmask]">Thanks for posting
the various references on 'awkward' writing. I've been interested in the
syntactic properties of awkward writing for a long time -- I'm glad someone
else has done the research already!!
As to the context of the particular construction in question, in my student
writing, it does not occur in the sort of contrastive context that Craig
describes. If it did, I wouldn't notice it, because it would work! There
is a delicate balance between making writing so dense that it is hard to
read, and so spread out that it sounds simplistic.
Along with Bob and Jim, I think there is a strong mental processing factor
here. Putting one's thoughts down on paper is somewhat laborious, and the
mind can generally hold only a small amount of information at a time in
the short-term memory. I think this is what leads to the less-dense character
of speech syntax. Also, I believe the rhetorical factor of using the topic-structure
to set the scene for the new information in the rest of the sentence plays
a big role. The writer does this in his/her own thoughts, as well as wanting
to orient the reader to the context within which to situate the new information.
Combine these two factors, and you get the orientation material put into
its own construction with a repetitious reference in subject position.
As to terminology, it's nice to have terms like subject, topic, etc. But
I think this particular structure can be handled with little to no terminology.
My own writing is not so hot today. I'm off to England for a conference on
Friday, and frantically trying to finish everything. Writing these notes
is a major symptom of procrastination and stress avoidance ...
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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