Sunday, October 07, 2007
(12:16 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Book Recommendation, with Paranoid Reflections on Education
If I had to pick one book to recommend to every English-speaking person who needs to write, it would be Understanding English Grammar, by Martha Kolln and Robert Funk. They have the novel approach of basing their description on the English language rather than imposing categories designed to describe Latin. It is my belief that working through this book would go a long way toward resolving the problems with punctuation and usage that plague the writing of, say, 90% of the educated population, because it allows the reader to understand how things actually fit together and how punctuation serves to (partially) map out those connections.The fact that I am posting this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I just got through commenting on some writing assignments. But in all seriousness, I am considering recommending this book to every entry-level class I teach, for all of eternity -- and I am this close to saying that the "freshman comp" sequence should be structured around something like it in the first semester, followed by rhetoric in the second semester. Sadly (or actually: thankfully), I have abandoned the field of English and so will never have any say over such matters.
Paranoid Reflections: It really seems to me that after 16 years of education, one should be able to write competently and clearly. Hell, 12 years seems like an adequate amount of time to achieve such a basic goal. My mom often says that I should be more empathetic with people who have a hard time, thinking of my own difficulties in gym class and imagining if I felt that way about every other class -- but I daresay that if a primary goal of the curiculum were for me to be a competent baseball player, I could've managed such a feat after 12 years of concentrated labor. The fact that the school system is not consistently achieving the goal of producing competent writers indicates not so much that "our nation's schools are in crisis" as that their real goals lie elsewhere. For example, the goal of elementary school isn't primarily to teach the rudiments of the "three R's," but rather to teach children to sit still for an extended period of time.
