🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <23912@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>In article <1992Jul17.174706.3008@alf.uib.no> hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald) writes:
>
>>I can think of nothing so UNhelpful as
>>putting red marks all over an essay, together with abbreviations
>>referring to a book of rules.
>
>This is exactly what happened to my essays at school. I found it a
>very efficient way of teaching me the rules. The process is: explain
>rules, show how rules can be found in the book, give exercise
>involving use of rules, mark mistakes with refs to book, repeat until
>rules mastered. Why is this unhelpful?
>
You found it helpful because you were equipped by education and
inclined by temperament to learn this way. And I have taught myself
much of a foreign language from a book, but I already had
a firm grasp of grammar.

The method is usually unhelpful for several reasons. The first
is that the student's main motivation is to convey his thought,
and he can usually not tell from the notation of error why his
sentence fails to convey his thought (indeed, sometimes it does
not fail to convey it). The sentence sounds right to him, which
is why he wrote it that way in the first place.
Second: When he goes to the book, there is often not enough information
to make the problem intelligible; the examples are not like his
sentence; he has written the sentence his way for a reason not
addressed in the book, etc.
Third, even when there is enough info in the book, the student
may not have a firm enough grasp of the concepts and the terms
to understand what is said there and see how it applies to his own
sentence.

I will grant that it can be helpful, if one _explains_ the
problem with the sentence as written, to refer the student
to the book as well.

Note, however, that not all problems with writing are of the
simple grammatical sort covered in handbooks. Sentences may
be entirely correct, but the emphasis may fall on the wrong word, given
the intended meaning (e.g. in a contrast); or a logical connective
may be ambiguous, etc. These are problems related to specific
contexts and the train of thought in those contexts. Teachers
who put lots of refereces to handbooks in the margin often (not
always) tend to neglect to put other kinds of comments there.
So it would have been more precise to say it is unhelpful
_merely_ to put references to handbooks in the margin. But
for the reasons stated above, such references can also be unhelpful
even when there _are_ other comments. It depends a lot on the
particular student.
-- 
Roger Greenwald
Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)