Teaching Writing
Find the Subject and Verb – Clause intervening
Tweet As discussed in a previous post, students have not been prepared in high school to identify the Subject and Verb of a sentence. The argument against teaching grammar is that we need no tutoring to create comprehensible sentences, unless there is some mental dysfunction. Volumes could be written about that contention, and I will not […]
Errors with Prepositions
Tweet This series of posts is about the error patterns in my students’ sentences. The errors interfere with clarity, flow, and aesthetics. There are so many occurrences of basic errors that my conclusion is not that the students are inattentive or sloppy, but that they have never been taught how to construct a solid English […]
Hal and the Cell Phone
Tweet I love my cell phone and would not like to go back to a world without them. But like Hal, the bossy computer in Stanley Kubric’s great film, 2001: a Space Oddysey, these little machines are messing with our heads. I teach first-year university students, and have noticed two new developments this year: 1) […]
Paying the piper 2: The failure of American high schools
Tweet A couple of blog posts ago, I presented some cockamamie sentences from my students. The sentences suggested to me that the students did not have a handle on the rules for constructing sentences. They confused spoken English with written English, but the sentences cited would not be used in spoken English. This baffled, and […]
Virtual reality
Tweet Years ago, a friend said he thought that young people today were blurring the distinction between real and virtual relationships. I said that was ridiculous, that human beings would always need the sights, smells, and touch of other human beings. A relationship based on language alone would never prove gratifying. Now I wonder. My […]
Paying the Piper – the failure of American high schools
Tweet A second semester college student included this language in the third, and final, draft of her essay on “love and marriage.” I like many other people are surprised by the amount of time couples stay together. Not to mention adopting a child. After the final drafts had been turned in, I culled 22 similarly […]
Playing with language
Tweet A recent article in The New York Times, “My Life’s Sentences,” by the author Jhumpa Lahiri, mentioned one of her favorite sentences. It is in the short story Araby, by James Joyce: “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” Since we had just read this story in class, I […]
More About the Scary Science: Linguistics
Tweet An article in the Arts section of The New York Times this morning, “How Do You Say ‘Disagreement’ in the Pirahã tongue?” points up the gulf between the soft science of Linguistics and ordinary mortals. Since there is no whiff of this science discernible in high school courses (at least in the U.S.), students […]
Fiction Exercise: Final part
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2, 7, 13, 16, and 21 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry […]
Fiction Exercise: Part 5
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2, 7, 13, and 16 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry […]