Johanna,
I think I understood that I was being unfair, and I was trying to reply
to what someone might interpret you to mean rather than what I might understand
(from a history of conversation.) I shouldn't have sent off a message that
misleadiing.
The topic comment structure under consideration was in fact adverbial.
Like Bill Spruiell, I was taken aback by your implication that anything
like this would be wrong because it is more typical of speech or because
it's overused. I don't thnk you intended that, but it came across that way,
at least to me. Marked themes are a very handy tool, and there are many
on the list who might not understand that on the basis of your objections.
I was afraid of how it might be interpreted.
In some ways, my concern would parallel concern if someone says they
correct the passives in student writing, but don't feel a need to use terminology
or point out places where passives are used well. (I don't need to point
them out because I don't notice them. I was surprised by that.) It seemed
like it might come across to a student as a blanket condemnation. (The only
tiome to talk about sentence openings is when they are wrong.)
My recomendation would be to point out the usefulness of these structures,
use full terminology to do it (so we have a metalanguage than can be brought
into play), and deal with weak sentences as weak within their context. I
have a hard time with "bad style." If we can take time to revise them, we
can take time to name what we are doing.
I admit nominalization was probably a stretch of the topic. It's just
one way, though, in which structures typical of writing can be less effective.
Before we tell students to avoid it, we should also point out places where
it is being used to great effectiveness, and that would be true of nominalization
as well. I have a game, in fact, which students find an interesting challenge.
Any part of any sentence can be made the subject of another sentence, including
the whole sentence. It doesn't take long to reach an almost unreadable complexity.
And I think it gets the point across in a playful way. (Paul loves Sally.
Pauls' love of Sally is something I admire. My admiration for Pauls' love
of Sally surprised Hank. Hank's surprise at my admiration for Paul's love
of Sally... and so on. This, of course, blows out of the water any sense
that a sentence is about a thing.)
Flexibility is a goal, I guess. A student should have a range of options
and a range of uses for them. I don't suspect we disagree with each other
on that one. To me, it helps to have a language to talk about it and plenty
of examples of these options being used well.
I apologize. I tried to qualify my statments, but did it very awkwardly.
Craig
Johanna Rubba wrote:
[log in to unmask]">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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