Bill,
   Thanks for the heads-up on the Swales book. I'll have to check that out.
   My hope for the course would be that we would look at different 
approaches already going on and discuss their usefulness for language 
users (reading and writing), editors, teachers, and so on. So we could 
look at corpus grammars as a way to find correlations between forms and 
registers. It seems to me that we then can look at whether those 
correlations are just conventional (a sort of style employed) or 
functional. In other words, whether you need to do this kind of thing to 
"fit in" or do you need to do it in order to accomplish the work of the 
discipline. (That doesn't mean it can't become dysfunctional if used as 
a mark of sophistication and not as meaning tool.) It may be an 
ambitious agenda for an undergraduate class, but I would ask them to 
look at the approaches going on in linguistics from the perspective of 
someone trying to mine them for practical application. Is traditional 
grammar wanting? If so, what exactly does it "want" and where can we 
find that? Does functional grammar have some answers? Cognitive grammar?
   I suspect that the book I am looking for doesn't exist, that I will 
have to patch something together.
   Meanwhile, students will be writing in the course, so we could also 
explore the language genre connection in their own writing.
  I'm curious about whether anyone is doing anything similar.

Craig

Spruiell, William C wrote:
> Craig,
>
> In addition to Martha's book, I'd think some material connecting
> language and genre would be useful -- for example, John Swales's book on
> research writing for graduate students. He ties specific linguistic
> choices (verb tense, nominalized forms vs. full clauses, etc.) to
> different stages in the research-article genre. 
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 10:09 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: language and writing
>
> Fellow ATEGers,
>    I have gotten the go ahead from our linguistics department to develop
>
> and teach a course in language and writing. I have been teaching writing
>
> courses with a strong language component, but this one will be a 
> language course with a strong writing component, fulfilling an upper 
> level "writing intensive" requirement for students while serving as an 
> elective in linguistics. Students will not only write, but explore those
>
> insights about language that seem most writing friendly, the "knowledge 
> about language" that might be useful in writing, reading, editing, 
> teaching. What can we learn from corpus grammars?  Is meta-functional 
> analysis (from systemic functional grammar) helpful? Is it useful to 
> draw from cognitive linguistics in looking at form as a construal of 
> meaning?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of traditional grammar?
>
> >From the writing end, what knowledge about language will help us 
> negotiate standard English, the routine conventions of writing 
> (including punctuation), rhetorically effective choice, and the demands 
> of academic texts.
>    My first question would be whether anyone is doing anything similar 
> and would be willing to share a syllabus and/or practical advice. The 
> other question would be how to deal with the problem of text for a 
> course that will, by design, be sampling from a number of approaches. 
> Any advice would be welcome.
>
> Craig
>
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