More fun with passive voice

Katie and I have just finished 5 chapters of exercises for Ed's European history textbook!

FIVE!

A great weight has lifted from our shoulders, soon to be replaced by Great Weight Number 2: finish another 5 chapters before Katie leaves in July.

I've just this moment revised the section on passive voice after our editor cut the line saying all good writers use it. We'll get pushback on that, she says.

(We handled the possibility of pushback by dropping the claim about good writers & doubling down on the assertion that passive voice is essential to cohesion.)

While I was Googling p.v., I found this:

All good writers use the passive voice. Orwell actually uses it while criticizing it: In bad prose, "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," he writes. He could have recast that sentence, but his focus was on the (alleged) stylistic sin; that was the logical subject, even if that required a passive verb.

The authors of usage guides shamelessly doctor the evidence on passive by offering examples that range from unlikely to fantastic: Strunk and White's is, "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." But there's more to vividness than active verbs. "Someone killed my parakeet" has an active verb. "My parakeet was hacked to bits with a machete" doesn't.

What we get wrong about passive voice by Jan Freeman

And, my favorites (which I'm sure I've posted before):

• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
• Passive aggression

Thesis statements are really, really, really hard & you're-not-special (& Facebook)

oh, man!

Finally finished my semester (grading still to do, but classes & exit exams are done...) and am immersed, with Katie B, in a now-nearly-desperate attempt to finish the exercises for Chapter 3 of Ed's European history textbook.

Subject: the thesis statement.

We've been trying to create a thesis-statement algorithm. And not just an algorithm, but a foolproof algorithm. I'm the guinea pig.

I thought we had it nailed -- finally! -- and......

We don't.

So: starting over.

....................

It's a good thing I went to school in the days before commencement speakers telling students they're not special and classroom teachers creating opportunities for students to fail against an exemplar of excellence (an actual comment I saw an actual teacher actually make on a Facebook thread concerning the you're-not-special commencement speaker, who is also a teacher.)

I would be in big trouble if my high school teachers had spent a lot of time creating opportunities for me to fail against exemplars of excellence.

That would be way too much failure for one person to surmount.

Take this afternoon. (Please.)

Ed and Katie and I were dealing with the failure of our algorithm (actually, the failure of my algorithm, which I'd come up with while dealing with the failure of the previous algorithm the 3 of us had hammered out just a couple of days ago).

Today's algorithm involved telling the student to start by picking a sentence in the textbook and turning it into a who-, which-, why-, or how- question.

Sounds simple, right?

So, the sentence we tested (on me) was:

It is difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI.

Which I instantly turned into the following question, while exclaiming 'This is easy!:

Which country was most responsible for WWI?

Wrong.

The question I was supposed to turn it into:

Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?

So then Ed and I got into a whole long argument about whether a college student would or would not make the same boneheaded mistake I had just made, since any fool (we're foolproofing, remember?) could plainly see that "which country was most responsible for WWI" was not the whole sentence.

The whole sentence was "Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?"

So there I was, the progenitor of an algorithm I myself could not use, having to argue, at length, that 18-year olds who are taking their first college-level history course are as dumb as I am.

Which I successfully did.

....................

Change of topic: I've become a Facebook person, heaven help me. Mostly because Debbie S. said I should: that's where the moms are, she said.

Facebook is pretty fun -- and it's different from a blog, somehow. Different in a good way.

I'm thinking of putting up a ktm Facebook page, but I want to keep it relatively separate from my Irvington life & have to figure out exactly how that works.

I think ktm readers would actually have to join the FB page (which is fine with me but possibly annoying for you --- ?)

Back to work.

And here's to you, Mrs. Malaprop

I love student malapropisms.

I love student logic misfires just as much.

From Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students Paperback by Anders Henriksson:

Judyism was the first monolithic religion. It had one big God named 'Yahoo'.

Noah's ark came to it's end near Mt. Arafat.

These pre-Socratics lived long before Plato and were not decisively influenced by his work.

Eventually Christian started the new religion with sayings like, 'The mice shall inherit the earth'. Later Christians fortunately abandoned this idea.

Romans persacuted Christians by lionizing them in public stadiums.

Without the discovery of the flying buttock it would have been an impossible job to build the Gothic cathedral.

(Regarding the Black Plague): "Death rates exceeded 100% in some towns."

This was a time of stunned growth. The plague also helped the emergence of English as the national language of England, France, and Italy.

Renaissance merchants were beautiful and almost lifelike. They enriched themselves by planting wool and selling it for clothing. They increased these profets by paying interest to people who borrowed money from them. This produced even more grits for the mills of change.

Hitler, who had become depressed for some reason, crawled under Berlin. Here he had his wife Evita put to sleep, and then shot himself in the bonker.

Stalin, Rosevelt, Churchill, and Truman were known as the 'big three'.

And this:

It is now the age of now. This concept grinds our critical, seething minds to a halt.

You can say that again.

Speaking of 'instructionism'...

...which I was doing a couple of hours ago, Chris's best friend from NYU was here today, in need of a brief session of instructionism himself.

Chris had been telling me his friend -- D. -- "can't do commas."

(I don't absolutely know Chris can do commas, by the way, though I think that, on the punctuation front, he's pretty much arrived. Will have to ask Ed, who's been advising Chris on history papers this year. Suffice it to say Chris knows enough about commas to be able to copy-edit D's papers.)

UPDATE 1/12/2014: Ed says Chris's punctuation is fine. It was basically fine by the time he graduated high school.

Anyway, I'd been mulling D's situation, and had decided I could probably fix all of D's comma problems in a couple of weeks, max.

The reason I was pretty sure all of D's comma problems could be remedied in a couple of weeks is that I've just about got sentence punctuation boiled down to the absolute, bare minimum of things you need to know in order to punctuate declarative sentences in college papers, and guess what?

There are only 8 basic sentence punctuation patterns.

That's not very many, eight.

To learn the 8 patterns, you need to know:

• Finite and nonfinite verbs
• Independent and dependent clauses
• Restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers (how to tell them apart)
• Coordinators
• Subordinators (aka dependent marker words)
• Adverbial conjunctions (which I call "fancy FANBOYS" in class)

If you are a native speaker (D. is), you already know these things nonconsciously (though I'm not sure that's true of the distinction between restrictive versus nonrestrictive modifiers), no matter how random your commas.

So I figured I could simply tell a smart kid like D. how to use commas in sentences, and he would know. His writing is good -- I've seen it -- it really is just the commas that are the problem.

So today Chris and D. did Hunter College's Exercise B, and I looked it over.

Turned out D. had never heard of "comma splices."

Or dependent clauses.

Never, in 13 years of public-school English class and 1 year of writing instruction at NYU (tuition $48k).

His only tactic for deploying commas was to listen for pauses as he wrote. Listening for pauses is a good idea as far as it goes, but, as D. pointed out, it's not going to fix comma splices. It's going to cause comma splices.

I suspect that listening for pauses may have caused both of the mistakes he was making:

• He was hearing the pause between sentences loud and clear, and was inserting naked commas^* between sentences he wanted to join. 
• He wasn't hearing the pause between opening dependent clauses and main clauses -- or, more likely, he was hearing the pause but was experiencing it, correctly, as softer than the pause between sentences. So he was failing to place commas after "introductory elements."

The instant I explained to D. that, generally speaking, in college prose you're not supposed to use  commas to join sentences, he got it. He correctly punctuated the last four sentences on the page without further ado. 

I'm pretty sure he instantly got introductory subordinate clauses as well. I told him that, with "introductory elements," you can just listen for the pause and use a comma or not, depending. 

I'm pretty sure that observation is true (once someone tells you that introductory elements are usually followed by commas). At least, it seems to be true with my students, but take it with a grain of salt. Somehow, for native speakers, hearing introductory elements appears to be natural even for students who have never in their lives placed a comma after an introductory dependent clause. So it seems to me. 

In any event, D. was having no trouble hearing the pause. He heard the non-pause that results when you move the dependent clause to the end of the sentence, too:

• When you get to the corner, turn right. [slight pause between clauses]
• Turn right when you get to the corner. [no pause between clauses]

We didn't have time to get into restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses, which is a challenge for my students.

D., by the way, is very smart. Had all 4s and 5s in multiple AP classes; wrote his friends' college admission essays. And didn't know what a comma splice is.

Someone should have just told him. It simply is not the case that smart people -- or good readers -- "pick up" punctuation by osmosis. We're not built that way. We're built to register the gist of a sentence, not the particulars.

Plus which …. there's nothing magical or even important about commas versus semicolons. Using semicolons instead of commas to join sentences is a convention; twenty years from now comma splices will probably be  correct. So just tell students what the convention is and move on.

But somehow, telling is not possible.

Not even at the college level, not even in a full year of college-level writing instruction.

^* "naked commas" meaning commas unaccompanied by a coordinator (and, but, or, so, nor, yet, for: the FANBOYS)

from 2008: Phil Holmes in Los Angeles

I have been meaning to get this story posted for years now. In fact, I've been meaning to track down Phil Holmes to ask whether he'd be willing to share his unpublished textbook with me.

Phil Holmes, one of the great English teachers of his generation, is standing before a class of high school seniors, trampling all over their self-esteem.

It is a Thursday in October, not long into the school year. Holmes gazes out at his class, his proper prep school face set off by white hair and rimless spectacles, and tells his students, all of them black kids from South Los Angeles, that the first grading period is ending "and most of you will be getting Fs."

The students stare, dead silent. For perhaps the first time today, he has their full attention.

"This is not a good start," Holmes continues, his tone stern but even. "But on the other hand, it's not unusual."

Class dismissed.

Holmes spent 35 years building his reputation at Harvard School for Boys and its successor, Harvard-Westlake, which attracted some of the best, the brightest and the richest students in Los Angeles. His teaching methods, his curriculum, his empathy, his intensity, his relentless demand for clear, well-ordered thought, changed kids' lives.

More than that, he shaped wave after wave of young teachers, many of them now working at some of the most influential educational institutions in America.

But when he and a colleague wrote a book describing their teaching method, publishers scoffed. Of course their method worked! Their classes were filled with bred-for-success overachievers! Who couldn't teach them?

So in 2002, at a time when most people his age were sliding toward retirement, Holmes accepted a teaching job at View Park Preparatory High School, at Slauson and Crenshaw boulevards.

[snip]

View Park Prep is no blackboard jungle. For many View Park parents, the choice was not between the charter and a traditional public school -- say, Crenshaw or Dorsey High -- but between the charter and a private school.

Still, the 15 miles that separate View Park from the rolling Coldwater Canyon campus of Harvard-Westlake might as well be 15,000.

More than 96% of the students at View Park are African American, and studies show that even middle-class black students tend to do worse in school, on average, than comparable students of other races. Moreover, roughly half of the students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

"At first, it was a shell shock," Holmes said, "because of three things. I wasn't prepared for the students to be so far behind in their reading development. . . . We were reading "The Odyssey," and within one or two days I knew we couldn't move through it like we did at Harvard-Westlake. Second, these students had no training in classroom discipline. At Harvard-Westlake, I could ask kids to start writing an essay in class, and I could go upstairs, get my mail and come back and they'd just be quietly working. If I walked out of class at View Park Prep, it would be total pandemonium.

[snip]

At the center of Holmes' teaching is a slender red-bound book titled "The Uses of Argument," first published in 1958 by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin, which sets out a steel-trap method for structuring an argument.

Creative writing, Holmes believes, is a frill for most high school students. How many, after all, will become poets or novelists? But virtually all will need to write some form of persuasive essay, in college and in their careers. That is Holmes' central focus.

By midyear, Holmes' students were showing progress.

"Can you state," Holmes asked his class one day in January, "what is the writing goal for the whole View Park Prep curriculum?"

Mister Searcy raised his hand.

"Writing a sustained case, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style," he said, repeating the mantra that Holmes has been chanting all year long.

By this time, everyone in Holmes' class knew the formula for a sustained case: Claim, clarification, evidence and warrant, cemented by "backtracking," a practice in which the writer re-reads and challenges his own work and answers any questions that arise.

The method works, as any number of View Park graduates can attest.

Skye Williams, now at Clark University in Atlanta, said Holmes' lessons "really helped us in college -- in history, biology, anything."

Teacher instills a love of words, but the lesson is about life
Los Angeles Times
By Mitchell Landsberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008

Susan S tells me that her high school uses some version of Toulmin's method, but it's been extremely confusing to deal with. I have yet to read Toulmin myself, sad to say, though I've read several  explanations of Toulmin posted at various college sites over the past two years.

I'm thinking Richard Nordquist's explanation at about.com is probably the place to start if you're curious. George Hillocks' book on teaching argument writing has a section on Toulmin, and Joseph M. Williams' The Craft of Argument (there are 2: a long version and a short one) may be an adaptation of Toulmin's method (not sure).

I find it horrifying that Holmes could not find a publisher for his textbook.

This passage from the article is very nice:

That Thursday in October began with students filing into the 12th-grade English composition classroom that Holmes shares with a younger View Park colleague. He was dressed in a suit, green dress shirt and tie, black loafers, his hair neatly trimmed, his bearing attentive.

Just before the bell, one of his students poked her head in, hoping to get excused from class. "We're taking a makeup test in AP history today," she said. "Do you mind?"

"Yes, I do mind," Holmes said. "We're doing something very important in here."

Holmes had nothing unusual planned. He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day's lessons. There are 26 students enrolled in this class, which was designed to give them the skills they would need to write college papers. All were dressed in some variation on View Park's uniform: khaki pants, a maroon sports shirt.

Holmes asked them to take out a homework assignment -- a critique -- that was due.

The assignment called for the class to analyze a student's college application essay. In the course of the next 90 minutes, Holmes led the class in dismantling not just the essay, but one student's critique of it, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word.

There's a hanging detail, he said at one point -- why is it a problem?

"It's too vague," a boy answered.

"What's vague about it?" Holmes demanded.

The boy couldn't answer at first, but Holmes was relentless, forcing him to think. In the end, they hammered out an answer.

At another point, a single word -- resourceful -- launched Holmes into a discussion of Odysseus, and how his resourcefulness ("He found a way to blind the giant") could be a source of inspiration for the students.

The entire class was like this, Holmes leading a discussion in which no point, no word was insignificant. He could be brutal, dismissing one student's argument as "mindless." And he could be generous, if guarded, with praise.

Outside after class, Khadijah McCaskill said the students don't mind the tough talk, or the tough grades. This is her second class with him.

"His toughness helps the class concentrate and makes it easier to learn," she said.

"He's a phenomenal teacher," she added. "He's phenomenal because everything he does connects together. And even if you don't know it then and there, it will . . . be connected to a larger thing later on."

Authoritative teacher ("his toughness helps the class concentrate"), coherent curriculum (everything he does connects together).

That's the magic.

Revolutionary writing instruction that is 'an old idea done better'

Here's another case of everything old is new again.  A New York City school finds that returning to fundamentals like explicit grammar instruction and formulaic writing has succeeded in turning around the dismal performance of high poverty students.  No iPads were required.

The problems at New Dorp High School were similar to many that afflict other lower-income public schools.

... students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams....

Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects....

... the students’ sentences were short and disjointed.

... These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did. “Yes, they could read simple sentences,” but works like the Gettysburg Address were beyond them—not because they were too lazy to look up words they didn’t know, but because “they were missing a crucial understanding of how language works.

This writing skills problem is widespread.

According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-­organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. ... for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.

There appears to be a massive failure in learning writing skills.  What type of writing instruction is used in most public schools?

... elementary-­school students ... today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction ...

... pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication....

For most of the 1990s, elementary- and middle-­school children kept journals in which they wrote personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in “peer editing,” without much attention to formal composition....

The explicit instruction of previous times has morphed into discovery learning, where students are encouraged to figure it out themselves, to "construct" their own learning.  Being creative has become more important than following formal rules.

... Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays....  About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

Low-income students have particularly suffered from the current approach.

The catch method works for some kids, to a point... Kids who come from poverty, who had weak early instruction, or who have learning difficulties, he explains, “can’t catch anywhere near what they need” to write an essay....

New Dorp High School tried something different.

Education schools don't spend much time on how to teach writing, so it's not surprising that New Dorp teachers were unaware of their own teaching failures.  They blamed the students' poor performance on poverty, low intelligence, or laziness.  The school tried 'innovative' methods, like small learning communities and special after-school programs.  Nothing worked, until they carefully explored the missing skills and took specific steps to address the gaps.  Deirdre DeAngelis, the school principal, learned of the acclaimed writing program used by principal Judith Hochman of the Windward School, a private school for learning disabled children.

The way Catholic schools used to teach, using explicit instruction and a writing "formula"

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones... It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”

... “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

... Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I” and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.

The successful results of the back-to-basics (revolutionary) writing program at New Dorp

... This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began.

... newfound ability to write solid, logically ordered paragraphs about what she’s learned, citing examples and using transitions between ideas.

Reading comprehension also improved.

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.”

More schools should try this '"old" way of instruction.
The Hochman Program being used at New Dorp High School is writing instruction that offers direct and precise guidance incorporated into a systemic process, along with explicit grammar instruction and a strong focus on sentence  composition.  This is very similar to the Kerrigan method of Writing to the Point, a personal favorite of mine.  I strongly believe this type of instruction would benefit most types of students, offering better preparation for college or career than the fluffy free-for-all type of writing instruction now popular in many public schools.  Perhaps this New Dorp success story will help fuel a change with more schools following in their footsteps.

(Cross-posted at Cost of College)

Related:

• Creating a Facebook page is high on list of high school writing lessons (Cost of College)
• ‘Writing, writing, writing’ – a skill lacking among too many college graduates (Cost of College)

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...

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..."

Latest installment on Kerrigan 'Writing to the Point' project - using CONCRETE words

Use words that are not abstract; that can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, felt, weighed, measured, lifted, dropped, moved, etc.
Examples:  child, chair, pencil are concrete; freedom, justice, bravery are not

Read more at Cost of College:  Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ –being CONCRETE