[lg policy] Teaching commas won't help

[Ann Anderson Evans]

Boy, do I agree.  I agree so much that I wrote an article on how to use
principles of linguistics (the dreaded "Grammar" among them) to students in
high school English classes, and have begun a blog
http://www.linguisticsintheclassroom.com which contains short exercises and
explanations to be sprinkled into high school classes, giving them at least
a rudimentary idea of how language is constructed, how meaning is made, and
what the role of language is in our lives.  As a professor teaching the
required freshman writing class, I see the results of our avoidance of
teaching commas and all the rest of grammar all the time.  My own students
love to learn such things.

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Dennis Baron <debaron at illinois.edu> wrote:

> There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>
> Teaching commas won't help
>
> A new rant in Salon<http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/05/10/death_to_high_school_english/index.html> by
> Kim Brooks complains, “My college students don't understand commas, far less
> how to write an essay,” and asks the perennial question, “Is it time to
> rethink how we teach?”
>
> While it’s always time to rethink how we teach, teaching commas won’t help.
>
> Teachers like Brooks commonly elevate the lowly comma to a position of
> singular importance. But documents in which a misplaced comma can mean life
> or death, or at least the difference between a straightforward contract and
> a legal nightmare of *Bleak House* proportions, are myths, just like the
> one that says Eskimo has twenty-three words for snow (twenty-eight?
> forty-five?). More to the point: understanding commas does not guarantee
> competent writing. . . .
>
> Read the rest of this exciting post on the Web of Language:
>
> http://j.mp/lliFNk
>  ____________________
> Dennis Baron
> Professor of English and Linguistics
> Department of English
> University of Illinois
> 608 S. Wright St.
> Urbana, IL 61801
>
> office: 217-244-0568
> fax: 217-333-4321
>
> http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron <http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron>
>
> read the Web of Language:
> http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage<http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage>
>
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