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Henry_Cowell
Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 3352
Location: Berkeley
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 Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2007 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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nomad2, you need to stop wandering and learn more about publishing. Please start by defining the noun proof. Why do you think it's called "proofreading"?
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2007 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Please don't tell me I should prepare students for formal academic research papers by teaching them that it's ok to write "I wish I would of discovered this principle earlier." |
You are confusing at least two quite different things here, and I don't believe you are doing it on purpose to irritate me either.
"Would of" is either a spelling mistake or a mistake in parsing. It is wrong, period.
On the other hand "I wish I would have', if not appropriate, is not so because it is ungrammatical, it is either the wrong register. or the wrong social dialect (I would incline to the former). It is perfectly correct grammatically, it is simply being used in the wrong place.
As 'I wish' is not a common construction in academic writing anyway, it is doubtful if it will come up in either the correct or incorrect form. What you must not do is inform students phrases they will see all the time are 'ungrammatical'. Inform them they are the wrong register, the wrong geographical or social dialect, or simply that you don't like them hard luck, but you are making problems for everybody when you use slaphappy terminology. Both you and your students will often come across non-grammatical phrasesI coffee like (violation of SVO order)
I wish had known the answer (violation of null-subject parameter)
I student in Saudi Arabia (missing copula)
I am English lecturer in most prestigious university in Pakistan (missing articles)
If you tell your students phrases they come across all the time in texts by native speakers are non-grammatical, how can you expect them to believe you when you tell them the above phrases are ungrammatical. |
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globalnomad2
Joined: 23 Jul 2005
Posts: 562
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| Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 4:35 am Post subject: |
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| What slaphappy terminology? Show me the slaphappy terminology in my last post, which is the one you're responding to. |
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 11:08 am Post subject: |
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| I'm not responding to the last post. The 'slaphappy' terminology I am referring to is 'ungrammatical' or 'wrong' or 'barely grammatical'. |
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Henry_Cowell
Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 3352
Location: Berkeley
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| Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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Stephen, I think this is a lost cause. He understands only what he wants to understand.   |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 3:48 am Post subject: |
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| Don't we all. |
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globalnomad2
Joined: 23 Jul 2005
Posts: 562
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| Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 6:00 am Post subject: |
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| I understand completely, but I don't respond well to condescension. Stephen, you should take a look at Henry's last post: he's spoofing you, I think, not me. |
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Henry_Cowell
Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 3352
Location: Berkeley
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| Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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| globalnomad2 wrote: |
| Stephen, you should take a look at Henry's last post: he's spoofing you, I think, not me. |
Yet again you are wrong. |
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merlin
Joined: 10 May 2004
Posts: 582
Location: Somewhere between Camelot and NeverNeverLand
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 5:03 am Post subject: |
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| I understand completely, but I don't respond well to condescension. |
I see ... you can start a discussion using strong words like "semi-literate" but when the criticism comes the other way you suddenly have a fragile ego, is that it?
If you don't like condecension, then don't dish it out to others so liberally.
Fact: Spelling is VERY low down on the list of language learner needs in our modern age. It is only a very rare breed of English teachers that place so much importance on it. CEOs, Lawyers, Doctors, Presidents - take any occupation and I'll show you people in it making 6-figure incomes who can't spell worth a darn and the rest making the usual mistakes. Yet the global economy moves on despite bad spelling.
Even if I were to hire a teacher, spelling would again be very low on the list compared to other teaching skills and knowledge. I've known some very good teachers who have dictionaries with them all the time to look up words. They know they don't know how to spell and work around it. It's very common with people with dyslexia.
If you just happened to have your 5 minutes of fame as the county spelling bee champion and this fact destroys you, then so be it. |
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globalnomad2
Joined: 23 Jul 2005
Posts: 562
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:09 am Post subject: |
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| Henry, if I worked as a writer on a magazine, and studied print journalism, I suppose I know what proofreading is. Yes, I also know what a proof is. Merlin, this thread had a narrow focus. Nowhere does it suggest that spelling is our main priority in teaching. |
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DNK
Joined: 22 Jan 2007
Posts: 236
Location: the South
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:18 am Post subject: |
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merlin:
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The only thing worse than poor spelling in the university graduate is a supposedly educated person who throws out logical fallacies left and right. Did they teach you to think at university or only to spell correctly? |
Not really. Maybe it was my university, but the rhetoric course wasn't nearly enough schooling for me, and I'd be willing to bet for most of the other students as well. One of my biggest complaints about the US school system is the lack of logic and critical thinking skills that are directly taught. Most students take school so lightly that I doubt they're indirectly taught by the time they graduate, either. It explains a lot, imo.
Not to mention I've been harangued by a masters student for trying to use excessive logic in a debate. He had a personal recommendation from the dean, too. For him, arguments were supposed to be emotional, and my idea that approaching an argument from a cool-headed, intellectual perspective was anathema to proper discussion. Apparently all discussion should be in simplistic terms and, in effect, be a rant. I think he went to Berkeley, for that matter. The future looks fairly dim over here. Logic isn't en vogue anymore.
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| the basic rule of English spelling which says that a double consonant is nearly always preceded by a short vowel, but we all have the odd blind spot.. |
Probably on account of all the odd rules that we barely ever need to know, can readily be shortcut via technology, and that have a decent amount of exemptions that require the phrase "nearly always" before stating them. The real question here is why anyone would need to know these rules to begin with, especially if natives get by just fine without knowing them at any level.
I can't remember the last time I hand-wrote something that anyone other than a friend read. Why should I need to learn a rather obscure spelling rule when any work important enough to require some level of perfection is going to have such mistakes quickly pointed out and corrected by the technology that would be required for such a work? commutting... Firefox caught it, and suggested committing, commuting, and commutating. Not hard to pick the right one. Maybe back in the time of typewriters this was important, but Word remembers the rules I only need to know when using Word for me. It's a nice little arrangement, to be honest. I'm more concerned with the fact that I don't know what commutating means.
The real problem is that so many forum users are using IE, but that's another discussion right there...  |
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furiousmilksheikali
Joined: 31 Jul 2006
Posts: 1660
Location: In a coffee shop, splitting a 30,000 yen tab with Sekiguchi.
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:27 am Post subject: |
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| DNK wrote: |
| The real problem is that so many forum users are using IE, but that's another discussion right there... |
That's not a big problem. There are plenty of Firefox users who enjoy pointing out "You're spelling mistakes" and say, "their wood be less mistakes (sic) if people use Firefox." |
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DNK
Joined: 22 Jan 2007
Posts: 236
Location: the South
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 7:17 am Post subject: |
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| furiousmilksheikali wrote: |
| That's not a big problem. There are plenty of Firefox users who enjoy pointing out "You're spelling mistakes" and say, "their wood be less mistakes (sic) if people use Firefox." |
I wouldn't consider the you're/your mistake to be as insignificant as the original complaint of "commutting", and would agree for the most part with your assessment that word processors aren't going to read your mind and output a perfect sentence onto the screen (someday, though...) |
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Ahchoo
Joined: 22 Mar 2007
Posts: 606
Location: Earth
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 7:57 am Post subject: |
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| As a teacher you need to be aware that the whiteboard does NOT come equipped with spellcheck, and you're going to look a right dik when some Chinese kid catches you out because you''ve become so addicted to spellcheck you don't know how to spell. |
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:48 am Post subject: |
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| The real question here is why anyone would need to know these rules to begin with, especially if natives get by just fine without knowing them at any level. |
You don't get by without knowing the rules of phonics at any level. They are drilled into you from Grade 1, unless you were lucky enough to work them out for yourself.
'Beginning' has double 'n' to let you know the vowel before is short, not long as in 'shining', just as we have the doubled consonant in 'winner' to distinguish it from 'whiner'.
Technology has not improved spelling; in fact quite the opposite. There are more spelling mistakes slipping through now than before, because you still need to make the right choice when you misspell the word, and if you have no idea how to spell it in the first place you will make the wrong choice (there is actually a technical term for the phenomenon; it is called the 'Cupertino effect' from the number of times the word 'Cupertino' turns up in EU documents because it has been chosen instead of the correct word from the list offered by the word spell checker.
Spell checks weed out typos, not the most serious kind of spelling mistake which involves using the spelling of a completely different but similar sounding word.
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| Even if I were to hire a teacher, spelling would again be very low on the list compared to other teaching skills and knowledge. |
Apply to where I am now with spelling mistakes on the CV and it goes straight into the bin; where I worked before you would need a some pretty good mitigating factors to avoid the reject pile.
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| CEOs, Lawyers, Doctors, Presidents - take any occupation and I'll show you people in it making 6-figure incomes who can't spell worth a darn and the rest making the usual mistakes. |
I would rather not get my prescriptions written by a dyslexic doctor, just as I would rather not have them read by a dyslexic pharmacist, and lawyers who can't spell probably have very efficient legal secretaries to check things for them, but to say a disability is not important because you can find people who have succeeded in spite of it, is not very convincing. And for an English teacher spelling is part of his core competence. |
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