In the Event of Moon Disaster

Another terrific historical document for use in reading and writing classes, particularly on the subjects of parallelism,  cohesion, and punctuation:^* Bill Safire's "In the Event of Moon Disaster." Transcript and image of the original at Letters of Note.

To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969.

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IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT:

The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to "the deepest of the deep," concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

Each of the widows-to-be.

Terrifying.

^* Semicolons!

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

wrong again - the case of Microsoft Word and passive voice

Elaborating on a comment I just wrote.... I have begun to feel that English teaching may be in worse shape than math.

(fyi: I frequently have students in my classes who tell me: "I love math, I hate English." Is that evidence that math is being taught better than English? I think it's possible.)

A fair amount of the content taught in English classes and covered in composition texts is misleading, confusing, or, in some cases, simply wrong. My favorite example may be the injunction against using the passive voice, which belongs to the simply wrong category.

Passive voice is essential to fulfilling the known-new contract. When you're writing with the known-new contract in mind, and you should pretty much always be writing with the known-new contract in mind,^* passive voice isn't just 'OK,' it's required: passive voice is good writing when you need it. Passive voice is so useful that if it didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it.

In my classes, of course, (and this is something the composition texts don't seem to have grokked) I don't have to worry about over-use of passive voice. As far as I can tell, students today haven't done enough academic reading to have noticed that passive voice is a common feature of academic writing, so they don't try to produce imitations of academic writing that feature excessive use of p.v.

As a result, far from having to inveigh against over-use of passive voice, I more or less have to teach students what passive voice is in the context of writing. (Writing as opposed to talking & signage, where everyone knows what p.v. is and uses it all the time. e.g.: Schools will be closed tomorrow...)

But when I'm trying to teach written passive voice using a Word file projected onto a screen, Grammar Check keeps dinging me, so I have to explain to my students that, back in the day, when students did read academic books and did try to imitate academic prose via liberal use of passive voice, writing instructors used to tell their students not to use passive voice, and that's where Microsoft Word got the idea from. Microsoft Word thinks passive voice is bad because George Orwell and Strunk & White thought passive voice was bad (my students have never heard of George Orwell or Strunk & White), and college students used to use way too much passive voice, but .... passive voice is not bad, and Microsoft Word is wrong. They should think about the known-new contract and use passive voice as needed.

Speaking of Microsoft, this was the first semester I 'infused' technology into my teaching, by which I mean I figured out how to use the laptop-projector set-up so I could project sentences and paragraphs onto the screen up front. When the class talked about passive voice, Microsoft's objections actually got to be pretty funny. We'd be cruising along, writing our sentences and making them cohere, and DING! Word would put a green squiggle under a passive voice construction.

Then I'd say, "Microsoft Word doesn't want you to use passive voice."

^* I say this with the proviso that all rules are made to be broken...