freshman comp

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

I was speaking of her judgment as a teacher of composition.

Obviously, people have different responses to syntactic complexity. But in the case at hand, no one seems to have indicated that they found the passage more than slightly problematical, even without the clarifying preceding sentences. A number of people have written me offline to say that they had to read the passage several times to find anything even prescriptively questionable about it.

So why  tell a student not to do something that could have rhetorical virtues (as I think it does). There is more than one goal in writing effectively--absolute linguistic clarity is an unambiguous virtue only in legal writing (and then not always attainable).

What I do object to is arbitrary adherence to prscriptivist rules (and I know that Arnold does, too).
------Original Message------
From: Arnold Zwicky
Sender: ADS-L
To: ADS-L
ReplyTo: ADS-L
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] freshman comp
Sent: Dec 9, 2010 12:17 PM

On Dec 9, 2010, at 7:19 AM, Ron Butters wrote:

> As a former Director of Freshman English at Duke, I'd have suggested that Barbara rethink her judgment.

her judgment as a composition teacher?  or her judgment about the sentence (in its context)?

the latter isn't something to rethink; it's a raw response to the sentence in context.  it's not uncommon for referent-finding examples to evoke different responses for different people (i've posted several times on Language Log on such cases), with some people seeing no issue, while others find the examples grammatical but inept.  the fact is that a large number of factors play a role in referent-finding, and different people seem to weight them differently.

the question for any particular example is how extensive the processing problem is for readers in general.  and that's something you can't gauge from your own responses alone, although you can develop a feel for certain classes of cases and how likely they are to be problematic for a significant number of readers.  if they are, then a composition teacher should flag them as problematic.

arnold

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