You never quite understand how and why

...until you try to teach.

My writing skills improve daily, even though I rarely get a chance to write. I see passive voice all around me now. I learned, just over the weekend, how to create a passive voice sentence without using a form of the verb "to be." (Can you do it?)

You see--I believe I mentioned this earlier--we forbid cadets in Freshman Comp to use any form of the verb "to be," as well as the words "it," "this," "thing," "that," "there," (I add "these"), and "has," "have," "had," and "having."

Crippling, huh? Yes...at first. I used a martial arts analogy to help them understand: When you teach a white belt to kick, he flails his arms to maintain balance. You let him kick for a while, then you remove his belt and tie his arms to his chest. He will stumble, teeter and fall until he learns to maintain his balance without using his arms. Then you untie his arms and teach him to use his arms intentionally and effectively.

My students get the physical demonstration, of course. I sometimes play the dancing chicken to keep their attention. I'm shameless.

I spent the weekend fighting the Colorado Crud and grading papers. Remember what I said about how my writing improves all the time? Well, funny thing about grading...the prof needs more than "an ear for" proper sentence structure, punctuation, parallelism, diction and pronoun usage. Early in the semester, I told my students where their papers needed work, saying, "Can't you hear the dischord of that sentence?"

They blinked at me. Some dozed off.

Thus, as I sat amid a pile of essays and journals yesterday, marking errors and in some cases, outright butchering of the English language, I researched grammar and punctuation rules as I went. I created a list, from which I plan to select the three most important points for each paper and use each for individual feedback. I'll add a personalized bit on what the student did well.

Butanyway. As I study grammatical and punctuation rules knowing I must explain them, my writing becomes cleaner and crisper. I also adhere to the "forbidden words" rule whenever possible. Again, the rule tightens my writing. I think I understand why, too. I added the following to my list of rules/explanations:

Why do we forbid you to use IT THIS THING THAT THERE AM IS ARE WAS WERE BE BEING BEEN HAS HAVE HAD HAVING?
- To reduce vagueness.
- To reduce unnecessary verbiage.
- To destroy your annoying oral habit of telling stories with continuous verbs.
- To remove your opportunities to use passive voice constructions.
- To replace static, boring, lifeless sentences with active and immediate sentences.
- To force you to use the stronger, more specific verbs and nouns you already know.

The average American uses multiple compound verbs in normal speech. We must like the sound of our own voices, because we don't believe in using one word when ten will do. We tell stories using continuous verbs throughout--requiring double or triple compound verbs, unless we add "started to" or a similar add-on, often yielding sentences with five- to six-word verb structures.

I never noticed this phenomenon until I graded student papers. Now I'm horrified.

Oh...I suppose you're wondering how to make a passive sentence structure without a form of the verb "to be." Simple. Use "got," as in "I got hit." :) (A few of my students replaced the forbidden "was" with "became," yielding sentences like "We became bombarded with coke cans."--poor grammar but still passive voice.)

Sigh.

Back to papers. Hope y'all have a great three-dayer.

This entry was posted by diana and filed under home, work, school.

10 comments

Comment from: Hinermad

Diana,

I’ve always believed the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. Even in medicine the educational process is “see a procedure, do a procedure, teach a procedure.” (Which makes it sound scary because you have students teaching procedures to students. I guess that’s why, after you graduate, you “practice” medicine.) Sounds like you’re having a blast learning.

I’m not getting what you mean by saying the average American uses multiple compound verbs in normal speech. Can you give me an example? (Or is that what I just did instead of writing “I don’t get…"?)

I’m not sure if Americans are so wordy because they like to hear themselves talk, or if they just don’t like silence. We’re pretty good with filling the quiet with noise.

Dave

09/04/06 @ 21:50

Comment from: diana

Yes…you just got it. :)

Gen Y’ers may have more problems with excessive verbiage than the older generation.

We probably use more small words when we speak for a couple of reasons. We can communicate with almost anyone that way. We learn the small words first, and many of us don’t develop our oral skills far past that point. We have a habit of telling stories using continuous verbs (I didn’t notice this until I read some student papers, and now I hear it in normal conversation).

And as Mark Twain said, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” We don’t learn to speak using short, declarative sentences with specific, active verbs and specific nouns. We tend to ramble around looking for the handful of words and the expression that will communicate an idea. Most of us won’t commit the necessary time and effort to finding the most succinct, powerful sentence to express our ideas.

Exceptions do exist, of course–but not many.

ESL students’ superior compositions skills baffled me–before I began teaching. Now I get it. The problem with teaching Americans how to write well lies in making them unlearn their plethora of oral habits. Many 18-year-olds can’t differentiate between proper (academic) English and slang. ESL students learn English from books and from in academic settings. They don’t have the “write the way you talk” silliness to overcome with English.

09/05/06 @ 16:52

Comment from: Hinermad

Diana,

A lot of what you say applies to design as well as writing. A friend sent me a list of programming quotations today: this is one of my favorites. (I hope the quote formatting holds.)

“You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

I need to hang this in my cubicle somewhere.

Dave

09/05/06 @ 21:11

Comment from:

Beautiful!

I’m using it. Thanks.

09/07/06 @ 19:16

Comment from: Hinermad

Diana,

Don’t thank me - I don’t write ‘em, I just pass ‘em along.

Dave

09/07/06 @ 22:05

Comment from: Pat

Hey Diana,

Well, I’m deployed again. This time however, my website is blocked. Yours is the only blog I can access from over here. Is this your personal webspace? Or is someone hosting the blog for you?

Well, I hope all is well in the Springs!

Pat

09/10/06 @ 03:38

Comment from:

Pat…

Yes to both questions, sorta. Where are you this time?

All is peachy in the Springs. We got snow on the Peak again over the weekend. It’s pretty thick this time. Also, a freak hailstorm hit yesterday and dropped an inch of quarter-inch hail. It’s going to be a booger of a winter, methinks.

Gimme the scoop if you can, mate.

09/11/06 @ 15:36

Comment from: Pat

I’m in Kuwait this time. Lots of fun and definitely nowhere as bad as Iraq. That was hell. There’s nobody shooting at us here! :-) I’m looking for a temporary home for my ramblings. Any ideas?

09/12/06 @ 02:29

Comment from:

Yeah. I sent you an email a day or two ago. Jeff said he’d be honored to hook you up. Name the space, babe. Check whatever email you type in when you post to my blog for details.

09/12/06 @ 21:04

Comment from: Pat

You may have been “spam” filtered on accident. Hit me at patrick DOT todd AT asab DOT centaf DOT af DOT mil

09/13/06 @ 05:25

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You never quite understand how and why

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