Commaphobia and Chisu

A cursory search of the net seems to indicate we lack a word in English for fear of punctuation. Perhaps that is because the former lingua franca of European scholarship, Latin, did just fine without punctuation, thank you. But times have changed. So, first, I propose adding "commaphobia" to the list of official phobias (after all there are words for fears of buttons and navels!). Then, there are a number of other lesser, yet recognizable, problematic relationships with punctuation, such as "semicolophobia", a common disgust for the semicolon found among Finnish high school English teachers, and "exclamania" which describes, rather than a fear, that effusive friend who cannot resist compulsive exclamation marks in every email, starting with "Hi!"

Now I will come out of the closest, I too have suffered from commaphobia. And, admit it, so do you. Are you fond of the slogan: "when in doubt, leave it [the comma] out" or does the semicolon make you deeply uneasy? Go ahead, self diagnose. After acceptance comes healing.


But, on second thought, lets blame English itself for problems with punctuation since it really does have a split personality. As Naomi Baron convincingly explains here, there have always been two approaches to punctuation in English, the grammatical approach and the rhetorical approach. The first says there are rules. Let's be honest: a whole broom closet full of them. The advocates of this approach say we can and should learn these rules. I have tried..and tried. The latter approach says, no no no, it all depends on how you want to express yourself; use punctuation to add rhythm, emphasis, and 'breathes' to your sentences. Written English, in this view, tries to emulate the natural rhythms of speech. Those fond of rules, on the other hand, want to emphasize the difference between sloppy speech and formal writing. Each of these approaches has had, and continues to have, its advocates, both in print and in writing pedagogy. Moreover, it is easy to give examples in which each side seems the sensible one.Yes, English is just schizo.

So I propose we need some simplified 'rules of thumb' for punctuation that neither burdens us with hard-to-translate advice, e.g. "when you take a breath add a comma", nor require mastery of grammatical jargon, e.g. "punctuate before a introductory participial or infinite phrase." The better the rule of thumb, the more cases it covers and the easier it is to grasp. A favorite I ran across once in a style guide: use colons to deliver the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words (Fowler). I hope you get it.

Alas, I don't have a complete set of these rules of thumb (or is it rules of thumbs?). If I did, I would put them in a book titled Punctuation for dummies like me and travel for a year on my royalties. But I can try my hand at one example that covers about thirty percent of the all my punctuation corrections in student writing!!! (sorry) Before I introduce this rule of thumb, let me illustrate its importance with some unpunctuated examples. I apologize that in order to have Chisu, the Finnish pop star, in the title of this blog post, I must now use a few unncessary song lyrics as examples, which, when it comes to teaching punctuation, is like eating soup with a fork.

Examples:

a. This could be a solution to our expert problems she thought. (-Chisu)

Does Chisu use commas?

b. While silent and a little fearful I am also patient and ingenious. (-Chisu)
c. As a the sleepy fog rose up to reveal the chilly waters of Lahdesjärvi lake and its surrounding 80's era dwellings one mathematician paused from running his ingenious simulations in order to gaze out the window. (-me)
d. In spite of much research into the causes of procrastination in writing researchers have uncovered little evidence for any evolutionary benefit. (-me)

Now I hope you will agree that these feel a bit hard to read or even ambiguous in the case of d. The source of the trouble, I would claim, is that in English we need to be able to spot the subject of the sentence quickly since the subject usually indicates who is doing what. This is in contrast to Finnish, which could care less about subjects. In the sentences above, the subjects are: a. she, b. I, c. one mathematician, and d. researchers. So the rule of thumb is this: when your subject is hard to spot quickly, put a comma before it to mark its place for the reader. Now this is a rule of thumb, so it is not precise and can be interpreted in stupid ways. But notice now how much better our sentences are to read!!! (note to self: take anti-exclamania medication)

Examples with punctuation:

a. This could be a solution to our expert problems, she thought.
b. While silent and a little fearful, I am also patient and ingenious.
c. As a the sleepy fog rose from the chilly waters of Lahdesjärvi lake and its surrounding 80's era dwellings, one mathematician paused from running his ingenious simulations in order to gaze out the window.
d. In spite of much research into the causes of procrastination in writing, researchers have uncovered little evidence for any evolutionary benefit.

Does this work for you?! Anyone else want to offer a good rule of thumb for punctuating in English?

Do read, please.

A student approached me after a class and asked ”Why is it that you keep saying things like ‘Do sit down, please’ and ‘Do feel free to start talking’? What’s it with this do you keep adding there?” The student said he had never spotted this in other people’s speech, and it caught his attention as something peculiar that required explanation.

The question first took me by surprise. The fact that a student should observe something like this and then be puzzled enough to come and ask about it is not something that happens every day – or every month, even? – but when it happens, it’s always an indication of the inquisitive mind of the student for whom learning is not just fulfilling the course requirements. As any teacher will know, it is always rewarding to find that our learners are, after all, autonomous, critical, thinking creatures who will question and learn, in spite of what we try to teach them.

Secondly, the question reminded me how little we can actually trust our own intuitions and assessment about our linguistic behavior, especially when it comes to spoken language. “Do I really keep using this pattern with do so habitually?” was my first reaction. I had been caught unawares, and, had anyone asked me previously, I wouldn’t have admitted to using the structure any more than the average speaker does. (Well, yes, I did catch myself using it several times in the course of a lesson afterwards!). 

This is, however, a common finding from many studies: people have often been found to either over-report or under-report their use of standard forms of the language, for example, or  to pronounce words in a way they would swear they never do. And if you think about it, do you know how often you use certain ‘filler’ words or expressions, such as sort of or kind of, when speaking English, for instance? Or how many of us Finns can truly say whether they talk about shampoo or sampoo (or samppoo, for that matter) in their everyday usage of the word? Well, I can’t, to be honest. 

The nice thing these days is, though, that we don’t have to completely rely on people’s own intuitions only when deciding whether some word or grammatical pattern is actually OK to use, and how common it is. At least for English, there are already several large databases of authentic samples of language use by native (and non-native) speakers, both spoken and written, which can be used to check whether a word or word combination is used, how frequently it is used, and in what genres, for example. These computer corpora, some of which are accessible online for free (e.g. COCA, Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ and BYU-BNC, British National Corpus,  http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/) are great tools for the language learner and teacher alike.

But back to the original question: what’s it with this extra do that you put before another verb, when it doesn’t seem grammatically necessary? This so called ‘emphatic’ do can be found not only in the case of an imperative clause, as in my usage above (Do sit down, please!; Do come in! ), but also in statements like I do like your cucumber soup. As the term suggests, its main function is to emphasize. In the examples above, it serves to indicate that I truly mean what I say, and thus it may be seen as conveying a warmer and more sincere attitude. A mere I like your soup can even be interpreted as too bland and indifferent, especially when expressed with the usual Finnish intonation. 

In some cases you may need the added emphasis to contradict a prior assumption that the hearer may (or may not) have had; for example I did get it sorted out afterwards signals that you didn’t originally have very high expectations of getting it sorted out. Perhaps this is also the reason why I do like your cucumber soup sounds so much more convincing: just in case you had any doubt about it, I do like it!

-Sari  [20.9.2012]

Ken Hyland on constructing a writer identity

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending a plenary by linguist Ken Hyland. It was well worth the negotiation of daddy away-time. One of the more fascinating and idiosyncratic projects he presented was corpus analyses of the oeuvres of two well known academics in linguistics, John Swales and Debbie Cameron. Hyland's study is published in Written Communication under the title Community and Individuality: Performing Identity in Applied Linguistics. Swales and Cameron are both known for writing accessable, compelling books. Or so I am told since I have not read Cameron's stuff myself, while Swales I know fairly well.

It is apparent from Hyland's study they have very contrasting writer personas to go with their real-life personas. Hyland puts a finger on how they construct their writer identities in words by looking at the frequency of key words and 'bundles' of words (phrases) in their texts. Hyland is able to demonstrate how Swales creates a cautious, self-effacing, writer identity which draws his readers into a common intellectual project, while Cameron projects a much more assertive, uncompomising style of public intellectual who is willing to ruffle the feathers of her readers. I lifted a few examples from Hyland's presentation. Debbie Cameron uses the verb to be, e.g., What has not changed is my conviction that.., and more particularly the pattern it is + adjective + to infinitive, e.g., It is important to distinguish betweem ideological representations of gender...The effect of this device is to draw a line in the sand: reader cross over at your own peril. In contract, Swales uses the first person (I and my being in his top 10 key words) frequently, and often in conjuction with verbs like think, believe, hope, suspect, tried, and guess, which all to a greater or lesser extent leave some space for disagreement.

What struck me while listening to Hyland's presentation is how neither Swales nor Cameron fit any conventional molds (yes, I am hiding behind those words) of good academic writing. How often I complain to my students about sentences with it and to be as the key ingrediants. Still, I suppose you have to earn the right to be quirky as a writer, and it should be remembered this is a corpus of their books, not their articles which are presumably more in line with the style constraints of journals. An additional take-away for me from this is that you can get at identity through analysis of a corpus! It is sort of a relief that frequency tables give you more to say than something is...well frequent. Moreover, in this day and age just about anyone could create a corpus of a favourite writer (or yourself if you are the type who likes to stare in a mirror) and quickly grip hold of the words and bundles out of which emerges a distinctive (or bland) identity.

Beware of predatory journals

When I teach doctoral students, I usually ask them to compile a small corpus of example articles from journals in their field. With these corpora in hand, they explore the disciplinary conventions of articles in their fields--the phraseology, the organisation, the way the authors position themselves, and so on. However, students increasingly return to our classes with articles which instantly alarm me or the other participants. It may be the quality of the language is below the threshold that any peer-reviewed journal worth the paper its printed on would accept. Or there may be other, even more glaring clues, such as authors who are still in high school.

So what's going on? What is going on it seems is that the academic world, with so much as stake and with the proliferation of open access publishing, is ripe for rip-off schemes. Young, ambitious, sometimes naive researchers are especially easy prey. These predators set up illegitimate journals that look and sound real but will publish anything for a fee. Gina Kolata raised the alarm about these journals, as well as phony Conferences, in a New York Times article this year. Many of us receive daily span mail from these journals, inviting us to join the editorial board or publish with a guarantee of a review process that lasts only two weeks (by the way, why an English teacher would want to pay to be an editor of a mechanical engineering journal is a mystery to me).  Interestingly, according to the article, even experienced professors have been taken in and "trapped" on editoral boards by these journals. So if it sounds to good to be true, it is! The NY Times article points us to a useful resource if you want to check whether the journal you are reading or being solicited to publish in is a set-up: Jeffrey Beall has created a set of criteria for identifying a predatory journal and maintains a list here.

Hearing voices – or writing as a mediated social practice?

Academic discourse is a genre shaped by the learning needs of its participants and it scaffolds knowledge practices in the academic community. It can be seen as adding cohesion to the social structures of our community: discourse serves as a mediator of acculturation and socialization, facilitating learning. Writing is the critical part of academic discourse, providing a venue for one’s voice to be heard.

Our voices, or the verbal track of our thoughts, as authors of written text emerges from the voices of other authors.  This is just to recognize that our thinking and voice (or subjectivity) is being shaped by everything that we have been and will be exposed to. Obviously a skilled writer does not, or could not, explicitly incorporate everything relevant she or he has ever read as sources. However, the text would not be plausible without merit being given to those other authors who deserve to be recognized by their name when their voice echoes clearly in our text.

Academic writing can be seen as a dialogue although the different parties do not necessarily meet. The dialogue in writing has taken, is taking and will take place in our minds. The readers’ impressions and interpretations are shaped by their exposure to other texts. Thus writing and reading texts are forms of everlasting and omnipresent dialogue that extends over time and place. Our voices as authors are always partially reflections and interpretations of others’ voices.

Observing and using language in different social contexts shapes thinking and vice versa. The more variety one has in his or her repertoire of linguistic devices appropriate in different social situations, the easier it may be to operate and adopt a multifaceted way of seeing things. This increased cognitive flexibility then scaffolds further learning within an individual. Learning within academia taking place IN academic discourse and thus writing is a mediated social practice. However, writing is not merely a tool to learn and think but also a proof of learnedness.  Our texts serve as lasting marks of our cognitive processes. They permit our voice to be heard.

Owl party

Owls: Olli Ikonen, Mika Tukiainen, Sari Isokääntä, Rick Van Camp

Last friday we celebrated the kickoff of the Writing Clinic project. As I already mentioned in my last post, the basic idea behind this pilot project is to provide writing support to researchers in the Faculty of Business and Built Environment, Tampere University of Technology. Aside from research articles, we are also ready to help with other sorts of writing, including conference abstracts and presentation slides, as well as grant proposals and dissertations.

In addition to individual consultations, we plan to offer a couple of writing workshops which will be open to anyone at TUT. Those will be announced later in the Fall. Finally, we anticipate interesting and challenging language questions to arise out of our consultations; therefore, the aim of this blog is share some of the questions and potential solutions.

On constructive feedback

We just kicked off a pilot project in the TUT Language Centre, The Writing Clinic. The main activity of this project involves individualised feedback to writers about their manuscripts. Now that high quality writing instruction is available for free online, it increasingly feels feedback is my raison d'etre as teacher. Whether our clients see it that way, remains to be seen. To convince students of the importance of feedback, I have often pulled out this line by Verlyn Klinkenborg: "When called to the stand in the court of meaning, your sentences will get no coaching from you. They'll say exactly what their words say, and if it makes you look ridiculous or confused, guess what?" I am here, in the worst case, to save you from ridiculousness and, in the best, to help you close the small gap between what is in your head and what is on your paper. But what sort of feedback actually helps you bridge that gap?

So let's imagine you are coming to me for a writing consultation, which sort of comment would you prefer as feedback:

A."This is a great first draft. Keep going!"

B. "I find your opening paragraph confusing." (paragraph circled in bright red)

C. "I think you write some precise individual sentences here at the beginning but I find the whole first paragraph to be unfocused. I like the next one though :)"

D. "I believe you can develop this paragraph further. What if you would add a first sentence where you introduce all the studies your are discussing and then use enumeration in the following sentences--first...second...finally--to help the reader link each of the problems you list about this area of research back to the first sentence? See this for an example: http://sana.tkk.fi/awe/cohesion/topsen/enum/index.html"

I would choose D, but let's not dismiss the other possibilities too quickly. Wouldn't you agree there are some situations in which choice A would be preferable? For example, if you are in your first weeks of beginning Russian and you are utterly confused by the large number of hissing silibants (zh, ts, ch, sh, and sh'), you probably wouldn't appreciate your teacher commenting, "I find your use of these sounds confusing." You want to feel you are getting at least one of them right! Studies looking at what feedback is appreciated at different levels of attainment (also see here) show, unsurprisingly, that beginners mostly want encouragment. When able to choose between flavors of teacher, beginning students will prefer a teacher who notices what we do well rather than our mistakes (in one study, a French teacher). Experts, on the other hand, often embrace and seek out negative feedback. Incidentally, I have learned that choice A is always the best if the person you are giving feedback to happens to be your mother-in-law.

I confess feedback type B has been my own vice as a teacher, having followed in the footsteps of  my own first English teachers. I have literally penned thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of comments that fall in this category. While these red splashes of alarm may actually work for a percentage of highly motivated learners undeterred by the occasional vagueness and sheer burden of so many things being incorrect, for many others I have noticed it has no effect or even does more harm than good in the revisions. I suppose there are two problems here: first, the inability to translate the wide comment or red mark into a satisfying fix and, more deeply, the fragileness of the psychological ground on which rests the relationship between feedback giver and receiver. In regard to the latter trust problem, I vividly recall a childhood tennis coach shaking his head in disgust every time I did one of my floppy serves. Yeah, I understood I was doing something wrong alright. But, in my case, I really needed a tip or two. At first I felt guilty for disappointing him, then I began to distrust his motives as my coach, and finally I quit tennis. A body of research on revision of essays in response to teacher feedback by minority writers in the US show how type B feedback may encourage those of us who are less resilient to give up on trying, precisely because we don't feel that the teacher actually believes in our potential. This is even more likely if the teacher and student are from different social, economic or ethnic backgrounds. All that said, there are some well-loved teachers out there (think Russian ice skating coach) who practice tough love all the time. Still, in spite of the toughness, it is felt as love.

Many of us have actually been trained to employ so-called hamburger feedback, which is represented in example C. You try to offset the sting of the bad news by sandwiching it between some good news. Again, such feedback may have its uses, particulary when it is news we are talking about, like you didn't get the job or your mother-in-law is visiting for a month. However, do we really need to confuse things by inserting a judgement in our feedback, framing every comment as negative or positive? The fact that a sentence could be written differently to suit a different audience is not really a good or bad fact about the world. It is simply a possibility. Moreover, there is evidence that we might actually mislead students about their abilities, if we constantly try to sugar our feedback with good news. After all, if the sentences are good, and the next paragraph is fine, maybe it's already good enough.

This brings me to possibility D in which the feedback seems to do three things: 1. he or she expresses belief in the writers potential to develop (the extent to which this is taken as genuine by the receiver may have to do with a number of other behind the scenes facts about the relationship), 2. a specific strategy is suggested together with a link to an example, although it is not presented as the one correct answer, and 3. it is formed as an experiment (i.e., what if) without judgement. It is a potential solution one could adopt or reject. In closing it should be mentioned that such feedback takes a lot of effort, and in all honesty, we may not have more than a feeling something is amis in someone's writing but not a strategy to offer; occasionally we are ridiculous and confused together.