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Subject:Re: Why kids can't write well From:mkale -at- GPS -dot- COM Date:Mon, 15 Aug 1994 15:42:54 LCL
When I was in college the old-fashioned grammarian was replaced by a linguist as
the grammar instructor, and I was stuck paying to spend a semester listening to
my professor "teaching" that any native speaker of English uses it correctly and
any way you wrote or spoke it was correct. If they won't teach it to English
majors, who will they teach it to?
I also had an English class where an English Education major was assigned to do
a paper on Hera, wife of Zeus, and she refused to do it because she said that
Zeus was sexist and cheated on Hera. What's worse, the teacher let her get away
with it. I haven't got much confidence in what our teachers are being taught,
let alone what they're teaching their students.
Mindy
P.S. This reminds me of one time when I was doing contract writing for Microsoft
and my editor told me (when the manual was about 3/4 done) not to end a sentence
in a prepositional phrase. When I reminded her that the rule was not to end a
sentence in a preposition, she said "Oh, well maybe we'd better not end them in
prepositional phrases either, just to be sure."
