[Bkn-english-646-fall-2009] Here's mine!

[Christopher Banks]

Christopher Banks
English 646
The Practical Tutor:
Chapters 8, 9 and 13

I once made the foolish mistake of calling myself a proud grammarian  
to a fellow undergraduate student at the time in the presence of the  
brilliant rhetor Dr. Kevin Brown of Penn State University.  He pointed  
out that while grammar and a good command of sentence structure and  
spelling were important, the term grammarian focused squarely on only  
the aforementioned parts of writing and left out the process of  
generating, refining, and the organized positing of unique and  
expressive ideas.  I learned a good lesson that day and decided that I  
wanted to become a powerful and relevant rhetorician.  The idea that  
being good at grammar makes you a good writer is antiquated;  
therefore, focusing too much attention on a student’s use of grammar  
rather than on the content of the argument can and most likely will  
intimidate a student and retard the writing process.  This is  
particularly true, I find, for reticent writers.  Grammar is most  
effective when it is shown to students as a way to more clearly  
express thoughts rather than as an arbitrary standard  of writing  
“prowess” and “sophistication”.
  Punctuation errors are common among undergrad and graduate  
students.  Is there a unique difference in the way that a semicolon  
combines two related independent clauses when compared to the role of  
a coordinating conjunction? Yes there is.  Is it something that  
student writers should focus on while they generate ideas and  
formulate arguments.  Heck no.  Focusing on punctuation is only  
beneficial when the student understands how it will help them more  
clearly state their arguments.  I try my best not to pause a student  
while we are reading a paper together to tell them to place a comma  
here...and there...and there too IF the student is looking to improve  
the content of their paper with content revisions.
Since the beginning of time, or at least since my birth in 1978, I  
have had a love hate relationship with spelling.  (I’d love to hate  
iit, if I could only iit).  All jokes aside, I just do not spell as  
well as I would like.  Tutoring students in spelling is not my strong  
point.  I always advise that a student carry at least a pocket  
dictionary.  For those students who wish to increase their writing  
vocabulary, I recommend the almighty thesaurus.  Learning new words  
comes from the practical practice of using new words.  As for  
overcoming the spelling limitation, I’m a bit stumped on that sans  
arming one’s self with a dictionary and thesaurus.=
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists-1.liu.edu/pipermail/bkn-english-646-fall-2009/attachments/20091028/71521e8b/attachment.html