Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Enough about math, already! Let's look at writing instead...








1. textbooks
3. rote imitation


Sound familiar? 




Happy Elf Mom said...

Well. I have an autistic child who can tell you about nominative pronouns and how they necessitate one saying, "It is I" rather than "It is me" when at the door.

Who is it?

He still says "it's me." He still writes that way as well. "The teachers are they" who use incorrect grammar in everyday speaking as well; let's be real about it. :)

gasstationwithoutpumps said...

Having just had to read several college senior essays that suffered enormously from ungrammatical sentences and lack of flow, I have to say that the current educational strategy, whatever it is, is not working.

I recommend to my students that they read Huckin and Olsen's "Technical Writing and Professional Communication for Non-Native Speakers" as it has some of the best heuristics for creating sentence and paragraph flow that I have seen.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that any of the college seniors who need this instruction are capable of reading anything as long as a book chapter.

Laura said...

Yet another reason I've chosen to homeschool. We are using traditional English books from the 1950s *gasp* (Voyages in English). Terribly old-fashioned, I know, but I'm having to learn grammar right along with my DD.

Geniferous said...

In seventh grade, my English teacher taught me how to diagram sentences. This was one of the most useful things that I was ever taught, and I also enjoyed doing it. I cannot believe that this is no longer taught in most schools. I absolutely believe that diagramming sentences should be part of the English class curriculum. For someone like me, who does not learn holistically, it was incredibly helpful for me to learn the seven parts of speech and exactly how they fit together to form a standard English sentence.

Don Stewart said...

One correction. Francis Christensen was not into sentence combining. He would give a student a portion of a sentence, generally the main clause, then have them place their own free modifiers before, within, and/or after that main clause. That way the students themselves were "generating" the content. His essay "The Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence" explains all this.

I am Don Stewart, and I am the holder of Christensen's copyrights. Amazon has my reissues of his essays and methods. Also, I have put his lessons online as writing whatever.com. Worth a look.