Blog Post #6--Linguistics

Evans, Ann. “Beyond Grammar: Linguistics in Language and Writing Courses.” Pedagogy 11.2 (2011): 285-300. EbscoHost. 7 June 2011. Web.

Evans argues that the inclusion of several basic linguistic terms and concepts in either late high-school or early college writing classes can increase students’ understanding of how language works and improve their command of it. The specific terms/concepts she advocates including are morphology, semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics. Evans devotes several pages to a short definition of each concept, a justification for why it matters and how it can help students write, and suggestions for exercises to try.

Evans stresses throughout the article that the goal is not to turn students into linguists, but to help them understand some basics about how language works. The exercises she proposes are written to encourage a sense of play and to help students gain awareness of their own language-rich environments—for instance, a semantics exercise asks students to transform the word “whoops” depending on context, choosing an approximate synonym that they would use when speaking to different audiences (291), and one of her sociolinguistic exercises encourages students to “report on the various linguistic communities they were a part of during their holiday dinners” (298). Additionally, Evans’s exercises all ask students to generate writing after the concept is explained, rather than fill out worksheets.

However, when Evans writes that “the concepts and exercises introduced here are simple” (286), I have to disagree. Some of the concepts—like morphology—seemed easy at first blush, but as I got further into her descriptions and suggested exercises, I found that the concepts were not simple at all. (In the section on morphology, for example, Evans spends some time using other languages such as Turkish and Italian as examples, and while I think I understand what she is getting at, the examples served to confuse more than clarify.) In fact, I found the definitions in each section somewhat confusing, and I am skeptical that high-school or early-college students would be able to master the concepts without quite a bit of instruction.

In my reading on grammar instruction, I have found that two reasons for moving away from the traditional teaching of grammar are frequently cited: firstly, that such instruction is decontextualized and disconnected from student writing; and secondly, that time spent on grammar instruction is time not spent on actually producing writing. While Evans is not suggesting a return to traditional grammar instruction, I see her methodology as subject to the same critiques. Although her exercises ask students to produce writing, the writing itself is decontextualized in that it is not part of a larger assignment: it is writing to understand the linguistic concept. Also, the concepts she suggests are not simple and will take time to explain. Not only might that time be better spent writing, but students might end up focusing too much on mastering the concepts in the same way that a heavy focus on grammar can lead some students to think that good grammar equals good writing. This article is well written and interesting, but I remain unconvinced that it is the best path for improving student writing.

Blog Post #5--How professional writers write

Schuster, Edgar H. “Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules.” English Journal 100.4 (2011): 71-76. EbscoHost. Web.

Schuster partially addresses the concern I raised in my last blog post: How, exactly, do professional authors write? While he does not examine the actual composing processes of professional writers, he does focus in detail on the ways in which professional writers (and one talented student writer) selectively break rules of grammar and style in service of meaning.

As a framework for the article, Schuster examines a paragraph from Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and three paragraphs of an eleventh-grade student’s personal essay. As he notes, both pieces of writing are very well done, yet both break generally accepted grammar and style rules: specifically, admonitions to avoid passive voice, weed out “be” verbs, don’t begin sentences with conjunctions, and eschew sentence fragments. Schuster spends time on each rule, first laying out the generally accepted rationale for the rule, then presenting sentences from his selections as they appear (with the rule broken) and as they might appear if the rule were followed. He handles the comparisons fairly—the rule-following options are well constructed and are not straw men—and that is why these sections are the most effective parts of the article. The direct comparisons (and the analysis with which he follows them) demonstrate the ways in which breaking the rules can lead to clarity and emphasis that are probably more consistent with the authors’ intentions.

Schuster provides ancillary examples of good rule-breaking writing alongside the two main examples; however, the majority of these come from creative-type writing (fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction). My guess is that his awareness of this is why he ends the article with a section entitled, “But What about Formal English?” This is certainly a fair question, and Schuster attempts to address whether rules can be similarly bent in formal writing. However, the piece he selects as an example of formal English is David Foster Wallace’s introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007. The paragraph Schuster examines is quite good, and, as he points out, it does break many common grammatical and stylistic rules. I wish he had looked at something else, though. While DFW’s piece is “formal” in the sense that it is public, non-fiction, and edited, the rhetorical situation for which he was writing is different from the “formal” ones in which many college students will be asked to compose, such as the business world or the sciences. What is needed (and perhaps exists, although I have not come across it) is an analysis of which grammar rules matter in disciplines far removed from English. (Larry Beason’s 2001 CCC piece, “Ethos and Error,” in which he examines business-people’s reactions to a variety of common “errors,” is a major step in this direction, but stands mostly alone—again, at least as far as I’ve been able to uncover.)

Still, Schuster’s article is well worth the time to read for its lucid and careful examination of specific samples of writing, which provide support for the claims some of my other authors made for how professional writers bend and break rules for a rhetorical purpose.

Blog Post #4

Rustick, Margaret Tomlinson. “Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.1 (2007): 43-62. EbscoHost. 29 May 2011. Web.

Rustick spends the first part of her article discussing the historical debate surrounding grammar instruction, touching on what she sees as the rejection of any discussion of grammar in composition, to the politics and power dynamics of correctness, to the difficulty of figuring out exactly how to teach grammar in context.  Despite these conflicts, she suggests that teachers need to move forward in the teaching of standard written English (SWE) in some way because the world outside of English studies values it. In order to meet this challenge, Rustick suggests we draw from ESL research, treating SWE as something akin to a second language. The two languages between which students must learn to code-switch are their oral (home) language and the written (SWE) language of the classroom.

The bulk of Rustick’s article describes several grammar games she uses with her students. “It is important,” she writes, “to understand that the primary purpose of grammar gaming is not to teach terminology or prescriptive rules, nor is it simply a way to have fun. Instead, the basic premise […] is that students need to practice using language the way writers do” (50). Rustick’s ending assertion—that students need to use language like “real” writers do—is one I have read in several different articles, most recently in Dawkins’s and Micciche’s pieces. A question I have, though, is how do real writers use language? And how do we know? All the above authors spend a small amount of time addressing my first question—the gist seems to be that real writers are guided by a rhetorical transaction of meaning and by stylistic considerations rather than by hard and fast rules—but all elide the second question (how do we know?). In a field that is focused on how writing is generated, this elision seems odd. Of course, we all can read professional writing and see how different rules are bent, and books on the composing processes of professional writers abound (I use Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing in my classes), but if the stated goal is to replicate another group’s composing process, more needs to be said about that model process.

The games Rustick presents do sound interesting. All have to do with playing with punctuation, word order, and sentence structure to see what happens, with a goal of increasing the ability to make conscious decisions about the above elements of writing without getting stuck on terminology. Rustick also suggests talking with students about the different considerations and options presented by oral and written compositions. It is an interesting article, and I think it will be helpful as I develop my basic-writing course for the fall. I do, however, wish for a more in-depth analysis of the practices of professional writers, and I also question whether it is appropriate to model what we teach students on how professional writers write. After all, the purposes and genres for which our students will end up writing are different that those of most professional writers. But I do like the movement away from hard and fast grammatical rules and the acknowledgement that too much terminology can serve to confuse and dismay students.