Re: Why kids can't write well

["Westra, Kayla L." <13718westr -at- KCPBLDG01 -dot- BV -dot- COM>]

I have to tell this joke here.  Actually, I heard it on _Designing Women_ a
couple of years back.

Young Southern debutante greets older Southern lady:
     "Good evening, maam.  Where you all from?"
Older Southern lady:
     "Well, I'm from where ladies don't end their sentences with
propositions."
Young Southern debutante:
     "Excuse me, maam.  Where you all from, bitch?"

Tasteless?  Perhaps.
Appropriate?  Definitely!
 ----------
From: TECHWR-L
To: Multiple recipients of list TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Why kids can't write well
Date: Monday, August 15, 1994 3:42PM

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

sentence in a preposition, she said "Oh, well maybe we'd better not end them
in
prepositional phrases either, just to be sure."