Re: Definately and English teachers...

[Bill Burns <WBURNS -at- VAX -dot- MICRON -dot- COM>]

Karyl Severson writes:

>>Frankly, I spend a good portion of the terms when I teach technical
writing to engineers trying to undo the damage done by 12+ years of
poorly taught English.

Here, here.  Most of the high-school English teachers I had used grammar
texts and sentence-level analysis to teach writing.  These techniques might
enable a person to parse a construction, but they don't help writers learn
to develop a clear line of thought or to move from one idea to another.  During
my undergraduate and graduate studies, I learned a new perspective--an approach
to writing that considered content, clarity, and development first, and
issues of convention next (or sometimes even last).

As a composition and literature instructor, I found that most students coming
into the university today have an odd mixture of these two approaches.  I'm not
sure which is more harmful--the grammar/five-paragraph-essay approach or the
year-to-year shifting between instructors that use one approach and exclude the
other.

Don't get me wrong--I believe that issues of convention and careful grammatical
constrution are important.  However, if writers focus on those issues from the
very beginning instead of focusing on the development and logical progression
of ideas in their compositions, their careful sentence construction may amount
to nothing more than gilding on a trash can.

These are, of course, just my opinions.

Bill Burns                            *
Assm. Technical Writer/Editor         * LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination's most
Micron Technology, Inc.               * precious possessions.
Boise, ID                             *
WBURNS -at- VAX -dot- MICRON -dot- COM                 *                     Ambrose Bierce