🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 25 Mar 1992 19:32:24 CST Eric Crump said:
>Good point, Lili. During an informal roundtable discussion at 4Cs one
>woman, playing devil's advocate I think, told about a teacher who had
>berated her for misusing a semicolon. She presented the anecdote as
>an example of an effective motivating strategy. Yeah, I said, you
>were motivated to steer clear of semicolons. But what did you
>learn about writing other than to toe that teacher's line?
>
>Well, I'm sure the woman is now a very competent writer, but I
>sure hope she isn't following her role model's teaching methods.
>Kicking butt is effective--it teaches people to fear the boot.
>
I came in late on this discussion, so perhaps I'm missing the point, but
it seems to me that this anecdote is relevant to a discussion of how to
teach rather than what to teach.  That is, I'd agree that berating a
student for his or her errors is a lousy way to teach, perhaps not even
worth calling "teaching."  But surely it is possible to teach grammar
in a way that doesn't shame students.  I learned grammar without being
brow-beaten.


On Wed, 25 Mar 1992 21:14:29 CST, Robert Terrill said:
>I found that the question of the relative importance of grammar
>in a writing class was moot, in a sense, because grammar was
>tended to take care of itself.  Those students who wrote well
>wrote well; they produced (mostly) sensible sentences, well-structured
>paragraphs, and essays whose form was both clear and concise.  Those
>who wrote poorly wrote poorly.  I never once saw a paper with insightful
>ideas expressed illiteratively, nor one in which dumb ideas were expressed
>eloquently; I suspect I never shall, and I expect that no one else
>has ever seen one either.  It would seem, then, that if a person's
>ideas are scrambled they are scrambled, either on the page or in the
>head.

>One learns to write by writing, just as one learns to drive by driving
>and to swim by swimming.
>Folks don't get better at swimming by driving.

I have a question and an observation: How is it that some students came
to write well--was it through innate talent, training, or some combination
of those things?  It seems to me that unless you think it was innate, the
observation says nothing about what role (if any) grammar plays in writing
skill.  My observation is that I think your analogy is weak, since it
suggests that grammar is an activity wholly separate from writing.  Also,
while it makes sense to me that practice in writing is essential to the
development of writing skills, it makes no sense to me that it is sufficient
for that development (as a rule--there may be exceptional cases).  So, if we
get beyond the maxim, the question is what sorts of instruction, corrrection,
and advice will best help students write better.  I don't think that this is
a profound insight, but it seemed to be lost in the haze in a couple of
cases.