March 12th, 2010:

"Stay away from the stove!"--Good advice for children, but not for adults.

So far in this series on “Myths We Learn in Grade-School English,” we have explored the myth of the run-on sentence, which erroneously states that all long sentences, simply by virtue of being long, are run-on sentences. This myth not only scares people away from writing cohesive, flowing prose, but also conceals the true identity of run-on sentences. (That is, writing two complete sentences with no punctuation to combine them.) Most often, people learn this misinformation from grade-school English teachers, usually at the elementary or middle-school level, but sometimes in courses as advanced as the high-school level.

But are those teachers wrong to require their students to avoid long sentences? If they are teaching at the high-school level, yes. Students should learn at the high-school level to write complex, flowing sentences. Students who do not develop these compositional practices in high school will struggle, both emotionally and academically, in college-level courses. And, if teachers find that communicating the difference between effective and ineffective long sentences is beyond their teaching capabilities, they should get out of the teaching business.

Elementary-school and middle-school teachers, though, are right to warn their students against excessively long sentences, although I wish they would not call such long sentences run-on sentences, since that misused term causes a great deal of confusion later on. These rules become myths only when they persist into adulthood. For grade-school students (particularly, grades 1-5), these myths are actually great advice, and for middle-school students (especially grades 6-7), they are still applicable. But, eventually, we must outgrow even some of the good rules we follow in childhood.

At this point, some readers may raise questions that go something like this: “But isn’t good writing the same for all ages? Why can’t we just learn the rules of effective writing when we are young, and follow them into adulthood?” Although it seems I have made things more complex for you, dear reader, this is not a matter of complex pedagogy. In the spirit of good old-fashioned common sense, here is an analogy, one I will reference throughout this series of articles: kids and stoves.

When we are young, say four years old, our parents would tell us, time and again, “Don’t touch the stove. Never turn the dial on the stove. STAY AWAY FROM THE STOVE!”

And of course they would not want us using the stove; at that age, we were not ready to use it. Chances are, we’d end up getting burned—without so much as a bowl of Chef Boyardee to show for our second-degree burns. “Don’t use the stove”—sound advice, at the time.

Now, what if you were to encounter a thirty-three-year-old man who refused to cook on his stove? His defense?—“No, I can’t do that. My mother told me never to go near the stove, under any circumstances.” I expect that you would find this fellow rather curious, at best. (This is clearly not the guy you want to bring home to meet your parents.)

It’s much the same for adults who still follow the writing rules they learned in grade-school. Yes, some of those rules still hold (for example, “Begin sentences with capital letters, and spell words correctly”), just as some moral or ethical rules we learn in childhood still apply (for example, “Avoid hurting others and starting fights”). However, rules like “Never cross the street,” or, “Do not touch the stove dial” disappear completely in adulthood.

Many of the rules, even those that still hold, change with time and with circumstances. Recalling one example from the previous paragraph, I try to avoid hurting others and starting fights—which was and still is sound advice. But if I see a child being attacked by a man, or if I see some defenseless person being physically victimized, the moral thing for me to do is to start a fight. For a capable individual to turn the blind eye in such cases would be reprehensible. As we grow, the absolutes we learn in childhood become gray; specifically, they become situational.

The rules of writing are the same. Believe it or not, there is a time to use the sentence fragment, even if we are told in high-school English (or even college English) that it is always wrong. (It’s called a stylistic fragment, and it should be used appropriately and sparingly. I will touch on this technique in a later article.) The best artists mind the rules, but sometimes they knowingly break them. Knowingly there is the key word.

Why Don’t People Grow out of the Myths of Writing?

Common sense and necessity teach us to use the stove. Similarly, experience teaches us that there is a time to stand up and fight to protect others. So why don’t we grow out of the myths of grade-school English, in the same way we naturally grow out of other absolutes we learn as children?

Well, let’s consider how we learned about the stove. As we grew older, we were able to watch how our parents or older siblings operated the stove as they cooked our Chef Boyardee. We noticed how they put the dial on Medium. We noticed that they were careful never to touch the eye, especially when it glowed red. (And, if they did, some odd word beginning with sh- and ending in a harsh -t would often follow.) We noticed that they would stir the food—and sometimes they even put us in charge of the spoon. Our teachers—the very same ones who had once told us never to use the stove—were there, showing us how to use it. The point that we should use the stove with adequate knowledge, and with adequate height, sinks in with time and familiarity.

Why doesn’t writing work this way? Well, for some people, it does. If you had parents who were professional writers—say, journalists or English professors—you probably learned how to use the stove. They probably made a point of showing you some of the finer points of compositional cooking, only a few years after you had learned not to go near the stove. Also, such parents might expect their children to begin formal writing at an early age, and to continue doing so through young adulthood. Such students handle college writing assignments as easily as most people breathe. It is a natural part of their lives, one that seems self-evident to them.

But, if you were raised in a household like mine, you did not learn the rules of advanced writing because no one was there to show you. My parents—intelligent people, quite proficient at their own trades—were not so well versed in writing. They themselves had never progressed past rules like, “Don’t write long sentences.” When it came to writing, they were still at a grade-school level simply because they had never been exposed to the rules of advanced writing.

Where were their teachers? Don’t junior-high and high-school teachers help us progress? Well, that depends. You’d be amazed if you knew how many high-school teachers I have encountered who think that run-on sentences are simply long sentences. Because many English curricula deemphasize grammar knowledge and embrace a whole-writing approach (that is, “Just read and write a lot and eventually good writing will just feel right”), many of today’s educators themselves do not know the rules—and much less, how the rules change from childhood to adulthood.

The other issue is that we often do not have the same teacher in high school that we had in grade school. If, for example, I taught English in a private school from Grade 1 to Grade 12, I would know to tell my ninth graders something like this:

Do you guys remember what I taught you in third grade about not writing long sentences? Well, I told you that because at that age you were not ready to write that way. Now you are ready. With that said, here are a few ways to write long sentences. . . .

More often than not, though, students do not keep the same teacher from elementary school to high school. Chances are, that teacher from early childhood is no longer around when the student reaches high school. She is no longer around to explain, for example, why she taught that long sentences are bad, nor is she present in these young adults’ lives to encourage effective, flowing sentences. That being the case, it is for the high-school or college-level educator (1) to be aware of the myth and the reasons that early childhood educators teach it, and (2) to dethrone the myth from its place as a set-in-stone absolute. The issue, in most cases, is that too many high-school and college-level educators do not realize how many of their students arrive in the classroom laden with myths—myths that were taught to them by people they trusted (namely, teachers from childhood) who expressed those myths as absolute truths. I think that one of the first things that must happen in any high-school or college-level English class is for those myths to be explained, and then promptly busted. We have too many adults running away from their stoves, when they should be cooking ravioli for themselves. The buck stops here: high-school English.

And, if it does not stop there, I make sure it stops in my college-level classroom. Many great student writers have come to me with horrible writing, not because they didn’t know the rules of writing, but because they were burdened with too many rules. And, the grade-school teachers who taught them those rules are no longer around (and, quite frankly, could stand to take a college-level writing course themselves). It’s just the new college student, alone in a new educational environment, dragging around 6.3 tons of writing no-no’s that no longer apply. My first job as that student’s English instructor is to look her in the eye and say, “Hey, you need to drop all of that. Stop killing yourself.” Oftentimes, that alone is all the student needs to write effective prose. (And, yes, there are also those students who come to me not knowing enough rules, and, even worse, there are those who know all of the wrong rules and do not know the real rules. Differentiating between these groups of students is critical to teaching English and writing.)

Further Reading

If this set of articles is your first encounter with someone dethroning these myths of writing, rest assured that I am not the first to address these issues. In his masterful book on effective prose, Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, John R. Trimble includes a chapter entitled “Superstitions,” which addresses some of these myths I am discussing, and a few others. I suggest reading that chapter, and the entire book, if you are interested in freeing your writing and empowering your prose. In these articles, I have suggested books on grammar and punctuation. However, if you are looking for a book on effective, powerful writing, I can think of no better place to start than John Trimble.

Here is the link to the Amazon listing for Writing with Style:

• Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, by John R. Trimble
  

Next up is Myth # 2: Never begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions like and, but, or so.

If you want to see that myth busted, I suggest clicking the link below and reading on:

• Myths We Learn in Grade-School English: Never Begin Sentences with Coordinating Conjunctions

Christopher Altman, a community-college composition specialist, is passionate about bringing the art of effective writing to average, everyday Americans. He has published work in the field of medieval literature, and has authored a book on advertising language entitled, Telling the Truth to Deceive: How Advertisers Manipulate the English Language. Mr. Altman is an assistant professor of English at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York.