I'm sure it's true that many students misremember what they were taught,
but I'm also sure it's true that there are a lot of writing teachers out
there that give bad advice, or at least exaggerations of good advice. A
comp teacher at my school whom I respect very much recently showed me a
handout he had created based on someone's hatred of sentences with the
verb 'to be'. This handout said, I quote nearly exactly, 'every time you
use the verb 'to be', you lie'. There is actually some kind of writing
ideology out there that would like to rid the language of the verb.
Where does this  stuff come from?

Manual writers and teachers use these prohibitions in part, I think, to
make their lessons stick (humans seem to respect -- and recall? --
absolute rules a lot more than 'use minimally' or 'use with care'). But
absurdities such as the above shouldn't be happening. Until a
scientifically-sound approach to teaching about language structure is
incorporated in schools, however, they will continue to happen.

There is also a wide disparity in how much college writing programs
'believe in' grammar instruction. Those that don't, or that discourage
it, won't be holding their teachers to high standards in this area.
Several of my worst students (as regards their use of formal English in
writing) have wound up being tutors in our college's writing lab. Maybe
these students only performed badly in _my_ courses ... I can only hope.

I'm also wondering if teachers who don't know grammar terms and concepts
are providing bad models. I've seen and heard students on numerous
occasions use grammatical terminology in a seeming random way, as if one
could make the terms mean whatever one wants. 'Passive tense', 'tense in
the noun' have appeared in our department on answers to MA exam
questions about linguistics. Do students toss around terminology from
other disciplines with equal license? (probably)

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Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
                                       **
"Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose,
but that's not why people do it normally"  -            Frank  Oppenheimer
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