Well, you sure opened Pandora's box. By answering you, I had hoped that our messages might evoke some thought about the underlying problem of the lack of schooling in grammar and punctuation, but as usual we all seem to want to protect our own. Thank you for your beginning this. "Everyone misunderstands" is going to have to wait.

"Kathleen M. Ward" wrote:

> 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