Avail yourself of her wisdom!
(Grammar Lady bumper sticker image from Cafepress)
Why do so many of us college professors encounter perfectly intelligent college freshmen — young people who articulately speak up in class about the books we’re studying — who have graduated from perfectly good high schools and yet don’t know how to write a good sentence?
What happened to the topic sentence, the paragraph, or the essay itself? What caused the essay we know and love to degenerate into a haphazard journalistic enterprise, where students vent their feelings about everything, including the kitchen sink, and where noun-verb agreement and clear antecedents have no place?
Why do my freshmen despise the comma, but adore the semi-colon? Why do so many of them use the word “feel” when they mean “think,” or assert that an author “believes” something when they mean he “argues” something? Why don’t my freshmen know the difference between “since” and “because”? Why do they produce such a cascade of pretentious words, when a little stream of ordinary nothing-words would do?
Here’s an example (plucked at random from an essay on Leonardo’s paragone on painting) that appeared in a paper recently submitted to me by an eager freshman:
“When referring to the art of sculpting Leonardo feels it is inferior to the art of painting and that sculpture unlike painting is a physical exertion.”
Professors (including those like me, who aren’t in English departments) reading student essays have a choice when confronting sentences like this. We can violate our professorial duty and utterly ignore their hideous form. Or we can write the words “wordy” or “fix this!” in the margins (the lazy man’s approach — in effect telling the student, “You’re on your own”). Or we can do the down and dirty work high school English teachers apparently balk at doing — revising the sentence into something that works, such as, “Leonardo argues that sculpture is inferior to painting because, unlike painting, it requires physical exertion.”
I’m not in the business of teaching English composition. On the other hand, I don’t believe there’s any way for me to separate the “form” of a student’s essay from its “content.” I’ve discovered that the medievalists had it right: Copy, copy again, and eventually you’ll get it right.
An approach that works with my students, although it’s absurdly labor intensive, is as follows: First, require students submit a paragraph outline, with topic sentences, before they begin the first draft. Second, require students to submit multiple drafts of each essay assignment, and incorporate all the grammatical and syntactical corrections the professor makes into each draft. In other words, copy the professor’s changes.
I turn myself into a copy editor for my students — revising every bit of bad punctuation, and changing every bad word choice, every bad sentence, and every bad paragraph into something that may not be perfect (the problem of the sow’s ear will be with us forever), but is better than what they’ve started with. I do viciously hard work, and they, in turn, spend several tedious hours dutifully deciphering my handwriting and copying each of my changes, no matter how picayune, into a subsequent draft.
This method — which I stole from teachers who applied it to my own juvenilia — works like a charm. Students write demonstrably better essays by the time they reach the third or fourth essay assignment.
Because I refuse to grade an essay until it’s been perfected, students end up writing four or five drafts of each essay assignment. I require them to keep a folder that contains all the drafts of every essay. By the end of the semester, the folders are as thick as a shag carpet, but the last essay ends up pretty darn good on the first try.
I recently asked my husband, who’s a writer, about what kind of high school English classes he had. He answered, “I took an English composition course in high school, taught by Mrs. Grayhair-with-a-bun-in-the-back, that was great. We diagrammed sentences and spent hours with the précis. Mrs. Grayhair would stand at the board, writing out our suggestions as we compressed paragraphs.” (He added, as an aside, that he’d loved Mrs. Grayhair-with-a-bun-in-the-back’s course.)
I, too, was compelled to diagram sentences and squeeze paragraphs during high school English courses. I can’t say that I loved these classes as much as my husband did, but they gave me the foundation in grammar and paragraph construction that served me very nicely once I arrived in college. For all my limitations in style, I was at least able to develop a fairly coherent and concise essay.
High-school English teachers, please consider the power in a Mrs. Grayhair-with-a-bun-in-the-back before you assign your next “reaction paper” or “response essay.” Slogging through essays that begin with the words, “I feel that,” and are then packed with sludge, is no fun at all.
