Although I know from experience that students often get their teacher's
directives wrong, I also recognize that what Kathleen reports could be
accurate.  A former colleague of mine, a senior professor in the creative
writing program, once complained to me about a studen's' use of a "there
is" sentence in a particular context. When I told him that I considered it
a perfectly reasonable use of the "there" sentence, given the context,  he
replied: "But it's passive; you don't let your students use the passive, do
you?"

I believe there are many teachers in English departments whose linguistic
education is limsited to their own "don't do this and don't do that" in
junior high or high school (and even college comp classes).

I once had a senior Writing major say, "You mean we can use "it" in this
class?"  I learned, after questioning him, that he had been warned against
"It is" sentences--and he thought the problem was the pronoun!

Nothing grammatical surprises me, Kathleen!


Martha Kolln















>In my afternoon class today, I was trying to explain to my History of
>English students how the "of-genitive" was used in Middle English.  Okay,
>okay, I know--it isn't what they want to hear before a long weekend.
>
>Anyway, I was using some lame example, like
>
>        the daughter of the king
>
>when one of my students piped up with, "but my advanced composition
>professor told me we should never use those 'of' phrases, because they
>were passive voice."
>
>I reeled.
>
>Folks, the advanced comp. teacher is a Ph.D. in English at a Research 1
>university.
>
>I have no reason to doubt the kid's word (or the word of the kid) because
>I regularly see this sort of thing in the corrected (by members of the
>English department) papers that students bring to me for translation.
>These are papers marked with a singular lack of knowledge of grammatical
>terminology, and, I might note, a complete lack of consistency.
>
>Why am I bringing this up?  Well, first, I need to vent.  Second, the
>advanced composition program has come in for a huge amount of criticism on
>this science-oriented campus, mostly because it does not seem to be
>teaching the students who go through it much about sentence structure.
>And, obviously, the teachers themselves don't know much about sentence
>structure (other than "what sounds right") and cannot convey it to their
>students (to whom very little "sounds wrong").
>
>I haven't taught comp for a long time now, but is this lack of facility
>among composition teachers now usual?
>
>
>
>Kathleen Ward
>Linguistics
>University of California, Davis