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#143513 06/03/05 02:36 AM
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tsuwm Offline OP
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a friend, knowing that my daughter was graduating from HS today, sent along a link to an op ed piece in the NY Times. as always with these things, it requires registration to read it; but this is just too good to miss -- so here it is in its entirety. fair use says I!

Devoid of Content

By STANLEY FISH
Published: May 31, 2005

WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather than another?

Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in English.

Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently.

In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them, must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination, relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to signal.

In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done.

AT this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me, "Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?" I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to teach them.

In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day: "We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.

Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.

In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her "opinion" about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some other student will turn and say, "No, that's content." When that happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company



#143514 06/03/05 07:28 AM
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Please take pity on me, and give me a sentence using only
"coffee, should, book, garbage quickly". How he got 20 different sentences back, all coherent and all different, is utterly beyond me.


#143515 06/03/05 09:29 AM
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utterly beyond me

Maybe you should take the class.


#143516 06/03/05 09:54 AM
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In reply to:

utterly beyond me

Maybe you should take the class.


Give up my job and my home, move 15000 kilometres, and somehow pay for a university course, having first qualified for entry to both the country and the university? Forgive me if I think my request a more reasonable approach. I will continue to hope that someone may yet be more helpful than you were.



#143517 06/03/05 01:45 PM
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My gosh! That's among the best essays I ever read!

k



#143518 06/03/05 01:55 PM
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Quickly, Garbage should book Coffee. I hear they're very good.


I'm with you, insel; perhaps a bit of hyperbolic verbiage?


formerly known as etaoin...
#143519 06/03/05 02:00 PM
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Thanks, tsuwm! I don't read the NYT near as much as I should.

Here are some letters to the editor:

What You Write, How You Write It



Published: June 3, 2005

To the Editor:

In "Devoid of Content" (Op-Ed, May 31), Stanley Fish says that American students need to become explicitly aware of the functions of form in writing. I have to disagree, though, with his main point - that form trumps content.

Sentence form is not as free from content as Mr. Fish would have us believe. He says he gave students the words "coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly" and asked them to write sentences using those words. But had the words been "function, limit, derivative, slope, secant, rate, average and ratio," I doubt he would have seen the same result.

The words in my collection, when used mathematically, are highly constrained in the ways they can be put together sensibly. One must know what the words mean in order to find ways to relate them.

While my example could be seen as a trivial riposte to Mr. Fish's claim, I would hope he sees it as arguing that when actually writing to communicate, form and content are equally important.

Patrick W. Thompson
Nashville, May 31, 2005
The writer is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University.



To the Editor:

As a writing teacher whose method is to have students engage in personally and socially meaningful topics, and to write about these topics in full, drafted and revised essays, I am as concerned as anyone about students' difficulties with writing effective, clear prose. But I have had no luck with the formal teaching of form.

Students are able and willing to attend to issues of readability and surface error only when they have written something that is of enough value to make the arduous task of making it readable worth the effort.

Emily Isaacs
Montclair, N.J., May 31, 2005
The writer is director of first-year writing, Montclair State University.



To the Editor:

Stanley Fish's assignment - asking students to create their own language - is brilliant! At last an educator who gets students to think about language.

I did not figure out English grammar until I taught myself Swedish during a year abroad in college. I see the same "aha!" moments in my students who learn a second or third language.

Sometimes a student needs to step outside her own conventions to see that she was trapped by them in the first place. And when she understands the logic behind the rules and conventions, she is no longer trapped, but freed.

Karla Spletzer
Boulder, Colo., May 31, 2005



To the Editor:

As a father of three teachers and a longtime advocate of teaching sentence diagramming as a prerequisite to proper writing, a subject I was taught in sixth grade in 1922, I was pleased to read that someone understands the problem that faces our country.

When will our educators wake up?

Francis L. Fahy
Trumbull, Conn., May 31, 2005



To the Editor:

Stanley Fish points out that we have been brainwashed into believing that content is paramount to form. Furthermore, we have been given technological crutches through computer spelling checkers and grammar programs to support this mistaken belief.

I am routinely appalled by writing that is not edited for correct syntax beyond these computerized quick fixes. The result is something that at best sounds unprofessional and at worst is incoherent.

Drew Lebkuecher
Washington, May 31, 2005



To the Editor:

If we want students to learn the form of language, we should require that they take two years or more of ancient Greek or Latin.

Scores of students to whom I've taught ancient Greek have told me they not only learned the form of English for the first time through studying Greek, but also learned to read English with a more critical and discerning eye. Latin can achieve the same end.

When one learns Greek and Latin, form comes first, but then, following form, comes content, sublime and concise.

Michael Simpson
Dallas, May 31, 2005



To the Editor:

Employers looking for copy editors should look for college grads who took Stanley Fish's composition class and hire them quickly.

His students will be able to untangle other people's sentences - preferably sentences that are written in their own made-up languages but maybe in English as well. And his students won't ask any uncomfortable questions because they will not care what the language means or what it may do to other people.

We learn what we are taught. What Stanley Fish teaches isn't writing.

Deborah Brandt
Madison, Wis., May 31, 2005
The writer is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin.



To the Editor:

Yes, writing clean English sentences is a learned craft. And like any other craft, it requires practice and guidance. But what student, confronted with contemporary popular artists of all stripes, wants to be a craftsperson?

As long as artistry is perceived as celebrity, and not the embodiment of art, the acquisition of skills is less necessary than an ability to generate clever ideas.

Yet artistry is more likely to arise from craft than craft is to arise from artistry. As I've told my students, "You can't deconstruct before you learn how to construct."

Mark Rosenblatt
Brooklyn, May 31, 2005






#143520 06/03/05 02:13 PM
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God Bless her (so to speak).

On the first day of class in 10th grade English, she told us all, "I'm not concerned with what you say. I'm concerned with how you say it."

This is what kids ought to be learning in English class - how English works. It's not the only thing they ought to learn. And I don't think every class should be taught this way. But it's great that one time in their lives these students have an English teacher who makes them think about how the language works.

k


#143521 06/03/05 03:30 PM
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I've been a voracious reader for most of my life. My English skills were pretty good, probably because of the reading and the family I was born into. In the 8th grade I sort of started to get the idea of adjectives and adverbs in English, but 9th grade was the breakthrough for me: I took Latin.

My vocabulary improved some, of course, due to the many Latin-influenced words in English. But my understanding of how language works was truly formed by learning the "rules" of Latin grammar. Tenses, number agreement, modifiers, prepositions, pronouns - whew, did I learn to know what those were!

I have to agree with the author of the article in the NYT: if you can't understand the sentence, what matters the content? Both are important, having something worth saying and saying in a way that others can comprehend. Good luck to him teaching pupils to understand how language works!




What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin, author (1929- )
#143522 06/03/05 04:20 PM
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> Please take pity on me, and give me a sentence using only
"coffee, should, book, garbage quickly". How he got 20 different sentences back, all coherent and all different, is utterly beyond me.

OK, to answer your question Vern, he nowhere uses the word 'only' in relation to that task. Sample answers might include other words to structure the relationships of the sentence.

A good article, but I've also got major reservations. I see no evidence of a practical outlook: he seems to think the meaning of these relationships in language is inherent, where they are demonstrably not - they are a product of repeated patterns of usage.

In that and many other respects, usage shapes, modifies and recreates language. All those who espouse the benefits of learning ancient languages need to be clear on what grounds they think this valuable. Is it simply through carrying out structural analysis, or (as so often creeps in) a belief that this is somehow getting back to the pure roots of Englsih before it got polluted by (ugh!) people actually using it to convey content?!

I have other considerable reservations too, but will leave it there for now.


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