teaching writing
Freeing the Imagination
Tweet Young students are always auditing themselves, judging their thoughts “right” and “wrong,” “acceptable” and “not acceptable.” This exercise frees their imaginations to indulge in a bit of wild creativity, which can bleed, in a milder form, into their essays. A story needs characters, a location, and a conflict. Create three columns representing three characters. […]
THE SCARY SCIENCE: LINGUISTICS!!!!!!!!
Tweet DON’T END A SENTENCE WITH A PREPOSITION!!!!! NEVER USE “I” IN AN ESSAY!!!!!!!! DON’T SPLIT INFINITIVES!!!! These old guidelines are obviously not the way we either speak or write, so what use are they? Steven Pinker calls them Old Wives’ Tales. Yet we have to have some kind of rules for our language, don’t […]
Principles of Good Writing:
Tweet This post is not specifically linguistic, but an aid to teaching writing. This short list remains open, maybe you, or I, will think of another principle: Principles of Good Writing: 1. Read the assignment, and adhere to the given format. 2. Tell the reader what you’re going to tell her, tell it to her, […]
Challenging Languages’ Universality
Tweet One of the controversial claims that Noam Chomsky presented in his original research was that language is universal and innate. In David Crystal’s A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics” (4th ed. 1990), this concept is defined this way: “…universals provide a theory of the human language faculty — those properties of language which […]
Simple sentence exercise
Tweet Make two kinds of basic English sentences. This exercise is deceptively simple. There are inevitably many stumbles, but students gain a bit of mastery. There is much more to be said about the form of English sentences, but the exercise should be kept simple. Elaboration on sentence forms comes another day. Subject-Verb-Object is the […]