I've been thinking about the bright line between "bad writing" and "good writing," at least as we can draw it in the most traditional way. I think that many of the rules Dr. Kemp mentions in his discussion of formalist "error-free" composition are vestigial holdovers from Latin. Some of them didn't come from Latin, but they no longer mean anything. Why does it matter if I split an infinitive in English? Why can't I end a sentence with a preposition? Sometimes a sentence should start with a conjunction, even if doing so technically makes it a fragment. Who cares? Because these conventions do nothing to make students better writers. I've read many awful, yet error-free papers.
On the other hand...
I'm sure that many experienced composition teachers can provide examples, but I can't think of a single student paper that could be considered in any way "good" when the student demonstrated a fundamental ignorance of the conventions of style, grammar, and spelling. Those papers were universally awful quite apart from their significant mechanical problems.
In other words, if a student hasn't mastered the basic conventions of written language, there is very little chance that he or she has mastered higher-order skills like style, invention, metaphor, storytelling, or argumentation. Dr. Kemp said it in the podcast: good writers are readers. And readers pick up the mechanical conventions at the same time they pick up the higher-order skills.
So that leads to the question...
It's a series of small questions, really, but it's interesting to me. Which skills are important? What constitutes an error? Isn't every composition toeing a formal line? Writing strictly formally, here are are the errors up with which I will not put:
- Misspellings and the abuse of homonyms
The former led to the spellchecker, which obscured the latter in mechanistic camouflage. And while we're at it: "Their," "they're," and "there." They're not that hard. - Egregious misuse of punctuation.
I don't really care about the Oxford comma, or the placement of commas in dependent clauses, unless this placement affects meaning. For beginners, I encourage liberal use of the period as a check against the dreaded run-on sentence. Many problems can be fixed by breaking these gargantuan crimes against style into smaller sentences. Of course, the apostrophe is a terrible punctuation mark, but I insist that students learn it. - The run-on sentence and the comma splice
- Various sins too egregious to count
Yes, this one is a cop-out. I'm writing here about errors that are so ungrammatical that they confuse the reader. I mean the truly egregious errors that give English teachers a shiver and make Shakespeare twitch in his grave: subject/verb disagreement, true (nonsensical) fragments, mixed tenses, and their many, many counterparts. - Inauthentic voice
A broadly defined crime against writing, "inauthentic voice" comes when students try to write for no audience in a tone they imagine as "academic." This inauthentic voice is the perpetrator of: esoteric words that don't quite fit, the use of "myself" when "me" is the correct pronoun, tortured constructions, long sentences, nominalization, deletion of the agent, weak verbs, vague propositions (especially in introductions) and the like. It's hard to pin down in a short description, but it is awful. You know it when you see it.
I suspect that even the most anti-foundational teacher of composition forces students to toe a line somewhere. Where do you draw yours?
I truly believe in the virtues of grammar, so my challenge is actually working in the reverse: finding places where I can let go of strict grammar rules. But your first paragraphs made me reflect on a couple things.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reason that students with poor grammar can’t do any of the “higher order” thinking is because they become mired, as Shaughnessy notes, in their grammar problems. On page 392, she notes that “So absolute is the importance of error in the minds of many writers that ‘good writing’ means ‘correct writing,’ nothing more.”
Maybe they’re so preoccupied with being grammatically correct--so caught in trying to figure out the patterns in micro-level problems--that they fail to recognize patterns of style, logic, and invention. It doesn’t help that the school system perpetuates this entrenchment: unless Johnny learns to write “correctly,” he cannot continue into a class that will teach him how to write critically.
I agree that students who read do better than students who don’t; even if they cannot use the vocabulary of grammar, they can still recognize an incomplete or problematic sentence. This might be one reason that literature is seen as important in elementary and secondary education. Perhaps the hope is that if we can give students exposure to “good” writing (or maybe even promote their enjoyment of reading) they will retain something by osmosis rather than grammar drills.
Hi, Dan...
ReplyDeleteYou make some good comments when say that it is difficult to find a single student paper that could be considered in any way "good" when the student demonstrated a fundamental ignorance of the conventions of style, grammar, and spelling.
I do agree with you that if a student hasn't mastered the basic conventions of written language, there is very little chance that he or she has mastered higher-order skills like style, invention, metaphor, storytelling, or argumentation.
However, I'd like to share a different point of view that I was introduced to at the IPCC conference in Orlando in 2003. One of the presenters, a teacher of students who's first language was not English, had a most controversial paper. I'll share it when I locate it, but the gist of it was that because ESL students (English as a Second Language) could be quite capable of communicating intelligently in their native language, we should not focus on forcing English grammar and spelling conventions, but rather encourage the clear expression of ideas first. As I recall, this presenter was vilified by the audience for this maverick stance, and there followed a vigorous (and interesting) debate.
I believe that grammar and spelling are tools that we use to help our reader understand us better (I'm reminded of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves title). But I'm not entirely convinced that if these elements are not there that we have bad writing. What if the ideas were communicated through bullet points rather than prose? Bullet points are not complete sentences, but we can generally understand them.
That said, when I peer-review articles,my first inclination is to fix the grammar (if the article is by a foreign author, it is sometimes very frustrating to read). I'm with Chalice on this, I get very distracted by spelling and grammar errors (of others, not my own...I of course don't make spelling or grammar errors...just typos :-)
Dan, the whole grammar topic has hit a nerve in class. Couple of thoughts to add to the points the Debbie and Chalice make:
ReplyDelete- Remember when we studied Lanham in the class on Style with Dr Rice? One of the key elements of effective style (and communication) was transparency. That's how I see the value of grammar - it helps the reader concentrate on the message rather than the language. Unless, you want to say something specific by using a certain kind of language, of course, ie, your language is the message, etc. Like the language in a Junot Diaz book, for example.
- Another thing that strikes me all the time is that when I'm in a bind with something and I google for help, oftentimes I find solutions in obscure forums written in horrifying English, but I just don't care. I need the solution and I'm grateful it's there in a language I can understand. Isn't that effective communication?