Commas, up and down

Ben Yagoda on commas coming and going:

An interesting Slate piece a few months back by Matthew J.X. Malady noted many Twitter users’ disdain for commas. It’s not just a matter of being frugal with punctuation in order to fit a thought into 140 characters. Punctuational minimalism has emerged as one of the hallmarks of casual online style—social media, texting, commenting, message boards. One inescapable example, which I’ve previously discussed, is the sea change in email greeting from “Hi, Name” to “Hi Name.” This is by no means exclusively the province of kids and illiterates....(Exceptions to the minimalism rule are ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points, which have spread online like Asian carp in a predator-free freshwater ecosystem.)

Skilled Twitter users drop commas, in particular, to punch up the comedy. Malady quoted a tweet by the writer Jen Doll on a day that Gmail went down for almost an hour: “I guess all those losers outside skiing or like at the movies or whatever missed out on this exciting adventure we just had.”

[snip]

In certain quarters, the trend, if anything, is more commas. Dropping the suspense, the quarters I refer to are the offices of The New Yorker, the soon-to-be-90-year-old magazine that is the veritable St. Peter’s Basilica of the comma. For The New Yorker, using this punctuation mark in all generally accepted and even optional spots, including after the penultimate item in a series, goes without saying. The magazine’s secret sauce in generating commas is its extreme strict constructionist view of nonessential (also known as nondefining) elements in a sentence. Consider: “By the time Blockbuster got around to offering its own online subscription service, in 2004, it was too late.” Virtually everybody else would leave out the commas after “service.” The New Yorker insists on it, the logic being that otherwise, the writer would be implying that Blockbuster offered its own online subscription service in years other than 2004.

Some people count sheep to get to sleep. I lie in bed reading New Yorkers on my Kindle, counting the commas. Normally, six or seven in a sentence is a number that allows me to close my eyes and drift off. Imagine my surprise, a couple of months ago, when I came upon this, in a review of a book about William Burroughs.

The biography, after its eventful start, becomes rather like an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs’s self-absorption, with connecting stops in New York, where he lived, in the late nineteen-seventies, on the Bowery, in the locker room of a former Y.M.C.A., and, returning to the Midwest, in the congenial university town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last sixteen years, and where he died, of a heart attack, in 1997, at the age of eighty-three.

That’s right. Sixteen commas. I had the feeling that the magazine’s editors were having a laugh among themselves, which I was lucky enough to share in.

I think so much about New Yorker commas that sometimes my head gets all in a spin, especially when pondering what I call the prepositional-phrase conundrum. It comes up in a series of prepositional phrases (as in Burroughs’s New York and Kansas experiences, above) or with verb-prepositional-phrase constructions, in cases where the verb is not preceded by a subordinate conjunction, such as the two “where”s in the Burroughs example. Consider these fairly recent quotes from the magazine:

1. “It first appeared in 1959, in Paris, as ‘The Naked Lunch’ (with the definite article), in an Olympia Press paperback edition, in company with ‘Lolita,’ ‘The Ginger Man,’ and ‘Sexus.’”
2. “Brigham’s Allentown and Pittsburgh clinics finally closed, in 2012.”
3. Robert Frost “was born in 1874 in San Francisco, where his father, William Frost, a newspaperman from primeval New England stock, had taken a job.”

No. 1 (also from the Burroughs review) omits a comma after “appeared.” Presumably that’s because “in 1959″ is considered an essential element, as is “in 1974″ in example No. 3. But why? There was only one year that Naked Lunch first appeared, as there was only one year Robert Frost was born. And sure enough, in example No. 2, recognizing there was only one year that the clinics finally closed, the magazine’s copy desk kept or put in the comma.

But down that road leads madness. Abraham Lincoln died just one time, but even The New Yorker would never print the sentence, “Lincoln died, in 1865.”

Or, would it?

The Commas Suit Ya by Ben Yagoda 4/29/2014

I've been thinking about New Yorker commas ever since reading an excerpt from Mary Norris's Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a book I'm going to be buying as soon as I finish writing mine.

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.

Trick sentence

Still on the clock, so I've only time to admire some sentences in the morning paper before I go write some of my own. Here's today's:

"With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice — her simplest remark sounded like a jungle mating call, one critic said — Ms. Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband."

That sentence is a little essay unto itself: a sentence-combining tour de force!

The September before last, I gave a department talk on precision teaching, and when I distributed a handout showing the number of subject-verb-[object] propositions a Times reporter had stuffed into just one fully readable sentence (17, as I recall), a couple of people were appalled. 

One said the Times has....hmmm. I'm forgetting the story now. 

Something like: the Times has some kind of widely circulating internal memo that lists the day's bad sentences so as to subject them to public shaming.

He said my 17-proposition pick should have made the list.

Jibber-jabber

Off-topic ---

I'm sitting here at the breakfast table reading the paper, and I've come across this fabulous sentence in an op-ed by Daniel Levitin:

"Every day we're assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions."

Wonderful!

I must say, that pretty much describes a normal day for me, inveterate information-consumer that I am. 

Of course, I like jibber-jabber.

Speaking of which, I have a guillotine deadline on Thursday -- so back with more education jibber-jabber after that.

More fun with passive voice, part 2

Just discovered Pullum's paper buried in my Great Unread:

Abstract Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.

Fear and Loathing of the English Passive | Geoffrey K. Pullum

153 words, 3 days

I just spent 3 days writing 169 words.

Good thing I'm not a poet.

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!

"topic progression" in new and old history textbooks

I've just read Katharine's post comparing a 1914 history textbook to a textbook published in 2005. The difference is staggering.

What jumps out at me are the many distinct grammatical subjects in the modern text compared to the older book:

Published in 2005:
The German States Remain Separate 
German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued their attempts to revive Charlemagne’s empire and his alliance with the Church. This policy led to wars with Italian cities and to further clashes with the Pope. Conflicts were one reason why the feudal states of Germany did not unify during the Middle Ages. Another reason was that the system of German princes electing the king weakened royal authority. German rulers controlled fewer royal lands to use as a base of power than French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority. 

Five main clauses, 5 different grammatical subjects.

Compare to:

Published in 1914:
In his lifelong attempt to maintain what he thought to be his rights as emperor he met, quite naturally, with the three old difficulties. He had constantly to be fighting his rivals and rebellious vassals in Germany; he had to face the opposition of the popes, who never forgot the claims that Gregory VII had made to control the emperor as well as other rulers. Lastly, in trying to keep hold of northern Italy, which he believed to belong to his empire, he spent a great deal of time with but slight results. (1914)

Four main clauses, 1 grammatical subject.

I'm wondering whether I can improve the 2005 paragraph just by tinkering with the subjects...

[pause]

OK, here's a rewrite:

Revision with "consistent grammatical subjects":
The German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued Frederick's efforts to revive Charlemagne's empire and his alliance with the Church, but they did not succeed. Like Frederick, they incited fruitless wars with Italian cities and further clashes with the Pope, and the constant conflict undermined their ability to unify Germany's feudal states under one king. The kings were further weakened by the German political system, which allowed German princes to elect the king, and by their relative lack of royal lands compared to the large territories controlled by French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority in their own countries. Frederick's successors succeeded neither in reviving the empire nor in unifying their country.

Six main clauses, only 2 different grammatical subjects, with 5 of the six subjects being the same ("German kings").

So I guess the lesson is: if you're going to engage in excessive summary, be sure to keep your sentence subjects consistent!

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.

What matters most in "The Writing Revolution"

Peg Tyre’s recent article in the Atlantic, "The Writing Revolution,” provoked controversy among educators, many of whom find direct instruction in writing, particularly at the level of sentences, to be unnatural, ineffective, joy stifling, and creativity-crushing (despite compelling evidence to the contrary).

The article should instead have provoked controversy among linguists.

It implies, among other things, that:

-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.

-Such students also don’t understand that “the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning of that sentence.”

The problem is that, except for severely language impaired children (and non-native speakers), these basic facts about the English language are among the things that children do pick up incidentally, without formal instruction, and master well before high school. (Mastering the written aspects of language, including the conventions that are specific to writing, is a different story).

Does anyone seriously think that typically developing native high school students, however socio-economically underprivileged, don’t know how to use and and or?

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?

The notion that the students in question don’t know these crucial function words comes partly from observations about their written language: “the students’ sentences were short and disjointed” and deficient in function words; partly from their performance on a “quick quiz” that required them to use these function words; and partly from their performance on a task that combined reading comprehension and writing: reading a passage from Of Mice and Men and then writing a sentence based on the passage that began “Although George...”

In this last task:

Many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

As a linguist who specializes in grammar, reading comprehension, and the mechanics of writing, I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation for what Tyre and others are observing here: these students are showing a combination of difficulties with reading comprehension, difficulties with writing conventions, and difficulties sustaining attention.

These high school students know perfectly well what for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so, although and despite mean, and how to use them. And, as the article observes, “the students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences.”

However, the article provides no evidence about their reading comprehension—and how many of them, for example, comprehend at the level of Of Mice and Men. While they surely understand the basic function words of their native language, perhaps they don’t understand all of nouns and adjectives used by Steinbeck. Perhaps (especially if they encounter words they don’t know) they aren’t able to sustain attention across some of his longer, more complex sentences. And while they surely could use the word “although” correctly in oral speech, perhaps they haven’t been instructed in the basics of punctuation and sentence fragments vs. complete sentences. All this could result in a fragment like Although George and Lenny were friends. when what the teacher was looking for instead was Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

And all this is consistent with the efficacy of the remediation program adopted by the school that the article profiles:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children … are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.

Prompting children to use certain function words, and also appositives, prompts them to practice writing longer, more complex sentences. Helping students comprehend paragraphs improves their ability to write responses to reading passages.

By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

Although ... “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.”

Unless ... “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.”  

If …  

This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”

Notice that what’s hard about this task isn’t the meaning of the function words and how to use them, but understanding the chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen well enough to know their relevant causal and contrastive properties. The issue is both reading comprehension and subject-specific mastery. But the task is still a good one, because what the although, unless, and if prompts do is to prompt Monica to review the lesson with the specific goal of finding the causal and contrastive relationships it discusses.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

When you’re prompted to look in a text for the kinds of relationships expressed by although and if, you know that you should specifically be looking for words like although and if. This kind of focus may help students overcome difficulties sustaining attention, such that complex texts become something more meaningful than a “sea of words.”

The Hochman method is a great antidote to the current fads in writing instruction, but not for most of the reasons suggested in Tyre’s article.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

Mark Helprin on writing by hand

In the Wall Street Journal's Word Craft series:

This brings up Levenger, which sells "tools for writers." The fewer tools the better, and they need not be costly or complicated. Whether you use a pencil, a pen, an old typewriter or something electrical is largely irrelevant to the result, although there is magic in writing by hand. It's not just that it has been that way for 5,000 years or more, and has engraved upon our expectations of literature the effects associated with the pen—the pauses; considerations; sometimes the racing; the scratching out; the transportation of words and phrases with arrows, lines and circles; the closeness of the eyes to the page; the very touching of the page—but that the pen, not being a machine (it does not meet the scientific definition of a machine), is a surrender to a different power than those of mere speed and efficiency.

In short, a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel. And although once you find a pen you like you'll probably stick with it the way an addict sticks with heroin, it can be anything from a Mont Blanc to a Bic. The same for paper. There are beautiful, smooth, heavy papers, but great works have been written on ration cards, legal pads and the kind of cheap paper they sell in developing countries—grayish white, almost furry, with flecks of brown and black that probably came from lizards and bats that jumped into the paper makers' vats.
Skip the Paris Cafés And Get a Good Pen by Mark Helprin

I can't help but feel there's something to this, although I don't write by hand myself. Still, I started out writing by hand, and that may be what matters. Temple told me that older architects who'd learned to draw by hand before switching to CAD continued to make good drawings. It was the younger architects, she said, who sent her blueprints with two-foot wide passageways for cattle and the like. They had never learned to draw, and their CAD drawings were severely flawed.

I don't generally give a lot of credence to intuition, but in this case my intuition coincides with a century-old belief in the value of good handwriting (at least a century). Seeing as how our predecessors seem to have known more than a few things we've forgotten, the fact that they valued fluent and beautiful handwriting strikes me as one more reason not to simply assume that "keyboarding" is to writing what washing machines are to doing your laundry in the creek.

But of course I could be completely wrong. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.

In the meantime, I'm going to see what Lifehacker and the Wall Street have to say about it:

• Why You Learn More Effectively By Writing Than Typing by Melanie Pinola 22 JANUARY, 2011 8:00 AM
• A Defence of Writing Longhand
• How Handwriting Boosts the Brain By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS October 5, 2010 WSJ

A few years ago, I used Betty Dubay's Write Now to try to improve C's handwriting as well as my own. My printing improved quite a bit.



image from WSJ

'good writing matters'

in the Atlantic:

I have an MBA and was a turnaround corporate and real estate banker for over 23 years. My husband also has an MBA and is a senior-level manager in the financial services industry. What we've both seen, in the course of our careers, is that good writing matters. While the weak writers may get hired -- job interviews rarely require a writing sample -- once the candidates get the job, they don't tend to go far. Soon after they start work, they are asked to prepare a presentation or simply send an email. Then, the trouble begins.

Writing longer pieces -- presentations, for example -- only confirms the negative impression weak writers make in the workplace. While they might be very intelligent, their inability to clearly and concisely advocate their position on paper completely undermines their reputation. As a result, others become reluctant to have them on their team. Even individuals in verbally focused careers such as sales need to write pitches and send frequent follow-up correspondence.

When my husband and I were children in the public education system, we routinely wrote five to six paragraph essays across several subjects. We also learned proper handwriting, a skill that's far too underrated today. (One cannot use the computer to fill out a worksheet or critique a colleague's hard-copy document.) In addition, we rarely took multiple choice tests, instead tackling open-ended questions that required at least full-sentence answers. None of this is the case in many schools today. What's particularly frustrating to us is seeing these shortcomings in a school district like ours, one that has far fewer obstacles than a lower-income school like New Dorp.
Why I Took My Child Out of Public School

As long as process pedagogy rules the day, matters will not improve.

Of course, it could always be worse:

Pedagogical resistance is perhaps most apparent in the claim that writing cannot be taught, which stems from the argument forwarded by Kent that writing is a situated, interpretive, and indeterminate act. In Paralogic Rhetoric, Kent suggests that accepting a post-process perspective (at least in a paralogic sense) means rejecting process as the ultimate explanation for the writing act and instead recognizing the role of interpretation and indeterminacy in the writing act. Consequently, if we consider writing as an indeterminate and interpretive activity, he asserts, then "writing and reading -- conceived broadly as processes or bodies of knowledge -- cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach" (161).
Post-Process "Pedagogy": A Philosophical Exercise by Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch

I wonder how post-process people feel about comma splices.

onward and upward

The poll...asked human resource professionals to identify the greatest “basic skills” and “applied skills” gaps between workers age 31 and younger compared with workers age 50 and older.

• Basic skills – more than half (51 percent) of human resource managers indicated they find older workers to have stronger writing, grammar, and spelling skills in English;
• Applied skills – more than half (52 percent) of human resource managers said older workers exhibit stronger professionalism/work ethic.

SHRM-AARP Poll Shows Organizations are Concerned about Boomer Retirements and Skills Gaps | 4/9/2012

I've been talking to a Manhattan teacher who has a late-afternoon class in the room where I teach. When she learned that I teach freshman composition, she wanted to know whether I was seeing deterioration in students' writing. She expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all, and she wondered whether those kids are already showing up in colleges.

The reason she expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all is that Manhattan schools are required to use the Lucy Calkins program. The teacher said that everyone in her school hates the curriculum so much they spend every lunch hour venting, and she herself is desperate to find a job in the suburbs because friends have told her suburban schools "let you teach grammar." There's no escaping Calkins in the city. The principal of a neighboring school tried to get rid of the program and was told to reinstate it or find another position. So the program stayed.

In my experience, suburban schools don't teach grammar, either, although I haven't seen the level of micromanaging here that Manhattan teachers are subjected to. If a teacher in my district wants to teach grammar, and knows some grammar, it's not against the rules. But Manhattan teachers are monitored.  Administrators enter their rooms unannounced to inspect the bulletin boards and observe the mini-lessons, and if teachers are found teaching grammar, they're in trouble. Such is educational reform in the big city.

I shared my Geographical Theory of school quality with her: the closer a school's location is physically to Teachers College, the worse it is.

She said, "Well, imagine how bad things are for us."

and see:
Nightmare from Teachers College
Coach Class by Barbara Feinberg

why there are no child prodigies in literature, history, or philosophy

Abstract: Writing skills typically develop over a course of more than two decades as a child matures and learns the craft of composition through late adolescence and into early adulthood. The novice writer progresses from a stage of knowledge-telling to a stage of knowledge-transforming characteristic of adult writers. Professional writers advance further to an expert stage of knowledge-crafting in which representations of the author's planned content, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of the text are routinely manipulated in working memory. Knowledge-transforming, and especially knowledge-crafting, arguably occur only when sufficient executive attention is available to provide a high degree of cognitive control over the maintenance of multiple representations of the text as well as planning conceptual content, generating text, and reviewing content and text. Because executive attention is limited in capacity, such control depends on reducing the working memory demands of these writing processes through maturation and learning. It is suggested that students might best learn writing skills through cognitive apprenticeship training programs that emphasize deliberate practice.
Kellogg, R.T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective. Journal of writing research, 1(1), 1-26

"NewsDiffs"

re: "writing is rewriting" at the NY Times, Anonymous tells us that the story changed 9 times (!) and leaves a link to NewsDiffs.

Wow!

Never heard of NewsDiffs, and obviously it's something I need to have heard of.

I love ktm Commenters.

"writing is rewriting" at the New York Times

I'm not sure how journalism works these days.

Last Friday, shortly after the BLS released payroll data showing 163,000 jobs created in July, the Times posted its story. The American economy, it said, had "continued" its "long slog upward from the depths of the recession." That was the lede.

The next paragraph reported that the economy was "just barely treading water."

I found this exasperating. Where jobs are concerned, the economy has not "continued" a long slog "upward." Employment crashed in 2008 and never came back, and there's an end to it. The economy is slogging sideways.

But even more annoying in some ways, to me at least, the metaphors are mixed. Barely treading water is not compatible with continuing a long slog upward. One is up, the other is down, or down as much as up. A person who is just barely treading water is not gaining altitude, and I'm pretty sure I remember a time when anyone working for the New York Times would have known this without having to think about it.

A half hour or so later, the story changed. Someone had cleaned up the mixed metaphor, which was good, but the story itself had gotten worse.

The lede was the same--the economy was still slogging upward (not true for jobs!)--but now the 2nd paragraph opened with the observation that while the payroll survey was better than economists had expected, "no one is yet popping champagne corks."

Yet?

I saw one estimate showing that if the economy continued to produce 163,000 new jobs every month from now on it would take 8 years -- 'til 2020 -- to return to the employment level we had in 2007. Eight years to produce a jobs recovery for a 4-year 5-year slump (to date): nobody uses 'yet' in a context like this.

And nobody pops champagne corks at the end of an 8-year slog.

So Take 2 was even more exasperating, and then finally a third version of the story cropped up:

America added more jobs than expected last month, offering a pleasant surprise after many months of disappointing economic news. Even so, hiring was not strong enough to shrink the army of the unemployed in the slightest.
Hiring Picks Up in July, but Data Gives No Clear Signal
By CATHERINE RAMPELL | Published: August 3, 2012

This is the same story! We've gone from the economy slogging upward to economists not popping champagne corks to an army of the unemployed not having been shrunk in the slightest, and all of this in just a couple of hours.

How does this happen?

How do mixed metaphors and bad metaphors get through copy editors at the Times, and how does a story completely change meaning within just a few hours?

I'm wondering whether, these days, news organizations post stories as soon as they possibly can, knowing they can clean things up later.

Do newspapers deliberately post first drafts these days?

update 8/8/2012: Anonymous leaves word that the story changed 9 times.

(click on the images to enlarge)

Legal Writing Tips - Thurgood Marshall School of Law

I've only read one or two of these thus far; both were helpful.

• The What and How of Legal Writing
• Macro/Micro Organization...Using Marginalia
• Developing a Didactic Style...Using Internal Cueing
• Using Introductory "Set-Ups"
• Using Thesis Statements
• Using Writing Road Maps
• Using Headings and Subheadings
• Writing Good Paragraphs with Topic Sentences
• Using Transitions Effectively
• Dealing with Problems that Affect a Text's Readability--The Overuse (or the Inadvertent Use) of the Passive Voice
• Dealing with Problems of Sentence Length
• Dealing with "Left-Handed" Sentences
• Dealing with Faulty Parallelism
• Superordination/Subordination/Coordination
• The Functional Roles of Sentences
• A Quick Reference Guide to Make Page Numbers Line Up
• Some Helpful Texts for Law Students: A Book to Help Deal with Legalese and a Booklet to Help Deal with Law School Stress
• A Helpful New Text for Law Students: The New Edition of the AWLD Citation Manual is Released
• Some Helpful Texts for Law Students: Writing a Legal Memo and Pass the Bar!

a cohesive paragraph about cohesive paragraphs

I spend a lot of time thinking about cohesion in writing.

talking isn't writing, part 2

John McWhorter gives the timeline.

I think he may be wrong (or perhaps I mean misleading) about the simplicity of spoken English, however:

Thus spoken language is fundamental, while written language is an artifice. Not surprisingly, then, the earliest writing was based on the way people talk, and that meant short sentences with a direct logical throughline. Researchers have found that even educated people today speak in word packets of 7 to 10 words a pop.

Talking With Your Fingers

I'm not so sure about that "direct logic throughline" concept, I must say. As far as I can tell, the Longman Grammar corpus study found that conversational English is more grammatically complex than linguists have assumed, which may (or may not) mean that the logic of spoken English is less direct than the simple Subject-Verb-Object ordering we imagine is typical of speech. And it strikes me that transcripts of spoken English often show a certain meandering quality.

But I don't know.

[update 4/27/2012: As I think about it, I realize I have no idea whether transcripts do or do not show meandering...]

RELATED: The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing is Bill Robinson's Rhetorical and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses, which appeared in a 1995 edition Syntax in the Schools.

Robinson summarizes Kellogg Hunt's study comparing K-12 students to professional writers. Surprisingly, Hunt found that professional writers did not use more subordinate clauses than novice writers:

In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at almost the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

The major difference between professionals and students was that professionals wrote much longer sentences, 40% longer to be exact. And what made the sentences of professionals longer wasn't the presence of more clauses per sentence, but the presence of longer clauses.

It seems that professionals do a great deal of "noun modification."

Which, upon reflection, I'm thinking is right. At the moment, if I had to say what I do that a student writer does not do, I would go with: noun modification and plenty of it!

EXCEPT: I'm not so sure that's true of blog writing.

How much noun modification is going on in this post, for instance?

Not too much. Assuming I know what noun modification actually is, of course, which I may not.

I probably need a 1200-page corpus study to nail this down.

update 4/27/2012: Actually, there's a lot of noun modification going on in a subject as long as this one: "The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing..."

a difficult passage - & terrific advice

[Terri] LeClercq offers a very helpful technique to check for coherence in a multi-paragraph text: As you edit your rough draft, separate each topic sentence from your text and examine each one to make sure it is a strong introduction to the main idea of that paragraph. Then examine the coherence of the topic sentences as they relate to the overall thesis set-up by seeing whether the topic sentences form a coherent paragraph.
“Writing Good Paragraphs with Topic Sentences.” Legal Writing Tips 1.8 (2005). Print. Web. 14 March 2012.

My students had trouble with this passage today. They understood the first and second sentences (the 2 independent clauses linked by the colon), but they stumbled over the last one.

I'm not crazy about the last sentence myself: reading it, you have to keep too much information lit up in working memory until you finally get to the most important bit, which is at the very end. The end is where the most important bit usually should be, but still. There's an awful lot to hang on to until you get there.

I don't mean to sound harsh. That last sentence is perfectly serviceable, and impressive in its way. It's nicely linked to its partner sentence, the one that comes just before it, and it manages to pack a great deal of information into a small space, which is not easy. You'd have to be an experienced writer to write it.

Nevertheless, if it were my sentence, I would keep on writing it before I stopped. I would revise.

Teaching basic composition, I've come to realize how important it is for college students to be able to read prose I wouldn't advise any of them actually to write. A fair portion of academic and professional prose is not very good, and some of it is god-awful. But students have to read it.

Of course everyone knows this, but I hadn't thought about the implications until now. College students have to be able to read bad writing. Not just difficult writing, not just sophisticated writing, not just writing with a lot of big words. College students have to be able to read all those things, but they also have to be able to read difficult, sophisticated writing with a lot of big words that is bad.

So how do they acquire this skill?

Composition textbooks come stocked with dozens of heavily copy-edited essays written by journalists and originally published in popular books and magazines: these are works that have been professionally engineered to be maximally swift, cohesive, and clear. They make sense as models for writing, but they're useless for reading. They're so well written they practically read themselves.^*

Where are the composition texts featuring 100s of pages of dense and mystifying academic prose, I ask?

And how does one teach students to read badly-written prose?

Is it different from teaching students to read well-written prose?

I'm thinking it might be.

Last but not least, speaking of bad and good prose, I think LeClercq's advice is brilliant. It's an amazing fit for William Kerrigan's X-1-2-3s.

X-1-2-3

^* I don't remotely believe that well-written prose practically reads itself. Certain genres, however, are written to be effortlessly readable, and that's the writing that appears in college composition texts.