Noting the lamentable truth that this is the time of year when millions of high school and even college students accept their diplomas despite being unable reliably to write a correct sentence, Stanley Fish offers up his own unique recipe for teaching freshman composition:

Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

Add to your description of grad students teaching writing seminars, since for the most part they are also:

c) given no pedagogical training in teaching good writing as a discernible, formal skill; and

d) fulfilling their "apprenticeship" for institutiotns that have whole-heartedly embraced the writing-as-content model.

As one of those former grad studenmt adjuncts who was woefully ill-equipped to teach writing effectively, I wish I had some brilliant solution to offer.

Grr. "institutions"

Solution one: proofread with greater care.

I thought Fish's idea was an interesting one (and I never thought I'd say that about anything written by Stanley Fish!)...it's arguably hard to understand the structure of English if English is the only language you know, for the same reason that the fish never thinks about the water. But wouldn't learning a foreign language (or two) have the same benefit, in addition to the other benefits of learning the language(s)?

Well, my wife emerged from the American High School system quite literally not knowing a noun from an adverb, and she still doesn't. She nevertheless writes public speeches for (British) government ministers, and has published a novel. This flows from her ability to recognise and use appropriate language wihout conscious analysis, so whatever they were teaching her must have been reasonably useful.

Don't forget that faculty often model poor writing ourselves. Four years ago, Educational Researcher inadvertently advertised the desperate need to teach future academics how to write. (My personal modern favorites on prose are Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace and Becker's Writing for Social Scientists.)

I was privileged to be in a college class led by a teacher who knew how to teach writing. It was Composition 101, for people who had mastered the basics (noun, verb, etc.), but needed help on specific issues (dependent vs. independent clauses), or organization, or just punching the essays up so someone would WANT to read them.

This was at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, OH. Community colleges often are derided by those who feel that the education offered is sub-standard in important ways. In general, I feel that the quality of the education depends more on what the student is willing to put into the effort to learn.

David: Learning a second language does help understanding one's own better... but it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: learning a second language is much more difficult when one doesn't know basic grammar concepts (how do you explain to someone who doesn't know any grammar that Italian uses six different articles -il, lo, la, i, gli, le-, depending on the number and gender of the words to which the article referes, whereas Englis only uses "the", to someone who doesn't know what "article" "number" or "gender" mean?)

Riccardo...but there are many kids who learn how to speak multiple langauges properly without formal grammatical instruction. But on the other hand, maybe this is possible only at a young age..

Parts of speech are of no use. I wonder if any writer of note ever bothered about them. One should promote the idea that people who read can be better writers.

Agree completely with your article. What Fish described as content is what my lecturers described as "process" style teaching, as opposed to the traditional "product"(form) style, of which grammar translation and understanding the basic rules underlying the language was extremely important.

I would like to think I have an unique perspective on all this, as I had gone through the process style in my formative years, and never once had to deal with what a verb or a noun was. When my essays came back to me, I could never quite understand what the rare red markings meant, things like 'Aux', 'part', or 'T' when these referred to auxilliaries, participle form, and tense respectively.

The teachers who taught me knew what those meant, because they went through the product style which required them to learn those rules, but we as their students did not, and they were forbidden to teach us parts of speech! And they expected us to make the proper corrections...

I was lucky, because I was one of the few students who managed to intuitively grasp the essence and structure of the language without learning the formal rules. Perhaps it was because I read a lot on my own. When presented with an incorrect sentence, I would know that the sentence was wrong, but not WHY it was wrong. But people like me are, as I later found, quite rare.

Fast forward several years, after my mandatory service in the military. I was in university taking chemistry and english as my major subjects. I was pretty excited to learn about the structure of the english language, and suddenly it all made sense to me. Why some sentences were wrong, why others were right, parts of speech, and so on. I learnt about syntax, morphology, some semantics, pragmatics etc, as a refreshing change from d-orbitals and statistical thermodynamics.

After graduation, I went to my country's teaching college, where I would learn pedagogy. Chemistry(science) was my main teaching subject(I achieved honours in it after all), and English Langauge was my second teaching subject.

In my class of would-be english teachers for the secondary(O levels), there were only 5 out of 25 trainess who knew what a verb phrase was. This was because my generation were taught english through the process/content method. We were put through a crash course on syntax(where I served as our tutor's foil and somewhat assistant), and then sent off to teach with only the barest minimum of knowledge about syntax and even less confidence.

I found that of the english language graduates from my university, more than half were immediately snapped up by the education business and sent to teach at the O levels and higher, and it still wasn't enough, which was why humanities graduates are being force-fed syntax as preparation to teach english at the O level standard.

And the new teachers at the primary level are even worse off, with practically all of them coming into contact with syntax for the first time in the teaching college. Some of them, I heard, are still unsure about the marking scheme for essays. And these are the folks teaching the basics, laying the foundation...

As the older generation of teachers, those like Fish who learnt english through the product style, who understood the difference between a modal and a primary auxiliary, retire over the next twenty years, the next generation of students(all over the world) is left with my generation of half-baked english language teachers to teach them the language and its rules. I'm lucky I only have to worry about A level chemistry nowadays...

The point is that to teach the language effectively, the teacher must know its rules and be able to explain to students why a particular sentence is wrong(or right). For example, Chris' wife can write novels, but can she evaluate an essay put in front of her, explaining exactly why certain sentences are improperly constructed? More importantly, not all students have the ability to intuitively grasp the rules of english without formal instruction through reading, and these are the ones who require somebody who knows the rules to explain it all.

For the record, english is actually my second language. My first is chinese, and I'm from Singapore.

TWG

I like the rewrite of your site.

I'd just like to point out that being a good writer oneself most emphatically does not make one a good teacher of writing.

I was one of those, for whatever set of reasons, who came through the US public school system able to diagram a sentence, distinguish all of the primary form classes, and I ended up a writing teacher for a few years--one of the countless adjuncts that staff English departments nationwide. Unlike most, I was not an erstwhile literature practitioner. Rather, my degree was in applied linguistics & writing pedagogy. I'm all for getting the writing specialists into the classrooms & the frustrated Terry Eagleton wannabes out.

Sad fact is, though: if you haven't learned your nouns from your adjectives (not to mention your phrasal verbs from your verbal phrases) by the time you hit postsecondary schooling, I've little evidence to suggest it'll ever happen, by Fish's proposed method or any other.

I think that I must have caught the last wave of 'here is how you diagram a sentence' instruction in the CA public schools in the late-70's/early-80's.

And while many/most English Comp. instructors at the UofA and Pima Community College here in Tucson seem to fit the 'teaching content' mold, the online distance learning version of it at Pima is stripped of all ideology. Those 2 teachers are both fairly young (early 30's), and have more of a handle on the nitty-gritty details than most english profs. at the UofA seem to. But of course they're both ABD and on adjunct contracts.