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