I'm coming late to this discussion, sorry.
I often ask students to search for particular structures in real world
texts and then I have them tell me where they found them (passives more
likely in news writing, vocative sentence modifiers in dialogue, etc.).
The resources everyone has mentioned will help me give students some
starting places--thanks.
Relating to Johanna's idea of funny business names, I've been thinking
of using Jay Leno's "Headlines" more often to talk about when
writing/grammar intersect. Sometimes what makes a headline funny is a
usage error, but more often not. e.g., what has gone wrong when we
laugh at the headline "Tulane Center monkeys escape: half are captured
in time for dinner" and how can writers fix it?
A bunch of funny "Headlines" are online here:
http://www.nbc.com/nbc/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/headlines/index.shtml
But beware, if you look at them in your office, you'll probably start
snickering, and then people will assume that instead of "working hard"
you're "hardly working" (loved that cruise ship/ship cruise example,
Craig).
Beth
Dr. Beth Rapp Young
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung
University of Central Florida
From Promise to Prominence: Celebrating 40 Years.
>>> [log in to unmask] 10/1/2004 3:57:29 PM >>>
I deleted some messages on this topic without reading them, so forgive
me if this is repetitive.
Seems you have gotten some research sources on this -- great! I have
worked with particular genres in both ESL and native-speaker classes:
-recipes (imperatives, of course)
-restaurant menus (lots of participial modifiers --sauteed, roasted,
etc.
-instruction manuals for assembling or operating furniture,
electronics
(phones, VCRs), etc. -- interesting ways of phrasing commands
-information about health insurance policies or procedures for dealing
with bureaucracies (have a lot of 'will' sentences--"The applicant
will
need to provide a form of ID" ... ). Notice this isn't really a future
statement, but the 'will' of the if/then conditional. The 'if' clause
is
an unstated assumption.
-greeting cards (a variety of genres within this category)
-field guide entries (e.g. birdwatching books) (lots of bare
predicates
w/o subject noun phrases)
My students have done nice creative work with the last one--esp. with
writing their own field guide entries for people: toddlers, couch
potatoes, good teachers, surfers, etc. I had beginning ESL students
write a recipe for a favorite dish and then cook it for the class and
give the recipes to their classmates.
In general, it's fun to have students collect 'realia' -- actual
printed
documents that serve real-world purposes--and use them for class
analysis and generation of their own documents. This is one area where
you can just try to pay attention to the stuff you see in everyday
life
to find treasures for class.
A fun activity (yes, I use it as an adjective) just for language
awareness in general is to observe things like bumper stickers and
clever business names. These, esp. the business names, show how
creative
ordinary people can be (although I guess a lot of business names come
from PR firms). Some of my favorites are an exterminator called "The
Bug
Stops Here" and a hair salon called "Curl up and Dye". Hair salons are
especially wonderful. There was one in a beach town where I lived once
that was called Coast Barbery. This isn't grammar per se, but it's
fun!
I'd like to start a serious collection of clever business names.
***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~ E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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