Doing the reading that would be due Monday....
My third year of college I took an editing class. In that class we learned a style guide-- Words Into Type-- that was being used to edit a journal published in the department. It was a pretty cool class, especially since our final was editing a document submitted to the journal using that guide, where grading consisted of comparing our versions to what she actually did and then discussing it.
Ever since then, my immediate response to error is "Well, standard english doesn't really exist. Those damn comma rules change from style guide to style guide. So all those nitpicky things? Who really gives a crap anyway? You can do it completely right according to one guide, and then turn around and have it be completely wrong by another." So yeah, why bother?
My second year of teaching one of the grad students had complained long enough and hard enough that we were finally going to have to pick a handbook to use in the course. I looked through them, but ultimately somehow (whoops) never turned in the form to order one. My students' papers were no worse than the people whose had, and who had spent weeks on grammar in class.
I just don't think it's my job to teach people how to spell, or to teach them grammar (especially when "proper grammar" varies so wildly). I DO help students that are having obvious problems--subject/verb agreement, double negatives used often (and not to make a point), and so on, but I'm not going to sit there and lecture about it. Goodness knows we all got enough of that in grade school!
But error, or percieved error, is how people outside english departments judge writing (and even speaking). I had an ex (and yes, this is why he's an ex) who picked up a copy of my thesis and corrected the entire thing with red pen--entirely against the style guide I'd decided on by my committtee, then went and "helped" by making these changes on my computer when I wasn't home (I had a back up, but he still wasn't ever allowed back in my house). Instructors in other departments see error only--after all, the paper they assigned might not even allow for creativity so ideas might not be on their grading rubric! And lastly, the current boy and his dad harassed me so much any time "irregardless" or "hopefully" came out of my mouth that I've eliminated the first entirely and am working on the second.
So to recap:
1. Standard english is defined in a bunch of different ways, so there is no one right version, and I let students know about style guides instead of lecturing on proper grammar
2. People outside the university do judge on correctness though, and I have no idea how to respond to that. How do you deal with all the people out there that think grammar is all that matters because they were TAUGHT that grammar is a sign of a good writer and that it is all that matters?
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2 comments:
I'd like to see you revisit your recap in light of what Hartwell, Sommers, Williams, and others are saying.
To take Hartwell as example. He is not dismissing grammar, but rather drawing attention to its complexities - as something we engage with (what is grammar) and as something we understand within our curriculum (where does it belong).
Yeah i just started the readings (did about half) and planned on writing again when done since we've got a bit of extra time next week.
Without getting into detail, "Writing's Dying" seemed like an echo of two of three trains of thought I've heard often: that writing today is crap and has to be taught better (somehow), and that workshopping might help. But I've read a lot of recent criticism on how workshopping (and I know Macrorie gives it another name--seminars? Don't have the article with me here...) doesn't really help either, particularly with creative works. Macrorie clearly has the creative bit of research writing well developed on his own--I felt like I was reading a modern Platonic dialogue.
Williams seemed to be saying that we only spot error when actively looking for it, when we're psychologically prepared to have to "correct" something. What I'd like to write (which is probably going to change after I read the articles in TC, admittedly), is an extended question into why people who aren't teachers get online and do nothing but correct other people's grammar, usage, and spelling. If they're psychological need to be "better" than others is being fufilled by nitpicking endless rules, is that the same thing that teachers do? Are we just proving our own authority by knowing more rules? Do we lose authority if we admit that some of those rules don't matter?
So if error is simply a matter of dealing with psychological space, and that maybe we need to engage with it in new ways that subvert some of out authority in the classroom, what will that mean for our classrooms? Some students will undoubtedly think they're better than us (already happens), while others might ignore the class if they don't feel they're learning something concrete, but I think that some other students who honestly have been trapped into trying to write all the time with proper grammar and spelling might just be freed....
So yeah, there's the plan, I try to write more than once a week....
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