CDC writing lesson & expert raters using holistic rubrics

I've been meaning to correct the flu-shot post & am doing so now because Linda Seebach has given me a nudge.

When the CDC writes:

"Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people."

...What they mean is:

Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of annual flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people.

It's funny. I think of writing as 'fuzzy' compared to math, but lately I've realized there's a precision to writing, too.

The first sentence means 3,000 over 30 years.

The second sentence, the one the CDC should have written, means 3,000 per year, in some but not all years.

I still question universal flu shots (although I certainly don't object to people getting flu shots if they like), especially given the fact that flu shots aren't particularly effective. Flu vaccine isn't like measles or mumps vaccine; the composition of each year's shot is an informed guess as to which viruses will be making the rounds this year.

As I think I mentioned in the earlier post, I recall a time when health authorities recommended flu shots only for vulnerable populations, not for the entire country. Vulnerable populations included the elderly (for whom vaccine isn't as effective), small children, and, I think, people with respiratory ailments (hence: flu-associated deaths).

Reading between the lines on the CDC page, I wonder whether the universal flu-shot campaign is intended to reduce exposure of vulnerable populations to the flu by reducing the incidence of influenza in non-vulnerable populations.

The elderly don't respond particularly well to flu vaccine.

Their best protection comes from other people not getting the flu, and thus not exposing them.

Thinking about flu shots, I'm reminded of my friend in LA who refused to get flu shots because the only time she ever lost any weight was when she got the flu.


Speaking of precision

Speaking of precision, I'm reading a fascinating study of college writing quality as defined by "expert raters ... using a holistic rubric."

(And, yes, that construction does give me pause. Expert raters using a holistic rubric are the people who decided that my SAT essay on freedom and macroeconomics was worse than my son's SAT essay citing Martin Luther King.)

A major finding: good writing, to an expert rater using a holistic rubric, isn't any more cohesive than bad writing.

Cohesion, pretty much the sine qua non of good writing outside of college, has no bearing one way or another on an expert rater.

Instead, what matters are:

1. Using lots of words before getting to the main verb (more is better)
2. Using lots of different words
3. Using low-frequency words (aka big words) 

If you've spent any time in academia, you already know this, and it's been a conundrum for me, speaking as an instructor of freshman composition.

Good writing as defined by composition textbooks and style guides isn't good writing as defined by the people grading papers.

No, it doesn't work this way

Peter Elbow on the composing process

I remember posting this before (or at least discussing it in Comments -- I think I recall gasstationwithoutpumps saying something about wives copy-editing their husbands' work) but I was just cleaning up some old drafts sitting in the queue and found this one, so here it is.

Again.

Still funny after all these years!

Wrong again

COOK: What are you looking into now? Where do you see the field going in the future?

PENNEBAKER: One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?

The Secret Language Code
Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns
By Gareth Cook

Number one: most college applicants seem to write personal narratives. As far as I can tell.

Number two: most college composition textbooks applaud the use of verbs, caution against overuse of nouns, and condemn nominalization (non-nouns turned into nouns) with zeal.

The world is topsy-turvy.

Skunk at the party

From Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers By Brock Haussamen with Amy Benjamin, Martha Kolln, Rebecca S. Wheeler, and members of NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar:

A Broken Subject

At the start of this new millennium, throughout much of the K-12 English curriculum, grammar is a broken subject. If you find yourself just not knowing what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what you yourself were never taught-you are not alone. Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing. Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts. Perhaps you've set aside time for labeling parts of speech, correcting errors, and modeling effective use of punctuation, but you may feel unmoored: you wonder whether the grammar you learned in school (what little there may have been) is sufficient or if the methods you learned by are up-to-date. And you certainly wouldn't be alone if you were embarrassed to reveal to your colleagues all that you don't know about grammar. Grammar feels like a frowning pedant reproaching you for not knowing enough about subject-verb agreement, for blithely ending sentences with prepositions, for splitting infinitives without even understanding what that means, for promiscuous use of commas and flagrant case violations. And, even if you speak and write with a confident tongue and well-schooled hand, you may tremble at the thought of trying to get your students to write complete sentences.

This is a remarkable passage.

It takes as a given the fact that English teachers know nothing about grammar. Worse, not only do English teachers know nothing about grammar consciously, they (apparently) know little about grammar unconsciously (procedurally), either. Their own writing is distinguished by "promiscuous" use of commas and "flagrant" case violations.

Why are these people paid to teach writing?

You are not alone. The obstacles to revitalizing the teaching of grammar are several. One is that our profession has lost sight of the connection between studying grammar and learning to read and write. As Robert J. Connors recounted in "The Erasure of the Sentence," our interest in analyzing sentences has faded since the 1970s. Today it is the process of writing, along with originality, authenticity, and personal writing, that we value. The change has left sentence-level work--even such proven approaches as sentence combining-in shadow. We're not comfortable encouraging students to be original and authentic one minute and then assigning them exercises in sentence structure the next. Many English departments, and highly respected English teachers, argue forcefully that sentence-level work is mechanical, behavioristic, antihumanistic, and, most scorn-worthy of all, boring.

I'm sorry.

An English teacher who has no interest in analyzing sentences is not an English teacher.

Writers write sentences. That's what writing is: it's writers writing sentences. The raw material of writing is the sentence, and a sentence is an essay in miniature.

The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.
John Stuart Mill (1773-1836)

The essential structure of the ordinary [English] sentence...is a noble thing.
Winston Churchill

Why nobody knows how to teach writing

"How Student Writers Develop: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis, Ethics, Erotics" by T.R. Johnson

What are the odds an article with this title will provide an adjunct teaching freshman composition  substantial help teaching students where to put periods and where to put commas?

I'm starting a prediction market.

"SEXEY" paragraphs

I bought a terrific book on college essay writing from iTunes: Essay Writing for Students. Just $4.99. The authors seem like a lot of fun.

I like their paragraph acronym, which they characterize as "one way to structure a paragraph:

SEXEY is a mnemonic (neh-MON-ick - a memory device) to help you create well-structured paragraphs which fully answer your essay questions.

S – STATEMENT
Make a statement linking to the question that you have chosen to answer.

E – EXPLAIN
Explain what your statement means in relation to your text.

X – EXAMPLE
Add in an example and quote from your text to back up your statement and explanation.

E – EXPLANATION
What your quote and example show the reader.

Y – WHY
Why is this all important? How does it all link to the question? What does it show us? How does it link to the novel as a whole or to a social and/or historical/political context?

As far as I can tell, all of the examples in the book -- and there are many -- are academic.

No personal writing, no journalism, no op eds.

It is very difficult to find an American textbook that teaches (or excerpts) academic prose.

Vicky S on the quota system

Speaking of quotas for reading and writing, Vicky writes:

My kids had the requirement of 25 books a year all through elementary school. Reading became a chore, and we all became tangled up in the white lies required to comply--not the kind of thing I wanted my kids to learn! The writing, too--ugh, excessive. My poor kids were totally turned off both reading and writing by this quota and quantity approach. Does it actually work for any kids?

copy that

The associate director of the learning center at my college told me a fascinating story this week.

Her son was hired by a major copy editing company (I had no idea copy editing companies existed). When he took the job, he was required to copy, by hand, several well-written and well-edited articles: each one three times!

She said she'd never heard of such a thing and neither had her son, but then a friend told her that's the way the Jesuits taught writing when he was in school.

Is that true?

Did the Jesuits have students copy good works by hand?

dog dog

C's friend E is here & the three of us are watching Scared Straight while I finished grading the papers that straggled in at the end of the semester.

E's brother is dating a young woman who is working on her Ph.D. and teaching undergraduates in the university. She told E. that one of her students recently, in a paper, used the expression "doggy dog."

As in It's a doggy dog world.

Speaking of which, my neighbor sent me an email with the title "Never Again" this morning.

There were dogs inside.

today in College Composition

Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference, and the Teaching of Writing
Stephanie L. Kerschbaum

Abstract: In order to show difference as a dynamic, relational, and emergent construct, this article introduces “markers of difference,” rhetorical cues that signal the presence of difference between one or more interlocutors, and suggests practical means by which teachers can engage this concept to improve their teaching practice.

College Composition and Communication | Vol. 63, No. 4, June 2012

These are the people running college writing programs.

Next Action:

a) teach your child to write before he/she gets to college (Susan S did it! ... I have some ideas; Katharine does, too)
b) check into the freshman composition program at the schools your child is considering
c) if the required freshman writing courses are run by a program called "Composition Studies," or taught by people with degrees in "Composition Studies," considering choosing another school
d) if that's not possible, move heaven and earth to get your child excused from all required writing course(s)
e) if exemption from a required writing course is not possible, make your child promise to visit the college's Writing Center for help with all assignments in the required course
f) also extract a promise from him/her to request frequent meetings with the instructor of the required course
g) plan on seeing a C on the transcript

testing, testing

Grammar is sooooo slippery.

If anyone has advice on teaching the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers, I would love to hear.

Here's my latest stab at it. (Katharine told me about the "Pause Test.")

And here's the boyfriend who plays the piano, an example I learned from a graduate student and Fulbright scholar whose native language is Arabic.

She was the graduate assistant in an Applied Grammar course for English majors I was auditing, and she was gobsmacked by how little grammar American students know. One day she said (paraphrasing), "The reason to learn grammar is to appreciate your language. We study grammar because Arabic is a beautiful language."

We need a Writing Renaissance, not a "Writing Renaissance"

Here is is! (Cross-posted from Out in Left Field.)

According to an article in this past week's Edweek, K12 writing instruction is undergoing a renaissance:

Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.

This renaissance, the article claims, includes a shift towards explicit instruction:

The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.

In fact there appears to be little or no increase in explicit instruction, but simply a shift in quantity and genres. For example, rather than taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss to write their own whimsical stories:

First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.

In keeping with the new Common Core standards for English and Language Arts, the article notes, "these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading." But the ultimate goal seems not to be to improve writing, but reading:

"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article cites a 2010 study:

a meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, which found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.

In other words, despite the fact that ever since No Child Left Behind, as the article itself notes, concerns about reading comprehension have eclipsed concerns about writing, the ultimate goal of the "Writing Renaissance" continues to be reading.

Worse, this emphasis on writing for comprehension has become yet another excuse to water down math class:

A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.

What goals the article does mention that pertain specifically to writing are about quantity and argumentation rather than technique. Students should be writing more, and they should be writing pieces that shift from:

"opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there.

As for writing strategies, we find nothing here about corrections and revisions. Instead of rewriting, there's rereading:

They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help,... A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.

There's something to be said for "spotting structural decisions" and trying to emulate these. Indeed, the one instance of direct writing instruction the article cite pertains to organization:

When Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.

But none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem that affects all types of writing--no matter whether it's fiction, nonfiction, personal writing, summaries, or more involved, reading-connected writing assignments. This problem, which has become the talk of professors at campuses all around the country, is the problem that growing numbers of students have with the basic building blocks of all writing: phrases and sentences.

In none of the many Edweek articles on English and Language Arts do we find any mention of the steep decline in students' ability to write well-formed sentences. But this is arguably the greatest problem with today's writing, which, even at the college and graduate levels, is riddled with comma splices, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement problems, and the kind of garbling that results from a dearth of direct instruction and feedback from teachers and a failure by students to review and revise. Here are just a few examples from my growing collection:

1. Comma between subject and verb: Children who experience the world in a more rigid and narrow manner, will have difficulty with social inferences.

2. Comma splice: Generalization is a tough skill for ASD students to learn, teachers are sometimes baffled that they act a certain way in one subject and completely different in other.

3. Failed subject verb agreement: Two of the defining characteristics of autism includes impairments in social interactions and communication.

4. Failed preposition agreement: There are three types of aphasia to which a child can be diagnosed.

5. Dangling modifiers: In thinking about students transitioning from high school to college, the issues of accepting the disability and self-advocacy are crucial.

6. Wordiness: By providing direct instruction, this assists the students with improving their ability to give examples.

7. Awkwardness (and wordiness): Because of these results, it suggests that “object and subject relative sentences” need different amounts of working memory to be understood by the reader.

8. Displaced modifier: I first inquired about this young man’s high school experience, who I will call RC.

9. Incoherence (and wordiness): Due to the fact that these children with autism are unable to proper engage in social situations eliminates the knowledge base that they would normally acquire.

None of the above-described elements of the so-called "Writing Renaissance" will solve these problems. For this, we need direct, sentence-focused writing instruction. Yet, for all the empirical support there is for this kind of instruction, the tide shifted away from it long ago, and it will take a true Writing Renaissance to bring it back.

thumb paragraphs and other

When Katharine has time, she'll repost to ktm, but go read now!

It's time for me to re-read Robert Connors Erasure of the Sentence. (Katharine's post on Connors.)

"from literacy to electracy"

Stumbled upon "from literacy to electracy" in my travels. Haven't had time to get a sense of the site, but I did click on enough links to find this observation from Claude Lévi-Strauss:

My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.

I wonder whether C's "Writing the Essay" instructor would like that.

I'm thinking Yes.

advanced writing in the 12th grade as assessed by NAEP

According to NAEP, in 2011 only 3% of high school seniors were able to write an essay as good as the one below, which is considered "Advanced."

% scoring "Advanced":
4% of white students
5% of Asian students
0% of black students
1% of Hispanic students.

5% of students whose parents had college degrees scored in the Advanced range.

5% scoring Advanced would be fine if "Advanced" meant Advanced. But it doesn't. "Advanced" on NAEP means 3% of high school seniors are able to write a coherent statement on the subject of:

• Story or personal narrative about real/imagined difficult choice
• Essay about technology important to student
• Letter persuading council to build/not build convenience store

All 3 of these prompts call for opinion and the marshaling of evidence strictly (or nearly so) from the student's personal experience, and that is not at all what college writing is about. Nor is it the kind of writing one does in business or the professions.

From The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2011:

Sample Task: Writing to explain
When writing to explain, the task of the writer is to bring together relevant information and to present this information with focus and clarity so that the topic becomes understandable to a reader. The sequence of ideas, and how ideas are arranged, must cohere and contribute to the communicative purpose.

One of the writing tasks from the twelfth-grade assessment asked students to write about a type of technology that they use in their lives and why they value that technology. The Value of Technology task began with a short video about young people’s use of technology. This video included animation and statistics about technology use. The written part of the task then specified an audience for students to address in explaining the value of a particular technology. Responses were rated using a scoring guide ranging from “Little or no skill” to “Effective.”

The sample student response shown below was rated as “Effective” in responding to the task about the value of technology. After an opening paragraph that defines video games and introduces the ideas to be developed throughout, the writer constructs the explanation primarily through use of personal experience. This approach skillfully communicates the value of video games through the use of detailed descriptions of specific games and what the writer has learned from them. Ideas are fully developed, and the rich use of explanatory details establishes a distinct voice speaking intelligently from experience. This response demonstrates skills associated with performance at the Advanced level. Twelfth-grade students at this level are able to craft responses that strategically accomplish the communicative purpose.

Student response - Grade 12 - Advanced
Videogames are a primary source of entertainment for people of all ages. Videogames are discs or cartridges that hold data; once a disc or cartridege is inserted into a gaming console, the data is read and displayed on the screen along with prompts that allow the game to be played. Games have many genres ranging from fighting to educational and can be used for than just mere entertainment. I personally have been experiencing what videogames have to offer for over five years now. Gaming is not just something that people do for fun, people can play videogames for many reasons. Videogames are an important factor in many peoples lives including mine and are a valuable type of technology.

I have been playing videogames from a very young age. Mario was the first game I was ever introduced to and it was not through playing; through sheer coincidence my mother realized that the theme music to Mario put me to sleep as a baby. Once I was old enough to hold a controller I began playing the game. Ever since that moment I have been playing videogames. Games are multi-purposed; to some it is merely a form of entertainment, but to others it could be their job. Some people argue that games are a waste of time and that they are not product. I beg to differ; games are important to me because not only do they give me something to do to pass time but they are also educational. A prime example of this is a game I was introduced to by my cousins, Runescape. When I was about thirteen I had went to see my cousins up state and I saw them playing this browser game called Runescape (a browser game is a game that can be played within an internet browser without the need to download or upload information from a disc or cartridge). Me being the person I am, I was curious as to what it was so I began to ask questions. By the end of the day I learned two things about that game, two things that to some gamers, were their favorite word. It was a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) that was free; in essence it was a free gamethat I didn’t have to download and I could do basically whatever I wanted that was allowed in the game. Within the game you could do any of the various skills offered, quests, and even fight against other players from around the world with you’re avatar. Once I got home, I of course signed up and began to play. Throughout the few years I played that game I realized it was set in Medieval times and I learned many things about that age. I learned the process it takes to turn ore into metal, what smelting is, how leather is crafted into clothing, how clay is used, and some of the politics of Medieval civilizations throughout the quests of the game. Although I would spend hours on this game and it seemed like I was doing nothing, I infact was actually learning.

Another game my cousins introduced to me was Age of Mythology. The game was a PC game(which means it had to be bought and it contained disc which had to upload the game onto you’re computer or device and then the game could be played) and I had played it at my cousins and eventually went on to buy it. If mythology was a subject in school, this game could be the teacher. This game focuses around Greek, Egyptian and Norse mythology. You follow the antagonists (which you name) through all three civilizations chasing an evil minotaur that is attempting to end the world. You begin in a fictional Greek city and eventually move throughout the world. This game teaches any of it’s players not only how armies from all three civilazations worked but those civilazations major Gods, minor Gods, demigods and mythological creatures. Stories based on mythology or fact are also told and experienced throughout the game; such as the Trojan Horse and Ragnorak. I have never picked up a book based on mythology or ancient Gods but because of this game I have an extensive knowledge of the mythology of those three cultures. Games are important in society; they give people a hobby and peace of mind. They can also be used for educational purposes. Toddlers no longer read books to learn how to read, write, and spell, they are given toys and games to play. Games hold a high position in society and can be beneficial to those who use them if they wish to use them in that way.

This student, who is certainly a competent "personal" writer, has advanced a thesis: video games are valuable for more than entertainment.

In support of his thesis (I'm assuming the writer is male), he tells us that he learned "the process it takes to turn ore into metal, what smelting is, how leather is crafted into clothing, how clay is used, and some of the politics of Medieval civilizations" from a video game. This knowledge he acquired over a number of years and many hours of play.

In the next paragraph he tells us that although he has "never picked up a book based on mythology or ancient Gods" he nonetheless possesses "an extensive knowledge of the mythology of [Greek, Egyptian, and Norse] cultures" thanks to another video game. He provides no further detail as to what this knowledge consists of, or how long it took him to acquire it.

Essentially, the evidence this writer offers in support of his thesis boils down to: I remember stuff I saw in my video games.

The essay concludes with the assertion that "toddlers no longer read books to learn how to read, write, and spell." The writer offers no evidence to support this claim and seems not to know the meaning of the word "toddler." Toddlers have never read books, now or in the past, because toddlers are too young to read. They can't play video games, either, for that matter.

For my money, this essay is pretty much the exact opposite of what an Advanced high school senior should be able to produce in timed writing.

Very worrisome.

more fun with middle school

An Amazon book review:

The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

Amazon review of Daybook of Critical Reading And Writing (Grade 6)

The fabulous thing here is that this student is attempting a fairly sophisticated argument. It's an argument of the jailhouse lawyer type, of course, but still. He or she is onto something. S/he just needs better writing skills to pull it off.

Unfortunately, better writing skills aren't in the offing, I predict. Daily zeros on daybook assignments are a proven time-waster even the Writing the Essay people don't go in for.

p.s: Someone needs to tell this student about the Postmodernism Generator.

p.p.s.: I was going to title this post "Why we fight" but I thought that would be over the top.

the natural

I read a fabulous passage the other night re: process writing, purportedly drawn from Peter Elbow's work. Can't track down the original to confirm, but it's too droll to pass up posting here:

Start off writing as naturally and comfortably as possible. Don’t think about grammar or about any minor matters of phrasing or spelling. Think only about what you want to say....

Next . . . get your text to say exactly what you want it to say—but still without worrying about minor matters of phrasing, grammar, or spelling....

Now turn your attention to phrasing, spelling, and grammar. . . . [R]ead it aloud to yourself ...and read your piece aloud to one or two listeners. . . . Give your final, typed version to another person to copy-edit.

Tryg Thoreson on Peter Elbow

My favorite part is paragraph 2, where you get your text to say exactly what you want it to say without worrying about spelling, grammar, or "phrasing."

I mean, jeez. If we're dispensing with phrasing, why not go all the way and dispense with writing altogether?

Writing is hard.

Talking is easier.

Also, where are all the volunteer copy editors? Do they copy edit blog posts?

Thoreson's article is a lot of fun.

cleft sentences

I was talking to Katharine today about teaching writing. I've been focusing on sentence combining, specifically on teaching students to write the kinds of embedded and heavily "noun-modified" sentences you see in academic writing.

Katharine said she thinks students need to learn not just how to 'combine' and 'embed' but also how to manipulate word order via cleft sentences, "anticipatory its," passive voice and the like.

So tonight I've been tracking cleft sentence handouts....

This one looks good.

English teachers need to study linguistics. I'm playing catch-up, and I hadn't made a conscious distinction, inside my own mind, between "embedding" versus "word order" as different ways of persuading sentences to do what you want them to do.

If you haven't made a distinction consciously, you can't use it to decide what to teach.

Mom of 4 on 'caught, not taught'

from Mom of 4:

A recent post on another website made a good point about the current edworld fad that grammar should be "caught, not taught". The point was that, in the real world, the only students who have any likelihood of sufficient "catching" are very bright kids, from advantaged families, who also read a GREAT DEAL of high-quality fiction and non-fiction. In other words, almost none of today's kids. Bottom line; better go back to teaching it explicitly.

Problem: many, if not most, teachers (particularly ES-MS) probably don't know grammar and compostion well enough to teach it effectively. I recently read that the percentage of teachers with less than 10 years experience has just crossed 50%, and that group I think is less likely to have a strong background in grammar and composition. Even when I was in college in the 60s, English majors (and possibly minors) in Arts & Sciences were required to take Structure of the English Language, and Stylistics, in that order, but secondary-ed majors in the ed school were not required to take either (although some did). They were the two most difficult classes in the department, with an outstanding professor teaching both, but everyone above C level (required) KNEW grammar when they finished.

Structure of the English Language & Stylistics: perfect.

I have been scrambling to learn the Structure of the English Language (Stylistics will have to wait) -- and not just the Structure of the English Language but also, and more importantly, the particulars of the Structure of the English Language that do or do not stump my students. I need content knowledge and I need pedagogical content knowledge, and they're not the same.

For instructors like me who themselves were not taught the Structure of the English Language, the confusing thing about teaching composition is that "basic writers" who are native speakers of English already know English grammar.

They know English grammar, and yet they don't write grammatically.

Why?

The answer is simple but by no means obvious unless you have some formal knowledge of grammar. When you 'write by ear,' which is the way I write and always have, it takes a while to figure out that the grammar of academic prose is completely and totally different from the grammar of speech.

(That said, it's not clear to me that people who do have some formal knowledge of grammar recognize the profound differences between talking and writing, either.)

In any event, basic writers who are native speakers of English know English grammar.

What they don't know is the specific grammar of academic prose.

Which brings me to Mom of 4's comment. Given my experience as a writer teaching composition, I think English teachers should study linguistics (and stylistics) in college and graduate school.

English teachers-to-be should study linguistics (and stylistics) because it's pretty hard for a teacher to recognize that relative clauses pose a specific challenge for her students if she's never heard the term "relative clause."

I speak from experience.

follow-up to Katharine on "Writing Revolution"

from Katharine's post on "The Writing Revolution":

- Many under-privileged children, even in high school, don’t know how to use basic conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and basic connectors like although and despite, and that the remedy includes teaching them the parts of speech.

[snip]

As for although and despite, while it’s possible that these specific words don’t figure much in the everyday speech of socio-economically underprivileged children, how likely is it, if you said something like “Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now” or “Despite the fact that we haven’t lost electricity yet, we might still lose it later,” they wouldn’t understand what you meant? Has anyone even bothered to test this?

As it happens, I've been thinking about "although" and "despite" for months now: I've been thinking about "although" and "despite" ever since reading William Robinson's 1995 article "Syntax and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses."

I'm very interested to hear how the passage below jibes with Katharine's knowledge of language development.

Robinson writes:

I want to focus on ... the assumption that our students need to write fewer simple sentences and more compound and complex ones ....

[Kellogg Hunt] (Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels) examined the grammatical features of the writing of students at grades 4, 8, and 12 and, for comparison, articles (not fiction) in Harper's and The Atlantic.  Among the schoolchildren, Hunt found that the 4th graders produced 37% more compound sentences than the 12th graders and the 12th graders 23% more dependent clauses than the 4th graders. So far, this would indicate that while increased compounding at the sentence level is not desirable, the increased use of dependent clauses is. However, the "superior adult" writers, as Hunt termed them, wrote only 5% more compound sentences than the 12th graders and only 6% more dependent clauses. In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at al most the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

[snip]

Despite showing that 12th graders use dependent clauses at about the same rate as do superior writers, Hunt provides some interesting data in the details of the kinds of clauses they use. To introduce their adverb clauses, they rely overwhelmingly on three words, if, whenr and because. While both the 4th and 12th graders use because at about the same rate, the 4th graders use many more when clauses and the 12th graders many more if clauses (82). But dependent clauses of contrast and concession are virtually absent from the writing of both groups. Although and even though appeared 2 times in the writing of the 4th graders (when appeared 101 times and if 30 times) and 5 times in that of the 12th graders (where when appeared 53 times and if 73 times). The contrastive whereas appeared only twice among the 12th graders and not at all in the earlier grades, and while appeared 13 times in the writing of the 4th graders and 5 times in that of the 12th graders, an indication that it was probably being used to indicate time rather than concession or contrast.

As far as I can tell, people virtually never use the words "although" and "even though" in conversation. (See, e.g.: Serving chili and A sample stretch of talk.)

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I'm thinking meteorologists and New Jersey governors don't use "although" and "even though" sentences, either.

(I cracked up reading Katharine's hurricane sentences -- "Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now." Believe it or not, I now possess an entire page of sentences transcribed from one of the weather people on TV the night of Hurricane Sandy. Great minds think alike.)

Back on topic: my experience of "basic writers" jibes with Kellogg's findings.

In my experience, "basic writers" don't use "concession words."

How well basic writers understand concession words inside academic prose, I don't know. I'm certain my students would understand Katharine's hurricane sentences.

The "although" sentences students write at New Dorp (2nd page - scroll down) sounded like a great idea to me the minute I read about them -- but, in line with Katharine's observations, possibly for different reasons from the school's.

I have the impression that New Dorp requires students to write "although" sentences in order to give them practice writing sentences with subordinate adverbial clauses.

In my experience, Basic Writers have very little difficulty (if any) writing subordinate adverbial clauses. My impression is that Basic Writers have very little experience learning how to punctuate adverbial clauses, either, but I could be wrong.

As far as I can tell, Basic Writers don't write "although" sentences because they aren't used to qualifying their statements or to conceding points. They aren't used to writing academic prose or thinking academic thoughts.

In fact, just before I read Peg Tyre's article I had arrived at the (tentative) conclusion that my students would profit from consciously and purposefully writing "although" sentences as thesis statements -- a subject for another post.

In the meantime, check out this beautiful two-sentence pair written by one of my students.