Teaching Grammar
Reading Kathy Schenck's Words to the Wise blog today, I stumbled over her explanation of the difference between "because of" and "due to":
This bothered me. The first thing that occurred to me was that "are closed" is not a verb; it’s a verb ("are") followed by an adjective derived from a verb ("closed"). I could see what she was getting at, since you can also say "Schools will close because of snow" or "Schools have been closed because of snow" or "Schools around here always close because of snow"--any of those would be a clearer example, in fact--but calling "are closed" a verb makes it look like "because of" modifies the copula "to be," which appears in "The cancellation was due to rain" as well. The reason "due to rain" can follow the verb and still modify the noun "cancellation," of course, is that "to be" sets up a copulative structure (cancellation=due) that is structurally identical to "schools=closed"--which makes the snow closure example confusing. Schenck notes that "because of" is an adjectival phrase, but doesn't add that "due to" is an adverbial phrase that modifies either verbs or adjectives.
But then I started thinking: how would I explain that to freshmen? That sort of explanation requires that your audience know (and care about) the difference between adjectives and adverbs--and while some freshmen do know and care about parts of speech, most don't. The adverbial nature of "because" is also the reason you aren't supposed to say "the reason is because" (or, worse, "the reason is, is because") but "the reason is that": the adverbial "because" can't modify the noun "reason." But how do you get freshmen to understand this, and remember it? Is it enough to tell freshmen, for example, that "like" is adjectival and "as" is adverbial? Almost certainly not. We would need to put examples on the board, possibly drill it, spend half the class period on each grammatical problem--and end up "teaching writing" by teaching grammar--the current-traditional approach to writing instruction.
The "like/as" problem seems endemic to academic discourse, where the general assumption seems to be that "like" is colloquial and therefore should be avoided, resulting in monstrosities like "John, as did the rest of the group, went home." Judging from the academic books and articles I read, English professors and copyeditors either don't know that "like" is the correct adjectival form or avoid it like some kind of taboo "ain't" or "dunno." If English professors and copyeditors don't know these things, how can we teach them to freshmen?
Above all, how do we teach them so that the lesson will stick? How do we build the grammar and other structure lessons we teach into some kind of phenomenology--a felt orientation to language--that students can internalize and use without having to memorize vast quantities of static rules? Or is the quest for a phenomenological shortcut a red herring? Is there no other way to teach these things than current-traditional drilling?
Ironically, I went to write a comment on Kathy Schenck's blog, and found that I had to register with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (where her blog appears), and on the page where they asked me for my contact information, found this: "By providing this data, the Journal Interactive Network will better understand our audience so we can continue to provide award-winning content FREE of charge." Presumably they want me to provide that information, so they can better understand their audience? "By providing this data" is a dangling modifier. The copywriters for the newspaper's website don't know how to avoid dangling modifiers. But then dangling modifiers are everywhere--even more common, even in scholarly writing, than the avoidance of adjectival "like."
Because of modifies a verb.
Schools are closed because of snow.(a verb)
Due to modifies a noun.
The cancellation was due to rain.
(A noun)
This bothered me. The first thing that occurred to me was that "are closed" is not a verb; it’s a verb ("are") followed by an adjective derived from a verb ("closed"). I could see what she was getting at, since you can also say "Schools will close because of snow" or "Schools have been closed because of snow" or "Schools around here always close because of snow"--any of those would be a clearer example, in fact--but calling "are closed" a verb makes it look like "because of" modifies the copula "to be," which appears in "The cancellation was due to rain" as well. The reason "due to rain" can follow the verb and still modify the noun "cancellation," of course, is that "to be" sets up a copulative structure (cancellation=due) that is structurally identical to "schools=closed"--which makes the snow closure example confusing. Schenck notes that "because of" is an adjectival phrase, but doesn't add that "due to" is an adverbial phrase that modifies either verbs or adjectives.
But then I started thinking: how would I explain that to freshmen? That sort of explanation requires that your audience know (and care about) the difference between adjectives and adverbs--and while some freshmen do know and care about parts of speech, most don't. The adverbial nature of "because" is also the reason you aren't supposed to say "the reason is because" (or, worse, "the reason is, is because") but "the reason is that": the adverbial "because" can't modify the noun "reason." But how do you get freshmen to understand this, and remember it? Is it enough to tell freshmen, for example, that "like" is adjectival and "as" is adverbial? Almost certainly not. We would need to put examples on the board, possibly drill it, spend half the class period on each grammatical problem--and end up "teaching writing" by teaching grammar--the current-traditional approach to writing instruction.
The "like/as" problem seems endemic to academic discourse, where the general assumption seems to be that "like" is colloquial and therefore should be avoided, resulting in monstrosities like "John, as did the rest of the group, went home." Judging from the academic books and articles I read, English professors and copyeditors either don't know that "like" is the correct adjectival form or avoid it like some kind of taboo "ain't" or "dunno." If English professors and copyeditors don't know these things, how can we teach them to freshmen?
Above all, how do we teach them so that the lesson will stick? How do we build the grammar and other structure lessons we teach into some kind of phenomenology--a felt orientation to language--that students can internalize and use without having to memorize vast quantities of static rules? Or is the quest for a phenomenological shortcut a red herring? Is there no other way to teach these things than current-traditional drilling?
Ironically, I went to write a comment on Kathy Schenck's blog, and found that I had to register with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (where her blog appears), and on the page where they asked me for my contact information, found this: "By providing this data, the Journal Interactive Network will better understand our audience so we can continue to provide award-winning content FREE of charge." Presumably they want me to provide that information, so they can better understand their audience? "By providing this data" is a dangling modifier. The copywriters for the newspaper's website don't know how to avoid dangling modifiers. But then dangling modifiers are everywhere--even more common, even in scholarly writing, than the avoidance of adjectival "like."
posted by Doug Robinson at
3:58 PM
3 Comments:
You asked me what would Heidegger do? The obvious answer is to tie some sort of meaning to the grammatical lesson-- and I don't think "to reduce the likelihood of being misunderstood" is meaningful enough for most students. The closest to "meaningful" most students get is "earn points."
Last semester, I asked students to relegate the unnamed drama to phrases and dependent clauses while preserving the main clauses for only the named drama. That worked pretty well. The students saw grammar as a strategy to distinguish the unnamed drama from the named drama. In this sense, the assignment made grammar meaningful.
Unfortunately, I'm teaching 102 this semester, and the difference between the two dramas collapses for the most part in the commentaries and proposals.
Why not madlibs, through which seemingly random choices magically achieve meaning? Of course, students may not make the connection between the exercise's random choices and their own-- unfortunately also random-- grammatical choices in their writing.
How do you make grammatical decisions blatantly meaningful? Exemplifying potential, humorous miscommunications doesn't seem to work well enough.
Gray,
"Unfortunately, I'm teaching 102 this semester, and the difference between the two dramas collapses for the most part in the commentaries and proposals."
This is an ongoing conceptual problem for me. I originally thought that the difference collapsed completely in academic writing, because the writer and reader aren't named. But then I gradually began to realize that that was wrong, the writer and reader ARE named, sort of ("now the reader will protest," "this writer has found"); and I do think it's important to teach the difference between the person actually doing the writing (the unnamed writer) and the academic persona (named writer) s/he dons in writing an academic piece.
How this might work on the grammatical microlevel, though, I'm not quite sure. It's easy to see how the main clause would still carry the named drama--"the reader may protest," "one might argue," etc.--but I don't see how dependent clauses could carry the unnamed drama. But then I don't quite see it in more "popular" genres, either. Give me an example!
I wrote an example, and I still have a hard copy of it, but I no longer have a digital copy, so I can't merely copy and paste it here. In this example paper, the main clauses analyzed how popular lyrics to which we unconsciously sing along in fact work against social values (e.g., "hit me, baby, one more time"). However, the dependent clauses and phrases periodically referenced the effects of alcohol on familial relationships as if they were, by contrast with popular lyrics, commonplace and insignificant. The effect was that the named drama of "we should moderate our children's exposure to popular music" seemed ridiculous in light of some of the more serious infractions in the sentential margins. I'll show it to you this spring so you can see if for yourself.
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