The end of the sentence?
June 14, 2008, 8:06 pm
Posted by Joseph A. Komonchak
Sunday’s Washington Post has an article on the decline among young people in the ability to write clear sentences and to construct coherent paragraphs. It gives both sides of the story and doesn’t indulge in apocalyptic warnings. But I have myself wondered what the effect of text–messaging, etc. will be. For myself I haven’t seen noticeable differences among my undergraduate students. I wonder if high schools still require classes in composition, and regular writing assignments. I’m grateful for the rather exigent education I got in that area.
Lengthy rant shortened to a single aphorism based on long experience: Blaming electronic communication for the demise of written language is like blaming Morse code, the telephone, TV, the movies, pulp fiction, comic books–in short, everything new that comes through the pipeline and offends the self-appointed Keepers of the Purity of Our Mother Tongue.
Those of a certain age will remember the furor over “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”
Spare me.
In any case, I think mourning the demise of the sentence is premature. The heart of journalistic writing is still the summary lead–a declarative sentence written in active voice with a hook telling who, what, when, where and why in 35 words or fewer. Students seem perfectly able to handle that. In fact, the confines of the formula actually sets many of them free.
“It’s like a little story in one sentence,” one observed recently.
Why, yes, Jimmy, yes it is!
Short side rant: I was struck by this sentence from the Post story:
Consequently, “the things that suffer most are spelling and punctuation. They put a comma, not a period, where there is a pause.”
For the 25 years or so I’ve been teaching, commas are the bugbear of many students, and the extract above clearly shows why this is so. Every semester, when it’s clear students need remedial comma instruction, I ask them how many were told by teachers that “you put a comma where there’s a pause.” Nearly ALL of them raise their hands.
I then kindly explain that the reason teachers tell students this is because they themselves know nothing about commas.
Commas set off little “side trips” in the flow of the sentence. They help separate grammatical structures within the sentence to help the brain absorb the information in complex sentences more easily. They were not invented to ape the “pauses” in spoken communication.
It’s really not that difficult to spend a few minutes showing students how commas set off relative clauses, introductory phrases, items in a series and the like. It is certainly less painful (for me, anyway) than watching 18 students lip read their sentences and trying to add commas “by ear.”
IMHO — WTF!
This discussion strikes me as a bit odd, even spooky — not because of the subject, which is of course important, but because if my eye strays to the right side of the screen I find Google ads for not one, but two, essay writing services. The beneficiaries appear to be those who have term paper deadlines, and no way to meet them other than paying for the (no doubt excellent) services provided by Tokenizer.org, and Eazypaper (sic) dot.com.
Or are Commonweal and Google indulging in post-modern irony?
That is very funny, Hicholas! Those ads are sitting there for me, too.
I will confess that, as an unemployed college student, I would solicit business from fellow students would pay me to type their papers (we used an odd mechanical contraption known as a “typewriter” in those days). As part of my “value-add”, I would take the occasion, as I typed, to smooth out some of the grammatical and punctuation unorthodoxies I encountered in the manuscript. I trust I didn’t violate the school’s principles about cheating in so doing, but it’s a regrettable part of my personality that I can’t come across a missing comma or misspelling without feeling an uncontrollable urge to correct it!
Sorry, Nicholas, didn’t mean to mangle your name, that was a typo. (Guess my proofing skills have declined since college days!)
Gee, all’s I see is an ad for the Marionist Brothers. I’m using Firefox. What browser are you using, Jim and “Hicholas”?
I use Internet Explorer. The ads I see are in a box entitled “Ads by Google”. Maybe that’s because I use Google to find dotcommonweal. Right now, there are five ads:
“Free Essay Paper Template”
“The book every Christian needs to read before the election …”
“Revelation 17 reveals identity of next pope. He will be the last pope …”
“Join Catholic Democrats. Faithful citizenship in action…”
“Catholic News and Features. Rochester, NY and around the world …”
All in all, an interesting smorgasbord. Or is it a panoply?
Marianists in the middle, essays available on the right sidebar…and I’m using Firefox.
I teach reading and writing at the elementary and middle school level, and find that students seem to have personal preferences. Some use commas, some colons and semi-colons, some dashes, and some make every fragmentary thought into a separate sentence. At this age, though, they are teachable.
It is my adult colleagues — some of them educators, some bureaucrats and others athletic coaches — who drive me crazy with poor punctuation. My particular peeves are overused commas and misused apostrophes, neither of which tend to show up in text messages.
Dorothy, when I receive notices from school that have glaring punctuation, spelling or grammatical errors, I redline them and send them back to the principal and school board president.
Certain People I Live With think this is mean, but we pay a load of taxes to educate our kid, and schools need to know parents are watching.
I do sent notes and e-mails when I think they’ve done a good job, too.