The Lost Art Of Writing

[Chevalier]

I still need to read the last few posts, but I wanted to say a couple of things already...

 

I've been in classes above the 30 mark most of the time. My biggest class, and the one that stayed together the longest time period, counted 38 people. Nobody inside this class had problems with the lectures, neither with teacher attention. We had the best teachers around, they never had a problem teaching their students. You'd never expect it, but it was the quietest class too.

 

There's only one major thing that needs to be taught besides really basic computer literacy .. that's RTFM (read the effing manual). Basic computer literacy isn't the problem, as it shouldn't consume much time anyway. The problem is, that every student is meant to learn stuff from all fields, no matter where their talents are. The amount of data exceeds the available time in school meanwhile. We can keep on trimming down the material, but we'll get a bunch of allround losers this way. There are basic skills everybody should have acquired (I think different arts are important), along with common sense, the ability to learn for him-/herself (i.e. to read and understand manuals) and the real basic knowledge. Everything beyond this point should be split up, in order to support the personal skills. Sure, there will be gifted classes able to approach a vast amount of data, but most students are almost overchallanged already. Most of the stuff students have to learn without interest, and without a single chance to use it later, will be lost anyway, that's what I'd call a waste of time.

 

I think we forgot the purpose of a school. I think most countries use the schools to make brought into line adults, that got their last bit of creativiy and motivation sucked out. Voilá ... a generation of mediocrity and moderateness. Is this what they had in mind when talking about equal opportunities?

[Mickey]

Re: " ... A copy of 'Strunk and White' ... "Can anyone please explain to me why that book is alleged to be good?

 

It encourages terseness. If you need more convincing, look at the user reviews on Amazon. The only negative remarks concern the publishers continuing to squeeze bucks out of a 50 year-old book.

[Mickey]

I still need to read the last few posts, but I wanted to say a couple of things already...

 

I've been in classes above the 30 mark most of the time. My biggest class, and the one that stayed together the longest time period, counted 38 people. Nobody inside this class had problems with the lectures, neither with teacher attention. We had the best teachers around, they never had a problem teaching their students. You'd never expect it, but it was the quietest class too.

 

There's only one major thing that needs to be taught besides really basic computer literacy .. that's RTFM (read the effing manual). Basic computer literacy isn't the problem, as it shouldn't consume much time anyway. The problem is, that every student is meant to learn stuff from all fields, no matter where their talents are. The amount of data exceeds the available time in school meanwhile. We can keep on trimming down the material, but we'll get a bunch of allround losers this way. There are basic skills everybody should have acquired (I think different arts are important), along with common sense, the ability to learn for him-/herself (i.e. to read and understand manuals) and the real basic knowledge. Everything beyond this point should be split up, in order to support the personal skills. Sure, there will be gifted classes able to approach a vast amount of data, but most students are almost overchallanged already. Most of the stuff students have to learn without interest, and without a single chance to use it later, will be lost anyway, that's what I'd call a waste of time.

 

I think we forgot the purpose of a school. I think most countries use the schools to make brought into line adults, that got their last bit of creativiy and motivation sucked out. Voilá ... a generation of mediocrity and moderateness. Is this what they had in mind when talking about equal opportunities?

 

Bravo!

[Mickey]

 

 

Secondly, as a researcher, I am not willing to accept information just because an elder read it 40+ years ago without any proof.

 

Just three little things, then no more

 

.1) You still haven't documented that you were ever a researcher. Your contribution to this discussion has so far done little to make the case. As for me, I'm a seeker of wisdom and truth. Note the cool, clear eyes.

 

2) No one required that you accept the findings of the report, but comity strongly suggests you accept that such a report existed and that the person recounting it is doing so accurately or at least as accurately as his decrepit memory permits.

 

3) Shill is still the correct word, like it or not.

[kitsunec4]

 

 

Secondly, as a researcher, I am not willing to accept information just because an elder read it 40+ years ago without any proof.

2) No one required that you accept the findings of the report, but comity strongly suggests you accept that such a report existed and that the person recounting it is doing so accurately or at least as accurately as his decrepit memory permits.

 

Hm...I believe that there wasn't doubt over that such a report existed, but simply wished for more details to find said report so as to read it for oneself.

[KateGladstone]

<br />

<br />Re: " ... A copy of 'Strunk and White' ... "Can anyone please explain to me why that book is alleged to be good?<br />

<br /><br />It encourages terseness. If you need more convincing, look at the user reviews on Amazon. The only negative remarks concern the publishers continuing to squeeze bucks out of a 50 year-old book.<br />

<br /><br /><br />

 

The book is far from terse — I found many passages verbose.

 

The Amazon review haven't changed my poor opinion of the book. Leaving aside S&W's glaring occasional instances of sheer carelessness — why, in fifty years, has no edition corrected the introduction's misspelling of "principal"? — may of S&W's dictates would, if actual UFO lower, produce odd and imperfect English.

 

Case in point: In my freshman year of high school, I was introduced to S&W by an instructor who asserted that this was a trusty guide for students and writers — that adhering to its usages would infallibly produce perfect English. On my next assignment, I was given a poor mark for having used the phrase "several persons" (S&W opposes the phrase "several people"). Citing the relevant entry in S&W, I asked the instructor why he had crossed out "persons" and substituted "people." He informed me that "several persons" was not English, that no one caable of speaking or writing the language could utter such a phrase, and that I should have followed his advice to let S&W guide my English. I asked for his copy, turned to the relevant page, and showed him the recommendation that I had followed (on his advice). He found this unacceptable, lowered my grade further for insubordinate contradiction (of his statement on the necessity of exactly following S&W on all points) and warned me to request a transfer to another teacher, because otherwise

[KateGladstone]

Further: the novelist who co-authored S&W (E. B. White) himself ignored its rules — rules which, the book claims, no good writer ignores. If White didn't let S&W dissuade him from (e.g.) using "which" in a restrictive relative clause (see the second paragraph of White's acclaimed STUART LITTLE), why should others follow a rule that White didn't follow?

[dasmart]

might i clarify a few points.

 

mickey did say... 40 with a GOOD TEACHER and 20 with a LESS teacher....

 

OBVIOUSLY.. 20 with aGOOD teacher is BETTER than 40 with a GOOD teacher, that is a no brainer lols,

 

i'm personally a youngin compared to him (seeing as how i've only been around 25 years let alone 40 lols) but i fully agree with him (minus the union theory stuff)

 

through out my high school there have been substitutes who full on SUCK... because teh qualifications is low right, BUT i've then seen a couple of these substitutes become TEACHERS at my high school because of how long they subbed their and the schools desperate need of a teacher.

 

i agree with the others in that today modern technology leads BIG TIME with how things go, but that only strengthens mickey's piont... about how there are a lot of crummy teachers now days. With every one on the fast track of 18 month degrees "get in get out" is the slogan of so many colleges, mostly business.... paralegal, info technologies and automotive, the growing industries bsaically... when was the LAST TIME you saw ANY teaching degree advertisement.... NONE.... at least here in hawaii. it is only LOGICAL to assume the teachers we have currently aren't ging to be replaced by qualified teachers, more like someone who took math for a logistics course... coudln't find a job... and is now a math teacher.

 

 

 

 

"Visually, the forms of cursive letters are more distinct from one another than are print letters: compare p b q with p b q, or t f k with t f k. Cursive letters are also more distinct from each other in terms of their respective beginning and end points and the movements used to write them. (Try writing the above letters in cursive and then in script.) The forms of cursive letters are very dependent upon the motions of writing, and the correct procedure for a given cursive letter can usually be seen from its resulting shape, as is emphatically not the case for the print letters.

 

Words written in cursive are clearly separated from each other, and the flow of cursive writing from one letter to the following, connected letter is quite similar to young children’s tendencies in drawing. The run-on words often written by children using print are much less common in the cursive writing of children of the same age. Also, mirror writing is rare in cursive writing, unlike in print writing, as the left-to-right order of letters is reinforced by joining letters and securely learning the movementsrequired to produce each letter. As a result, when the child uses handwriting to communicate with another person, she is more likely to have her writing considered legible and her meaning understood."

 

an excerpt from magulang.net, no idea who makes that site, i just googled script concepts, and just these 2 paragraphs make perfect logical sense without being too technical, it's just plain and obvious. I'm sure there are other reasons for still using script as well. One being that it has been proven many times that script/cursive IS HARDER to forge than print, though u can print signatures now days and there is so much more fraudprotection today, it still doesn't defeat that fact.

 

 

anyways i might have butted in where i wasn't suppose to, but just wanted to say i concur with mickey minus the union thing ( i do not have enough knowledge about that).

 

 

 

[unrelated portion, just for mickey's interest if he wants]

 

on a side note, mickey, i've been talking to a friend about this concept, idk if it's propaganda or true, but i've read articals of how the modern education system is designed to teach people to be followers and mindless. back in your day the way you made a living was go out there and learn a trade of some sort, become someones apprentice and work hands on i'm sure. n if you were going to be a teacher, u were taught by a teacher how to be a teacher probably, n didn't need all these side useless information to throw you off, like ICS, or religion, philosophy etc etc, they do broaden knowledge but they have no bearing on ones job (unless one plan to teach those of coures lols). Then with tech every one just googles what they need rather than look in a book, i've read that ressearching in books leads u to other topics of other chapters(i love it) and makes one an independent researcher, rather htan today we look to experts... have a question? ask someone or google it and be spoon fed an answer. any ways just some interesting things i've read about the modern day education system thot u'd like to indulge in since u mentioned curriculum

[Nonsensical]

I am somewhat confused as to why people assume that a teacher who is more qualified is naturally a better teacher.

 

I've had lectures from so called "associate professors", just because they're highly qualified (IN THE AREA OF RESEARCH), does not make them good teachers, in fact, most of them are terrible at teaching. I'm sure they known their area of expertise exceptionally well, but it's still not very inspiring, or helpful, given that I find it hard to pay attention, or understand what in the world they are going on about.

 

As for class sizes, well, on average one lecture will have 2 to 3 hundred students, so I'm not quite sure whether that's comparable to what is being discussed here....

[KateGladstone]

Re comparing letters written "in cursive and then in script" — in the USA, "script" is a synonym for "cursive."Further, your source ignores the needless similarities among many cursive letters: e.g. cursive J and cursive f are reversals of each other; cursive b and cursive l (unlike their print-style counterparts) are nearly identical.

[KateGladstone]

My own experience as a child, was that I produced more run-on words in cursive than in print-style writing (although I had been carefully informed of the theory that this, and other problems I was having with cursive, did not happen).

[Mickey]

I am somewhat confused as to why people assume that a teacher who is more qualified is naturally a better teacher.

 

I think you've hit on something important, here. Teaching is a talent, a gift, a skill, and a calling, quite independent of subject matter command. Indeed, it's quite possible that the best teacher is one who has just learned the matter under study and had trouble doing it. (A dear friend was a whiz teaching calculus, and he believed that this was directly attributable to the difficulty he had conquering the subject. He knew not only the all the correct answers, but most of the incorrect ones, as well.) I doubt the empathy required to be a great teacher can be taught, though it may be contagious.

 

As for class sizes, well, on average one lecture will have 2 to 3 hundred students, so I'm not quite sure whether that's comparable to what is being discussed here....

 

Not entirely comparable, but it does point out that a lot of teaching does not take place one on one, and that student / teacher ratios are, with regard to many teaching tasks, utterly irrelevant.

Edited July 20, 2011 by Mickey

[Mickey]

Further: the novelist who co-authored S&W (E. B. White) himself ignored its rules — rules which, the book claims, no good writer ignores. If White didn't let S&W dissuade him from (e.g.) using "which" in a restrictive relative clause (see the second paragraph of White's acclaimed STUART LITTLE), why should others follow a rule that White didn't follow?

 

Style manuals, such as S&W are not really intended to provide guidance to writers of fiction. As far as I can discover, fully sentient mice are fictional.

 

Seriously, much of what S&W would bar from non-fiction prose is the fabric from which fiction is built (variable clarity and unreliable narrative, unusual rhythm and scansion, euphony, kennings, paraphrasis, etc.). S&W is primarily a guide for producers of business correspondence, reportage, text books, and documentation, not for novelists and certainly not poets.

 

One of the most famous violation of S&W might be "to boldly go." In nonfiction, it is anathema, but in narrative fiction it is simply hyperbaton.

[Chevalier]

The split infinitive might be inappropriate sometimes, but I thought it's fine to use it rhetorically (in nonfictional works).

 

I like that somebody adressed the problem of beeing a teacher and having learned to teach. My old maths teacher was a genius, in math, but he was the worst teacher I had in my life. Everything mathematical was easy for him, too easy to understand the student's problems. It's possible to study pedagogics, but it's impossible to *become* a good teacher. Like I said earlier, the focus is too much on the subject to be taught.

[Mickey]

 

 

[unrelated portion, just for mickey's interest if he wants]

 

on a side note, mickey, i've been talking to a friend about this concept, idk if it's propaganda or true, but i've read articals of how the modern education system is designed to teach people to be followers and mindless.

 

This is nothing new. Schools have always been used for social canalization. (The Classical Greek curriculum certainly accommodated it) The important question is whether the indoctrination encourages the student to be a thoughtful, moral, responsible member of society or to blindly follow and espouse a particular political philosophy. When I was in secondary school, the civics / history teachers were already fairly leftist (being children of the FDR generation), but still fair minded enough not to insist that everyone walk in lock step. I'm not convinced this is still true, but I also see evidence that the present generation of HS students are starting to detect the au de stockyard in their classrooms and may be starting to push back.

 

Schools (and society itself) are at particular risk when any flavor of political thought, right or left, begins to dominate the educational system.

 

Regarding your question about research; Researching with the materials actually in hand does have merit, but I love hyperlinked text, particularly studying something new to me. For example, I started reading (U.S.) Constitutional law ten years ago, Being able to jump directly from the opinion I'm reading to the cases being cited makes the process much quicker and encourages me to read even deeper into the material than I might otherwise.

[KateGladstone]

Split infinitive "anathema" in nonfiction? Of those Oxford English Dictionary quotes that include a split infinitive, more than half are nonfiction. Further, the OED editorial staff approves split infinitives without restriction of genre: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/150458.stm

[beak]

Split infinitive "anathema" in nonfiction? Of those Oxford English Dictionary quotes that include a split infinitive, more than half are nonfiction. Further, the OED editorial staff approves split infinitives without restriction of genre: http://news.bbc.co.u...news/150458.stm

The politics of dictionaries.

 

And here we hit a major difference in outlook between certain dictionaries. The new work by Oxford is, as mentioned in the article, a redefinition of its entire (seems unlikely?) content 'from scratch' based on sampling how language has been used over recent years. That means that language used incorrectly becomes part of the data used to redefine. Problem. Unless you take the line that there is no right and wrong, in which case who needs a dictionary at all.

 

Seems to me that Oxford is going for the popularist and 'world English' gold medal in sales. This is why I, for one, prefer the Penguin English Dictionary.

 

As with many other uses of language, the split infinitive is a matter of style and of education. It isn't news to many who do not split the infinitive that the practice is not logically supported; I would hazard that those who don't split tend to be those who have had some Latin, or had enough of it to know the form of the infinitive in Latin.

 

A popularist approach is helping to maintain elitism! It withholds the relevant information from those who lack it.

Edited July 21, 2011 by beak

[Mickey]

Something seems to have been missed those who would pillory Strunk and White. They (or rather their book) make the point that most of their code (more of what you call guidelines than actual rules) may be violated if the violations lead to greater clarity and terseness.

[KateGladstone]

What makes a usage "incorrect"? Are you alleging that there is an intrinsic "correctness" in a particular sequence of sounds, so that — for instance — even when the last person to use a particular pronunciation or a particular grammatical form has died, that form still remains forevermore the only correct and admissible form — and its successor is forevermore incorrect, even if it is universal?Please alsonexplain why the impossibility of split infinitives in Latin would somehow make them wrong for English too. Would you advise residents of London or Boston to drive through their using a map of Rome?What will you don if Penguin someday follows the OED? Will you aver that all dictionaries — and all speakers of English, except you — are wrong?

[beak]

What makes a usage "incorrect"? Are you alleging that there is an intrinsic "correctness" in a particular sequence of sounds, so that — for instance — even when the last person to use a particular pronunciation or a particular grammatical form has died, that form still remains forevermore the only correct and admissible form — and its successor is forevermore incorrect, even if it is universal?Please alsonexplain why the impossibility of split infinitives in Latin would somehow make them wrong for English too. Would you advise residents of London or Boston to drive through their using a map of Rome?What will you don if Penguin someday follows the OED? Will you aver that all dictionaries — and all speakers of English, except you — are wrong?

Assuming that to be directed my way, I can't answer you because you have misread and / or misunderstood to such a enormous degree; almost at every turn, as far as I can see. A remarkable feat. Can I suggest you re-read?

Edited July 21, 2011 by beak