One of the first questions I ask when I am Instant Messaging someone
who only responds with single words (which is like 99% of Asians on IM)
is, "Can you speak in full sentences?". Why? I have found that those
who do not prioritise speaking in full sentences are much less likely
to realise how important grasping and reinforcing the common sense
notion of causality is. And the consequences and consequences of
consequences of not doing so. They are much less likely to grasp,
without it being pointed out (and the defensiveness that sparks), that there is a reason why Man invented
sentences and paragraphs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Devoid of Content
By STANLEY FISH

Chicago

WE are at that time of year when millions of American
college and high school students will stride across
the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the
wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a
clear and coherent English sentence. How is this
possible? The answer is simple and even obvious:
Students can't write clean English sentences because
they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take
today emphasize content rather than form, on the
theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough,
the ability to write about them will (mysteriously)
follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a
delusion, and it should be banished from the
classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give
the students this assignment: You will be divided into
groups and by the end of the semester each group will
be expected to have created its own language, complete
with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for
translating the text and strategies for teaching your
language to fellow students. The language you create
cannot be English or a slightly coded version of
English, but it must be capable of indicating the
distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood,
agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think
that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay,
guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe
inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the
slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner"
and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks
later - and this happens every time - each group has
produced a language of incredible sophistication and
precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short
answer is that over the semester the students come to
understand a single proposition: A sentence is a
structure of logical relationships. In its bare form,
this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I
immediately supplement it with a simple exercise.
"Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn
them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the
words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.)
In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences,
all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then
comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you
did? What did it take to turn a random list of words
into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and
false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put
the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the
next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the
relationships? And working with the sentences they
have created the students quickly realize two things:
first, that the possible relationships form a limited
set; and second, that it all comes down to an
interaction of some kind between actors, the actions
they perform and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore
the devices by which English indicates and
distinguishes between the various components of these
interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing
something to someone or something else, how does
English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or
what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there
is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer
is doing what he or she does in this way and at this
time rather than another?

Notice that these are not questions about how a
particular sentence works, but questions about how any
sentence works, and the answers will point to
something very general and abstract. They will point,
in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves
without content, are necessary to the conveying of any
content whatsoever, at least in English.

Once the students tumble to this point, they are more
than halfway to understanding the semester-long task:
they can now construct a language whose forms do the
same work English does, but do it differently.

In English, for example, most plurals are formed by
adding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way to
indicate the difference between singular and plural?
Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell
them, must have some regular and abstract way of
conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the
other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial
relationships, relationships of hierarchy and
subordination, relationships of equivalence and
difference - languages permit you to signal.

In the languages my students devise, the requisite
distinctions are signaled by any number of formal
devices - word order, word endings, prefixes,
suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name
it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point
is that they know what it is they are trying to do;
the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even
if much of the detailed work remains to be done.

AT this stage last semester, the representative of one
group asked me, "Is it all right if we use the same
root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish
between them by their order in the sentence?" I could
barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a
question like that one, they had already learned the
lesson I was trying to teach them.

In the course of learning that lesson, the students
will naturally and effortlessly conform to the
restriction I announce on the first day: "We don't do
content in this class. By that I mean we are not
interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We
don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss
current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button
issues. We don't tell each other what we think about
anything - except about how prepositions or
participles or relative pronouns function." The reason
we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or
themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the
forms that make the organization of content possible
to this or that piece of content, usually some
recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted
suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death
penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the
task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms
will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of
reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull
arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk
show.

Students who take so-called courses in writing where
such topics are the staples of discussion may believe,
as their instructors surely do, that they are learning
how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve
their compositional skills. In fact, they will be
learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by
sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They
will certainly not be learning anything about how
language works; and without a knowledge of how
language works they will be unable either to spot the
formal breakdown of someone else's language or to
prevent the formal breakdown of their own.

In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only
fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task
of understanding the structure of language - a task
with a content deeper than any they have been asked to
forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and
spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And
when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and
some student voices his or her "opinion" about
something, I don't have to do anything; for
immediately some other student will turn and say, "No,
that's content." When that happens, I experience pure
pedagogical bliss.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of
Illinois at Chicago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

cheers../bala
Bala Pillai bala@apic.net
Knowledge
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