I love red-herrings in arguments about what developing writers do.  Bill writes:

 Randomizing verb tense choice in an essay will make it ineffective. Ignoring context established earlier in the text will quite likely result in bad pronoun choices, and hence an ineffective text, etc. The work on genre that Craig mentions has extensively developed descriptions of correlations between particular linguistic choices at specific points in a text and whether the text is considered a good example of science writing, or a good example of a narrative. You may or may not view that kind of correlation as being within the domain of "grammar" -- but that's a definitional issue, and one that I doubt educators are quite so invested in. 

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We have to be very careful about the implications of correlations of particular grammar forms in a particular genre.  As someone who teaches ESL such correlations help make decisions about what needs to be taught if students are expected to write such texts.

However,  let's use an example from Biber et al.  They found in fiction that passive with the by-preposition phrase occurred about 500 times for every one million words while in academic writing such passives occurred 1500 times for every one million words.  (p. 938)

Does this mean that if I write fiction (their category) and have NO passives with by-prepositional phrases  I have composed an ineffective text?  Likewise if my academic text has only 850 passives for every 1 million words, is my text ineffective?  

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Here is the red-herring:

 Randomizing verb tense choice in an essay will make it ineffective.

Perhaps, I'm fortunate, but my students don't randomize verb tense choices.  Perhaps from a mature writing perspective, the non-target-like verb choices in my students' texts may appear random, but I don't think they are.  To consider them as random is committing what Robert Bleyv-Roman calls the "comparative fallacy." 

As their instructor, I think is my responsibility is to figure out what their principle(s) of tense choice is and show why that principle is inappropriate for the kind of academic text they are trying to write.

Again, Jim Kenkel and I have several papers looking at both native and non-native speaker writing from this perspective. 

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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