English Prime

[Herbert Stahlke]

I'm surprised it was a journalism professor.  In my experience, journalism
professors tend to be among the worst of prescriptivists, or, to use
Arnold's word, proscriptivists.

However, the usage that irked Duane is found widely in spoken English,
including spoken academic English.  But, and, although, etc. all function as
conjunctive adverbs and are followed by comma intonation.  They also show up
in informal writing, newspaper articles, advertising, etc.  They're not
recognized in handbooks yet as conjunctive adverbs, but I wonder long it'll
be before some of the newer handbooks stop proscribing them.

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University



On Fri, 23 May 2003 14:29:18 -0400 Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU>
writes:
> I guess we'll all be writing like the "new" journalists, who say
> "Important
> events happening at the White House...."  How ridiculous.  Who's
> teaching
> these teachers?

I had a running battle with a professor of journalism who also wrote
opinion pieces and self-syndicated them to small newspapers, I think for
free. I used to red pencil his columns and return them to him, a service
he did not particularly appreciate.

It was not uncommon to find a dozen errors in an 800 word piece. I don't
mean school-marmish prescriptive stuff, but blatant errors -- failure of
agreement, arbitrary capitalization, tense, and quotation marks used like
sugar roses on a wedding cake.

One thing that particularly irked me was his insistence on beginning a
sentence with a conjunction (which I allowed; as I said, I wasn't nit
picking), but then following the conjunction with a comma. I don't even
like to see a single opening word followed by a comma, let alone a
conjunction.

I am happy to say that after I had helped him out with a few corrected
columns, his usage improved considerably. I have no doubt he had his TA
start checking them. But he never let go of the comma following a
conjunction.

So to answer your question, PhDs taching writing at college level cannot
write. That is certainly part of the problem.

D