Teaching Grammar as a Liberating Art 
by Dr. Ed Vavra
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Chapter 8:
Syntactic Errors
and Syntactic Expectations 




     This chapter obviously owes a great debt to Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations. Professor Shaughnessy not only taught us that students’ errors are themselves rule-bound, i.e., patterned such that four or five mistaken "rules" may account for hundreds of individual errors in a student’s writing, but she also devoted much of her book to syntactic errors. Readers of Errors and Expectations will find some of the same errors discussed here, but I hope that this chapter expands on Professor Shaughnessy’s work in three ways. First, Professor Shaughnessy was working primarily with "basic writers," i.e., students who were considered to need remedial help; the errant sentences discussed in this chapter are taken from the writing of average students, from fourth graders to college Freshmen. Second, in organizing her discussion of errors, she groups them into four main categories: Accidental Errors, Blurred Patterns, Consolidation Errors (Coordinate Consolidations, Subordinate Consolidations, Juxtaposition Consolidations), and Inversions. (47) The organization here provides a different perspective -- errors are grouped by syntactic constructions, and the constructions are presented in the same order that has been used throughout this book. Thus, the errors which result from prepositional phrases are discussed first, etc. 

     The third difference, which concerns what should be done about the problem, is more complicated. As she herself notes, Professor Shaughnessy emphasizes process and practice rather than "direct grammatical instruction as a way of improving syntax." (88) Readers of this book need not be told that I favor direct grammatical instruction. But I would suggest that the grammatical instruction for which I am arguing is a kind that Professor Shaughnessy never considered and that, had it been available and had she considered it, she might very well have liked. In discussing the "causes and cures of syntactic errors," she states: 

when academically ill-prepared young adults write, which they rarely do except in an academic situation, they often mismanage complexity. This mismanagement gets explained in different ways. One explanation focuses on what the student has not internalized in the way of language patterns characteristic of written English, another on his unfamiliarity with the composing process, and another on his attitude toward himself within an academic setting. And each of these explanations suggests a pedagogy: the pedagogy that stresses grammar, whether in the abstract or as a set of forms to be generated through practice with sentences, tends to assume that students do not have command of many of the forms required in written English and must therefore learn them through explicit instruction; ... (72-73) 
The "explicit instruction" to which she refers is clearly not that proposed in this book, but rather the traditional approach to teaching and reteaching the simple grammatical definitions of clause, phrase, etc. Such instruction was totally isolated from practice in writing and from the complexity of the students’ own sentences. Had she been aware of the approach suggested in this book, she might very well have argued for it since, as she admits, "the inexperienced writer is indeed not likely to have command of the language he needs to bring off the consolidations that are called for in writing." (73) Unfortunately, her choice of terms results in her overlooking half of the problem, for she goes on, quite correctly, to point out the important role of vocabulary in writing, but she never returns to the question of syntax. As she states, "Without the ‘right’ word, [students] often cannot collapse sentences or clauses in ways that preserve [their] meaning and must thus choose a circuitous syntactic route." (73) As an example, she notes that "the writer who wrote 'The employer doesn’t want someone who had just started who doesn’t have any experience with the job . . . ' could have avoided both relative clauses had he thought of beginner." (74) Her argument misses half of the problem -- the inexperienced writer is also not likely to have command of the syntax he needs. Many syntactic errors cannot be avoided simply by increasing a student’s vocabulary. Instruction in syntax, integrated with instruction in writing and reading and spread over several years, may greatly accelerate a student’s improvement both by helping him see numerous examples of good patterns and by helping him see the importance of every word in a sentence. 

     Having said all this, I need to emphasize that students should not be taught about errors. Typical pedagogical practice is exactly the opposite of what it should be. The students who have the most problems with sentence structure are the ones who are most frequently required to do workbook exercises in which they are instructed to correct fragments, comma-splices, etc. But these are also the students who have done the least reading -- they are the students with the smallest mental storehouse of images of good written sentences. Having them work with incorrect sentences simply increases the percentage of ill-formed sentences in their memory, thereby reinforcing the very errors that the exercises were meant to eliminate. Throughout this chapter, therefore, I will suggest how the instructional approach discussed in this book will automatically result in the students’ avoiding errors. Such improvement will not, of course, occur overnight. Students will not learn to analyze clauses and immediately stop writing fragments. Assimilation requires practice. But as students continue to analyze clauses in good sentences, they will begin to realize that there is something wrong with their fragments. They do not need to be told the names of the errors -- instead of writing "frag," "cs," or "dm" in the margins, teachers need only write "ss" for "sentence structure," which would indicate to the student that she needs to focus on, and improve the structure of the sentence. As I hope to explain, the student could then examine the sentence just as she has been examining numerous others and correct the error. But what is an "error"? 
 
 

Errors and Preferences 

     For the last few decades there has been a growing debate about the very existence of "errors." The movement for the "students’ right to their own language," over-reacting to the prescriptivism of traditional grammar, has led some teachers to conclude that they should simply not concern themselves with errors, that everything is "correct." But this debate, like many others, is simply a question of definition. There are errors, and then there are errors, and English does not have a word to distinguish them. Roughly speaking, we can make a distinction between errors of syntax and errors of usage. Since traditional grammar did not make such a distinction, the reaction against prescriptivism is in part justified. But the distinction is real. There is no syntactic error in: 

 I ain’t done nothing wrong. 

If this is to be considered incorrect, it can be justifiably so considered only from the perspective of usage, i.e. one group of English speakers will object to it, some adamantly, but the sentence is perfectly acceptable in the context of another group of speakers. As teachers, we should urge, coax, and cajole students into learning standard usage, but we should not tell them that non-standard usage is "incorrect." The question is one of preference and of being able to address different audiences, it is not a question of grammatical error. 

     Some teachers will argue that usage is logical and can therefore be considered a matter of error, not of preference. One of their favorite arguments is the double-negative. Everyone knows that in math two negatives equal a positive; thus, we are told, in language, a double negative, as in "I ain’t done nothing," equals a positive. But this argument fails on three counts. First, linguists have discovered languages that regularly use double negatives. Second, everyone understands the sentence as a negation, not an affirmation. Third, if we adhere to the logic of the double negative, then we should all say either "I wash meself," or "he washes hisself." If, in other words, usage is logical, then we should say either:

  I wash myself. 
  You wash yourself. 
  He washes hisself. 
or: 
  I wash meself. 
  You wash youself. 
  He washes himself. 
We do not do so, because standard usage is based on social custom, not on logic. 
 
 

The Definition of Syntactic Error 

     Unlike problems in usage, syntactic errors involve the reading process and cause the reader either to misunderstand what was meant or to have to reread in order to reconstruct it. Psycholinguists have basically shown us that a reader’s mind looks for nexal (subject/verb/complement) patterns. But the syntactic part of language processing occurs in what the psycholinguists call "Short-Term Memory" (STM), and STM can only hold five to nine "bits" of information at a time. The nature of a "bit" of information is complex and far beyond my scope here, but even if we simply consider each individual word a "bit," we can immediately see that the mind cannot hold all the words in an average main clause in STM at the same time. To process a sentence, it resorts to "chunking," i.e., grouping individual words into larger "bits." Exactly how the mind does this is still a matter of research, but we can imagine the process and even develop a little model to suggest what creates a syntactic error. 

     Basically, "chunking" involves syntactic connections. As a simple example, we can use the sentence: 

The little boy in the brown shirt is my son. 

Seeking a subject, the reader’s mind perceives "the," and "little," both of which are held as adjectives. But when the mind perceives "boy," "the" and "little" are immediately chunked to it such that instead of three "bits," the phrase only occupies one. "In," "the," and "brown" add three more, but as soon as "shirt" is perceived, not only is the prepositional phrase chunked into one bit, but that bit may also be chunked to "boy," thus reducing the seven words to one bit. My model is, of course, overly simple and crude, but it does reflect the basic processing of language and it also helps us understand the nature of a syntactic error. 
 

To see my online model of how the brain processes language, click here.

     A syntactic error is anything that causes the reader to make incorrect chunks. In the sentence: 

Wearing a silver bracelet and white petticoat, the boy dreams of an encounter with his love. 
everything through "petticoat" is first chunked to "wearing." But since "wearing" will attach itself to the first free noun, i.e., noun not subordinate to it, the reader will tend to chunk it with "boy." Indeed, some readers will leave it chunked with "boy." Most readers, however, will not accept that as the intended meaning and will therefore have to dechunk it from "boy" and hold it as an extra "bit" until their mind perceives "love." For many readers, such an error results in their having to reread the sentence. 
 
 

 What Should We Do about Syntactic Errors? 

     Since I am about to present a catalog of syntactic errors, I would like to emphasize that it is for teachers, not for students. Teachers should not only be able to identify all these errors, they should also understand something about their causes. As we will see, many errors result from students’ attempts to use more complicated syntax, and in some cases I will argue that such errors should simply be ignored, perhaps even encouraged. Much depends on the age and experience of the student. I  suggest that fifth grade teachers totally ignore occasional comma-splices in their students’ writing. But if comma-splices still appear in the writing of an eighth grade student, the teacher should make some response.

     The response, however, should not be a focus on the errors. Students do not need to know the names for comma-splices, fragments, etc., and they certainly do not need to study all the errors in the following catalog. The best response is probably to use the approach described in the preceding chapter to give the student a firmer sense of the basic structure of normal sentences. Students should, moreover, be encouraged to write frequently and freely, without worrying about grammar. Syntax should be integrated with writing, but with revision, not with first drafts. 
 
 

A CATALOG:
THE CAUSES OF SYNTACTIC ERRORS 

     The erroneous sentences in the following reflect the errors of students at all grade levels. The catalog is not complete, but it is more complete than any I have found in print. Almost all the errors result from one of two causes -- an underdeveloped sense of nexus, or a misunderstanding of modification. Indeed, the catalog could be reorganized under these two groups, and, for example, all fragments could be discussed together, but such an organization would blur the developmental arrangement. More advanced students, as we will see, may write subjectless sentences when they attempt to make a gerund the subject. This kind of problem with nexus is quite distinct from a seventh grade student’s inability to feel the nexal connection between a regular subject and its verb. I have therefore deemed it wiser to organize the errors by constructions, keeping the constructions in the same order in which they have been discussed in preceding chapters. 

Prepositional phrases 

Reference Errors 

     A typical error with prepositional phrases is that they get connected to the wrong thing: 

At age thirteen, my father obtained custody of me. 

Having students place parentheses around prepositional phrases and draw arrows to the word modified helps them recognize the problem, which may be more common and more serious than we realize. (See the discussion of dangling gerundives, below.) 
 

Interference with Subjects and Verbs 

     A student’s lack of feeling for nexus may result in his inserting the semantic subject in a prepositional phrase: 

The result of this "care-free" life at an early age, resulted in what I feel to be mild ignorances. 
Many students need help in developing a feeling for the subject / verb / complement relationship. Traditional grammar never taught students that the object of a preposition cannot be the subject of a verb. Once students realize this, they can eliminate the object and find the true subject. 

     A more common problem is the interference in subject / verb agreement caused by phrases that separate the subject from the verb: 

The advancement of computers rely on the individual’s typing and programming abilities.
Here again the remedy begins with having students place parentheses around prepositional phrases and then learn the rule that a subject and verb can be either in or out of the phrase but not half in and half out. The interesting aspect of this problem is that it suggests that the student is focussing on individual words rather than on larger syntactic units. If "the advancement of" were deleted from our example, we would have a perfectly correct sentence. It is as if the student wrote "the advancement of," then wrote "computers," and then forgot all about "the advancement of." As with many syntactic errors, we must always remember that the problem may be the student’s lack of care: the student may have written "the advancement of," then changed his mind and started over with "computers" without bothering to erase "the advancement of." If the students don’t care, there is not much that teachers can do, other than let them fail, but many students do care and, for them, this error reflects a much more important problem than simple subject/verb agreement. These students need to have their attention shifted from individual words to the total sentence structure. 

Superfluous Prepositions 

     A strange and somewhat inexplicable error is some students’ use of superfluous prepositions. In some cases, the preposition is simply doubled: 

In writing letters to friends or relatives, you not only need to know the standard usage of words but it is also important, to whom you are writing to, that you keep them interested. 
The cause of such doubling perplexed me until Robert Boynton noted that in attempting to stop students from ending sentences with prepositions, many teachers use drills that offer alternatives. He interestingly suggested that students absorb the alternatives and retain the prepositions at the end. But is such instruction also responsible for sentences such as: 
The instructor then began to go into detail about the essay and the things in which it should include. 
Both knew they each had a deep dark secret in which the other did not even know about. 

From that discussion Raimi again leads us into Natural Division by discussing the subjects in which he had to take in school. 

After asking the question in which I’ve waited years to know, I gave her the phone number of my dorm and waited daily for the answers. 

The error is common and deserves further research. (The majority of the examples I have seen involve "in.") It may result from previous instruction in English, or it may be a carry-over from instruction in foreign languages. It is of particular interest to me because, unlike all the other errors discussed in this chapter, I cannot explain it as the result of either syntactic interference or natural growth. 
 
 

Subjects, Verbs and Complements 

Subject / Verb Agreement 

     Some students do have problems getting subjects and verbs to agree in number, but their problem is not that they do not know that they should write "he says" instead of "he say." Most of these students have done hundreds of workbook exercises on subject / verb agreement, but these exercises do not help because they are almost always too simple. Indeed, most of these exercises identify the verb for the student:

Bill and John (is, are) going to the store. 

Such an exercise completely misses the students’ problem: they can’t identify the verb in the first place. Half of my college Freshmen (and they are not untypical) cannot underline all the finite verbs in their own writing. In effect, the verbs get lost in a maze of words. Once they learn how to underline all the finite verbs in their writing, most students will automatically correct errors of agreement. If a student underlines all the subjects and verbs correctly and still has problems with agreement, then the teacher has reason for calling the student’s attention to the agreement problem.

Spelling Errors 

     Some readers may be surprised to find "spelling errors" discussed under syntax, but some of the most blatant and most persistent errors in spelling result, not from the student’s inability to spell, but from his poor understanding of syntactic patterns. The student who, in a written evaluation of my course, wrote: 

 I should of past this course. 

knows how to spell "of," "have," "past," and probably "passed." We can, of course, explain to the student that "of" is a preposition, that "have" is the verb, etc., but the explanation will not help until the student also learns how to determine when she is using a preposition, when a verb. Similarly, we can tell students that "it’s" means "it is," "they’re" means "they are," and "who’s" means "who is." But in the heat of writing, it is precisely the poor writer who will not feel the nexal verb and who will have too many other problems on his mind to be able to think about it. Here again I would suggest that exercise with underlining the subjects and verbs in entire passages will help these writers develop a feel for the nexus, but such exercises should be part of the normal course of instruction and not specific punishment for making errors. 

Subject / Verb Logic 

     An inadequate sense of nexus and of the purposes of the four variations of the basic nexal pattern also explains many students’ problems with subject / verb logic. Frequently, the error involves the predicate noun variation: students don’t realize that the subject and the predicate noun must name the same or equivalent things. Thus a student wrote: 

Peer pressure is a type of fear. 

Some readers may not feel this as an error, but the student has confused a cause/effect relationship with one of identity: peer pressure can cause fear. In working with syntax, we should try to help students keep logical relationships as clear as possible. Another student wrote: 

Often the practice rooms are the only time one can be alone. 

If we point out to a student that "rooms" do not equal "time," he will often respond, quite correctly, that we know what he meant. I immediately admit this, but suggest that we know what he meant because the idea being conveyed is fairly simple. But that the writer equates space ("rooms") with "time" suggests that readers cannot trust this writer to lead them through any ideas that are not simple. The error, in other words, is not just grammatical. It suggests that the writer cannot distinguish spatial from temporal relationships.

     Once a writer gets beyond simplistic sentences, we teachers should always remember that errors may be the result of our own prodding. The following sentence, for example, was a student’s excellent response to my urging that students include more details in their writing: 

The taste of a sizzling foot-long hotdog coated with tangy sauerkraut with mounds of pickle relish is a typical snack when accompanied by a tall chilled paper cup of Coke. 
The student did exactly what she was asked to, but in so doing, she expanded her sentence so much that she was unable to keep track of the nexus between "taste" and "is a typical snack." On one hand, I want to ask if this writer is anorexic, or a ghost that snacks on tastes rather than on hotdogs, but I can’t really consider this as an "error" since it results from obvious syntactic growth. 

     Frequently, a syntactic error results from interference from another construction. As in the preceding example, many "logic" errors actually result from the writer’s placing the semantic subject in a prepositional phrase: 

The quality of the majority of the papers the instructor will receive could be extremely boring. 
The quality may be poor, but it is the majority of papers that are boring. Note that this error is closely related to the prepositional phrases that result in disagreement between subjects and verbs. Interference may also result, as Professor Shaughnessy reminded us, from problems with vocabulary. Was the following sentence produced because the student couldn’t keep the syntax straight, or because she didn’t understand the meaning of "setting"? 
The setting of this poem takes place by a trellis in the late summer or fall season. 
It is tempting to believe that the student’s problem with the concept of "setting" resulted in the error, but the following sentence, which illustrates the same syntactic problem, demonstrates that the problem may be syntactic: 
The location of the commercial takes place by a pool. 
As students analyze sentences, their attention should constantly be directed toward the meaning the writer is attempting to convey. If we were to ask the writer of the last example whether the location took place or the commercial took place, the student would have no trouble in answering correctly. But in putting both words in the same sentence, the writer could not distinguish the subject from the object of the preposition.
 

Inflated Balloons,  or Main Ideas in the Main Slots 

     Students who write inflated balloons, who use weak words in the primary sentence slots and thereby shunt the important ideas into subordinate constructions, are not really making syntactic errors. This question, therefore, could just as logically be discussed in Chapter Ten ("Writing and Style"), but it fits here because the problem reflects the interaction between syntax and vocabulary. Although most textbooks urge students to put the main idea in the main pattern, some teachers object to the advice, noting that good writers don’t always do so. Both sides of the argument are correct -- the difference is one of perspective. Good writers don’t always put the main idea in the main slots, but they usually do. On the other hand, some students rarely do. Many a student’s paper is inflated by sentences such as: 

After the invention of the bike, many manufacturers created a lot of varieties in the size and in the style to make each bike different from others. 
It is unfair to take such a sentence out of its original context, and some readers may be able to conceive of a context in which it would be perfectly fine. Syntactically, it is perfectly correct, but it is wordy. And if a student has a tendency to write such sentences, he needs to attempt to put the main ideas in the main pattern. 

     But the problem goes beyond that -- the student needs to look at his sentences to see if he is saying anything meaningful. In the preceding example, the opening two prepositional phrases are meaningless: could the manufacturers have possibly varied the size and style of bikes before they were invented? Likewise with the closing infinitive, "to make each bike different from others." The infinitive, one of purpose, does not convey a purpose: it simply restates the main clause in different, more general words. The writer of inflated balloons, in other words, usually can’t see that words have meanings and implications. Having such writers attempt to put the main ideas in the main patterns is thus an attempt to help them align vocabulary and syntax. It is also an exercise in syntactic flexibility. In introducing students to the parts of speech, I usually include a discussion of word families: 

 Verb      vary 
 Noun      variety, variation 
 Adjective variable, varying, varied 
 Adverb      variably 
The purpose of the discussion is to help students see that they can restructure sentences by moving words around, often by changing the part of speech: 

Many manufacturers varied the size and style of bikes. 

Teachers who object to the advice about putting the main idea in the main slots apparently feel that it creates a straight-jacket for students. But it has just the opposite effect -- it increases students’ syntactic flexibility. Students are not going to follow this advice in every sentence they write: no one does. For those students who need it, the advice can work wonders. 

Punctuation 

     Fragments, comma-splices, and run-ons are almost always errors of punctuation. They are also often major syntactic errors which force the reader to go back and reprocess the sentence, but as later examples will demonstrate, they do not result primarily from a misunderstanding of the basic nexal pattern. Workbooks which give students fragments, usually subjects without verbs or verbs without subjects, probably miss the major cause of such errors, thereby confusing not only the students, but also the teachers, who are led to believe that exercises with simple sentence patterns will help.

     The role of punctuation in such errors can be seen in the following example, a sentence written by a student about auto-racing: 

At that moment everyone seated rises to their feet and shouts and cheers out-do even the loudest engine. 
Many readers will process "shouts" and "cheers" as finite verbs, parallel to "rises." They then hit the verb "out-do," crash, and have to go back to reprocess "shouts and cheers" as subjects. With a comma before the first "and," more readers are likely to process "shouts and cheers" as subjects on the first reading. Such errors are difficult for a writer to spot, since the writer’s mind processes "shouts and cheers" as subjects and doesn’t easily see the possibility of their being perceived otherwise. Here is another example of how punctuation conveys syntactic information: 

Through these emotions can be expressed. 

Many readers will process "through these emotions" as a prepositional phrase, hit the verb "can be expressed," and then have to reprocess to locate its subject. The problem occurs because "these" can be either a pronoun or an adjective, and without a comma after it, most readers will take it as an adjective. Textbook instructions to "set off long introductory phrases with commas" miss the point -- the purpose of punctuation is to help the reader distinguish and process syntactic units. 
 
 

Clauses 

Punctuation 

     Most textbooks suggest that subordinate clauses before the main subject and verb should be set off with commas, whereas those after need not be. The problem with this suggestion is that it doesn’t explain why. The following sentence, taken from a student’s paper, does: 

When I approached the light was red. 

Some readers will feel that there should be an "it" after "approached," and it is true that including the "it" would prevent the reader from processing "the light" as the direct object of "approached." But as we have seen in Chapter Four, deletion is a sign of syntactic maturity. A comma after "approached," on the other hand, is a signal to the mind to close the clause and to start looking for another subject. If the clause is placed at the end of the sentence, the problem doesn’t occur: 

The light was red when I approached. 

The subordinate conjunction indicates that a new subject is coming, and the final period closes the subordinate as well as the main clause. Our example, of course, is an extreme which clearly indicates the problem, but the comma after any clause at the beginning of a sentence serves as a signal of closure. 

Comma-splices and Run-ons 

     Comma-splices and run-ons are obviously punctuation errors, but attempts to "treat" them as such are doomed to failure. Here again the problem is usually not that the students’ don’t know the rules: they know them -- or at least they learned them at one time, found them useless, and then forgot them. What they don’t know is how to distinguish the ends of their main clauses. Run-ons are probably the more serious of the two errors, primarily because, as with unpunctuated subordinate clauses at the beginning of a sentence, the reader receives no signal to close the clause: 

The hometeam Courtland Cougars struck first a lightning quick run by Bill Culley made the game seven nothing. 
In this sentence, most readers will initially chunk "run" with "hometeam ... struck," either as the direct object of "struck," or as the object of an ellipsed preposition "with," the prepositional phrase being chunked adverbially to "struck." They then have no subject for "made." But even when the result is less serious, run-ons still result in the reader’s momentary confusion: 
I was disliked by some children because of my kindness they had the impression that I was rich. 
Hitting the "they," the phrase "because of my kindness" still in the process of being chunked to "disliked," most readers will experience confusion about what goes with what -- was the writer disliked because of her kindness, or because the children had the impression that she was rich? 

     Since the comma in the comma-splice indicates at least a degree of closure, the error is not as serious. Indeed, professional writers, who almost never use run-ons, often resort to comma splices. Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with thirteen of them: 

     It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.  (Heritage edition)
The short main clauses and the parallel construction enable the reader to process this sentence without having to reread, but the passage indicates that there is no reason for banning the comma-splice. Some students, of course, simply string together totally unrelated clauses with splices, but others frequently use the splice because they are unaware of better ways of joining their clauses. Their splices, in other words, connect clauses that a more mature writer would tend to put together. In the following sentence, I have included my revisions in brackets after the student’s splices: 
The song writer puts onto paper his feelings, [:] an excellent example of a song writer is Barry Manilow, he [who] expresses many feelings in his songs which he then sings with the emotions he has expressed. 
Simply to mark such splices as errors is to punish the student for seeing the connections which most of us want students to see. On the other hand, typical textbook explanations of the rules for using colons and semicolons to separate main clauses are useless unless the students can identify their own main clauses. 

Fragments 

     Many fragments result simply from the student’s punctuating a subordinate clause as a main one: 

Because I never knew what was going on in class. I was always thinking about something else. 
(Some teachers may feel that the cause effect relationship in these clauses is backwards, but it may not be.) Many ridiculous "rules" have been given to students in an attempt to prevent such problems. Thus students have been told that a sentence is a "complete thought," and therefore a  period cannot go after "class." Teachers who offer students this rule would be hard pressed to define "thought." Could they, for example, give an example of an incomplete, as opposed to a complete thought? Some will argue, of course, that the subordinate clause is an example of an incomplete thought, but their argument is tautological: a "thought" either is or isn’t, but thoughts don’t come in halves. (See Chapter Ten.) A thought may be more or less well developed, but as transformational grammar has demonstrated, every sentence combines numerous "complete thoughts," one embedded in another. The teacher’s argument is tautological because he is relying on the unsatisfactory definition of a main clause as a "complete thought." Thus the teachers logic runs like this: 
Complete thought = main clause 
subordinate clause <> main clause 
Therefore: subordinate clause <> complete thought.
The teacher’s logic is inaccessible to the student, not because the student is stupid, but because the student cannot distinguish main clauses. 

     Another ridiculous attempt to solve the student’s problem is frequently used: "put periods where the pauses are." Teachers who give this advice ought to listen to themselves talk: 

 "Why did you take a cookie?" 
 "Because I was hungry." 
As with the "complete thought" advice, the advisor is giving advice without realizing that it is meaningless to the student. 

     Although some subordinate clause fragments are only a matter of punctuation, others result from the student’s inability to keep track of the preceding elements of his sentence. Thus some students will begin a main clause, go into a subordinate clause, and forget to finish the main: 

Students [who cannot write grammatically,] [who cannot express their ideas and personal experiences]. 
It is impossible to diagnose a student’s mental abilities from a single sentence, but the odds are that this student labors over individual words and would, for example, be prone to errors in subject / verb agreement when a prepositional phrase separates the subject and verb. Thus, by the time the writer got to the final subordinate clause, "students" had disappeared from his short term memory, and the student didn’t even feel any sense of error. But there is another possibility. The second subordinate clause is an excellent appositive for the first: it may expand and specify what the writer meant by "who cannot write grammatically." But a subordinate clause used as an appositive is a very advanced construction. Thus the student may have felt uncomfortable with it, become perplexed, and simply ended his frustration with a period.

     The subtleties of clausal embedding can easily result in fragments: 

On the other hand, another story I heard by Julie, my older sister, about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 
In this fragment, "story" is a subject, and "I heard" is processed as an adjectival clause modifying it, as is the rest of the fragment. The writer probably intended to write: 
On the other hand, another story I heard by Julie, my older sister, was about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 
But the subject "story" is followed by the clause which includes a prepositional phrase and an appositive. By the time the writer got through the appositive, her original mental pattern slipped to "I heard a story": 
On the other hand, I heard another story by Julie, my older sister, about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 
We can correct such sentences for students, but I am unaware of any textbook which will help them learn to deal with them by themselves. All the elements of a correct sentence are included; the problem arises from the complex interrelationships of the parts. Only by being able to untangle the parts will the student gain not just correctness, but also confidence in what she writes. 
 

Interfering Constructions and Increasing Maturity 

     We have already seen how prepositional phrases can interfere with subject / verb agreement, but they can also result in mangled syntax: 

In "The Town Dump," Stegner spoke of the skeleton of the colt, which was once his, was found skinned and lying on the dump. 
In this 24-word main clause, much longer than the twelfth grade average of 14.4 (See O'Hare, 22), the error probably results from the embedded "which was once his." The student probably would not have written: 
In "The Town Dump," Stegner spoke of the skeleton of the colt was found skinned and lying on the dump. 
Without the additional clause, the student most likely would have felt the problem and adjusted the sentence in one of two ways. If the developmental sequence presented in Chapter Four is correct, the "less mature" option would be the use of a subordinate clause: ". . . of how the skeleton of the colt was found skinned and lying on the dump." The "more mature" option would retain "skeleton" as the object of the preposition and reduce the clause to a gerundive:  ". . . of the skeleton of the colt, found skinned and lying on the dump. "

     The error, in other words, may be a sign that the student has mastered subordinate clauses and is in the process of learning to reduce them to gerundives. Having added the "which was once his, the student may have sensed that the gerundive "found" would be too far from "skeleton." The "was" is thus an interesting retreat to the subordinate clause, almost suggesting that the student perceives the strength of nexus as opposed to junction. 

     I am not, of course, suggesting that the student consciously performed all this syntactic analysis. Were the student capable of that, he probably would have omitted the "was." Syntactic growth takes place naturally, with or without instruction. Students test and probe, trying new combinations and matching them against their individual, internalized sense of "sentence," a sense developed from their reading and from reactions to their writing. Along the way, they make mistakes. Here, as always, I am suggesting that a conscious understanding of syntax 1) will help teachers understand why students make the errors that they do, and 2) will help students more quickly understand which of their combinations are successful. 
 

Faulty Noun Clauses 

     Noun clauses used as subjects don’t seem right to many students, some of whom avoid them by using adverbial clauses followed by a pronoun which refers to the adverbial clause: 

When Madame Bovary tries for the power of attorney and gains it, this shows her influence over Charles. 
The student meant: 
That Madame Bovary tries for and gains the power of attorney shows her influence over Charles. 
The revised sentence is still weak, but the revision indicates its semantic rather than syntactic problem. In the original, the singular "this" obscures the relationship between the verb "shows" and its subject. The revision, on the other hand, aligns the syntax with the semantics: we can, in other words, more clearly see that the subject involves two acts, only one of which, the gaining, "shows her influence over Charles." (She can "try" all she wants, but unless she gains it, we won’t believe in her influence.) The "tries for and" is thus superfluous, but the student’s ability to perceive this may depend on his ability to align the syntax. Conscious knowledge of syntax will not, by itself, make students better thinkers, but it may be that they cannot become better thinkers without a clearer sense, conscious or unconscious, of syntax. 

     A main clause followed by a gerundive that modifies the entire preceding clause is another indication of students’ problems with the noun clause as subject: 

The setting is very dark, meaning depression or loneliness. 

Jeans have never gone out of style, making them a worthwhile investment. 

Other students will avoid the noun clause as subject by following it with a "which" that refers to the entire clause: 
Keats compares the artistic scene on the urn to real life, which questions his sense of reality. 
The problem here with diction -- "questions" instead of "raises questions" or "makes me question" -- reflects the student’s problem with the reference of "which." Unsure of what the subject precisely is, the student can only take a stab at the correct verb. Problems with syntax can affect vocabulary, just as vocabulary can affect syntax.

Cause and Effect and Other Faulty Noun Clauses 

     For decades, textbooks have been instructing students not to use "The reason is because . . .," but students continue to use it, in part, at least, because the textbooks have never explained what is wrong with it. Nor, apparently, have the writers of the textbooks noted the similarity between this "error" and sentences such as: 

One innovative idea was when balls of string were used to bond the congregation together literally as Christ’s love bonds the congregation together. 
In both cases, the problem results in a blurring of the S/V/Predicate Noun pattern, a pattern which supports the relationship of identity. "Is," in these sentences, means "equals," but the clauses in the complement position are introduced by subordinate conjunctions that signal adverbial clauses. Readers may thus process the clause as adverbial and reach the end of the sentence still looking for a noun clause. The problem is just as common with "when" as it is with "because": 
Another thing silly about adults is when they are calling their pets. 

The only thing that stopped them was when my mom called the principal and he talked to B.B. and me. 

The first method was when he had one of his new classes read only for pleasure. 

Technically, of course, the problem can be solved by using "that" as the subordinate conjunction, but simply telling students to do so will not help. Students need to understand when they need to use noun clauses -- the easiest way to help them, therefore, may be to emphasize the S/V/PN pattern. Unless they understand the clause structure, instructions about "that" will not help. 

     A variation of this problem is the use of an adverbial clause as a subject: 

When the Master tells Ivan that "Satan is whom you met," might suggest that the Master has an inner relationship with the devil. 
This sentence is particularly interesting because of the student’s correct use of "whom." ("Whom" is the object of "met," the predicate pronoun "he" having been ellipsed, as in "It is he whom you called.") In Chapter Thirteen, on research in the classroom, I suggest that one of the things we should do is find the grade level at which such errors begin to appear. As for correcting the error, students need to understand that noun clauses can function as subjects -- many college Freshmen are surprised at this "news." It is "news," not because they haven’t heard it before, but because they, at best, were forced to memorize it once. Never having to use it, they then promptly forgot it. 

Subject Verb Agreement and Subordinate Clauses 

Students problems with the case of relative pronouns, especially in subordinate clauses, are well-known. Thus we find sentences such as:

In the play, Oedipus vows that he will punish whomever brought, to the kingdom of Thebes, the plague. 
But as we have noted previously, students often don’t recognize that such pronouns may function as subjects of clauses. As a result, we get: 
Subconsciously humans cause their libido to function and secrete excesses of hormones which in turn raises their sex drive. 

Besides being wrapped up in drugs, he has gotten involved with false philosophies which leaves out Christ. 

The singular verbs in these examples suggest that the writer tends to perceive the entire preceding clause as the subject of the verb in the subordinate clause, which, in a general sense, each is. But each "which" has a more precise referent, and precision is what instruction in writing is all about. 
 
 

 Gerunds and Gerundives 

Dangling Gerundives 

     At the college level, gerundives are the most likely modifier to dangle: 

Walking into the room, the eye immediately goes to the single, glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. 
Students who have an error such as this pointed out to them often argue that we know what they really meant. But their argument begs the question, since teachers recognize dangling and misplaced modifiers only when they result in such absurdity that the teacher has to go back and reconstruct the meaning. The same student might write:

Thrown from the car, he saw her lying on the ground. 

and mean that she was thrown from the car. If we imagine this sentence in a police report used at a trial which the policeman cannot attend, we can foresee some serious miscommunication. Thousands of such misplaced modifiers go undetected each year simply because the teacher is able to construct an acceptable meaning even though the meaning is not what the student intended. When such misplacements are detected, they are thus a serious problem, not as individual "errors," but as a reflection of the writer’s inability to understand how words relate to each other within sentences. 

     As we noted in Chapter Five, gerundives, reductions of clauses, are, as Hunt calls them, "late-blooming constructions." The better readers and writers may have problems with gerundives in the early grades, but most students won’t use them (except as "formulas") until grades nine and ten. The following sentence illustrates the kind of problem that students may have: 

The first story was called "The Brown Wasps" and we discussed the story in detail and then numbering the paragraphs and then dividing the story into sections. 
In a less mature version, this sentence would have all finite verbs: 

... we discussed ... and then numbered ... and then divided ... 

The student has attempted to reduce "numbered" to the gerundive "numbering," but has retained the "and then" from the less mature version. We could, and perhaps should, in other words, view this "error," the incomplete reduction of a clause, as a sign of progress. Reduction accounts for many lost gerundives: 

Recently, when leaving for college, my mother had a hard time letting me go. 
In the writer’s mind, this clearly meant "when I was leaving for college." The writer is assimilating gerundives, but has not yet mastered the idea that the gerundive functions as a modifier and will attach itself, in the reader’s mind, to the nearest free noun. 

     In the frequent "repressed egocentric dangler," the dangling gerundive expresses the writer’s actions: 

Looking around the room, it becomes obvious that two people live in it. 

While reading the article, it consisted of suggestions for good and bad [sic] blind dates. 

 Continuing in a circular motion, bunk beds are beside the wardrobe on the opposite wall facing the window. 

Syntactically, a dangling gerundive is a dangling gerundive, but the "repressed egocentric" may result from another cause: teachers’ prohibitions against the use of first person pronouns. These sentences mean: 
As I was looking around the room, ... 
While I was reading the article, I noted that it ... 
As I continued in a circular motion, I saw that ... 
As teachers, we don’t always see the long range implications of our instructions. We may also occasionally interpret mistakes as brilliant writing. The following sentence was written by a student who used numerous subordinate clauses, but almost no gerundives: 
Our stomachs were full of butterflies wondering whether, after all this work, we could pull the performance off as a success. 
Did this student realize that she was reanimating the cliche about stomachs full of butterflies, picturing them as conversing about the possibility of success? Or is this a "repressed egocentric dangler"? Since the student used few gerundives, the odds are that it is the latter. 

Gerundive Fragments 

     Every individual has a sense of "correct" sentence length -- after a certain number of words, we feel the need for a period. Every individual’s sense is, of course, different, and as was suggested in Chapter Four, "sentence" length increases with age. Many fragments may result from the students’ sense of sentence length -- the student writes sufficient words to fill his sense of a sentence, puts down a period, and then continues with the sentence, thereby writing a subordinate clause or gerundive fragment: 

All at once I was overwhelmed by the thought of a good meal and before I knew it I was asking for the dark brown glistening object on my plate. Thinking awful thoughts such as what if it’s so raw inside the steak that it will run off my plate the first time I try to cut into it or what if it’s so well done that it’s been lying there and now is as hard as a rock. 
Most such fragments are not as long as my example, but they probably all reflect a "sentence" that would be "too long" in the writer’s view. An interesting bit of research would be to measure the average number of words in such fragments against the average per main clause in the paper in which they appear. 

Gerunds as Subjects 

     Some inexperienced writers avoid using gerunds as subjects. When they do attempt to use them, they frequently do so incorrectly, often making the gerund the object of the preposition "by": 

By seeing and hearing the closeness between those sisters in the sorority made me want to join more. 
There is logic behind the mistake. The preposition "by" expresses agency, i.e., the performer’s means. "Bill, by talking about nothing else, made me agree" equals "Bill’s talking about nothing else made me agree." The inexperienced writer’s tendency thus seems to be to shore up his doubts about gerunds as subjects (i.e., as "performers") by placing them in prepositional phrases that express agency. The use of the preposition may also have developmental causes. My research indicates that professionals use gerunds as objects of prepositions once in every ten main clauses. They use them as direct objects once in every fifty main clauses. In all other functions, they use them less than once in every hundred clauses. The gerund may therefore be so commonly associated with prepositions, that students who make this error may simply have not yet been able to break the association. 

      Occasionally, a gerund as subject is immediately followed by an unnecessary "it" to shore it up: 

Being involved it assures the individual that he has helped in the decision making. 
And sometimes the additional "it" supports a gerund as subject in a prepositional phrase: 
Everybody feels lust, (except certain parts of New Jersey) and by feeling lust, without being able to control it, it can backfire and cause severely negative reactions. 
We have already seen similar redundant pronominal subjects with prepositional phrases and with clauses used as subjects. And, as we might expect, the disinclination to use gerunds as subjects often results in semantic contortions with the true subject located in a prepositional phrase: 
The thought of doing another uniformed paper, was just seen as another meticulous assignment. 

Personal gain through taking advantage of others is a threat to us all. ["Taking advantage of others for personal gain threatens us all.": It is not, after all, the "gain" that is a threat; it is the "taking advantage."] 

Another indication of a student’s hesitation to use gerunds as subjects is the finite verb that agrees with the object of the gerund: 
Creating illusions like that were very helpful in conquering my enormous fear of death. 
This particular problem is related to the voracious verbals.
 

Voracious Verbals 

     In the discussion of "When I approached the light was red," we have already seen the voracity of verbs. The problem becomes more common as sentences become more complicated. Some of the most amusing sentences that students write result from their failure to realize that, once a verb or verbal appears in a sentence, it has a tendency to gobble up nouns as its objects:

I remember the men who dressed like Cherokee Indians dressed long ago, wearing the brightly colored feather bonnets and all the trees and unusual rocks. 
I delight in envisioning Indians wearing bonnets, trees, and rocks, but I’m saddened that so few college Freshmen have even heard that verbals can have objects. 

     Some voracious verbals may result in sentences that we ache to correct but don’t know if we should:

Learning and practicing sentence structure, paragraphing, organization, and a fairly extensive vocabulary is necessary. 
"Learning and practicing" go together as much as bread and butter, which is a good snack. The singular verb is thus not a problem, as long as the writer (and reader) view the subject as limited to "learning and practicing." But are "sentence structure, paragraphing, organization, and a fairly extensive vocabulary" all objects of the gerunds? Certainly not all readers will so read them. Is the sentence "correct"? Only the writer can tell, for only the writer knows if he meant "learning and practicing vocabulary is necessary." 
 
 

Infinitives

Infinitives as Subjects 

     As with gerunds and noun clauses, inexperienced writers are ill-at-ease with infinitives as subjects and may prop them up with a redundant pronoun: 

To be a good nurse it requires a person with very unique qualities. 
A disinclination to use infinitives as subjects may be characteristic of the language itself: 
 a.) Stegner’s sentence is hard to read. 
 b.) To read Stegner’s sentence is hard. 
Most of us would say or write (a), which is most easily analyzed as an infinitive acting as an adverb to the predicate adjective "hard." Sentence (b), however, comes closer to the logic of the situation: the reading is what is hard. Perhaps (b) is felt as unnatural because it results in an infinitive being modified by a (predicate) adjective. 

Fragments 

     The same sense of sentence length that underlies gerundive fragments probably causes most of the infinitive fragments. Whereas teachers usually focus on fragments only long enough to write "frag" in the margin, we should look at each in the context of the preceding and following main clauses. Usually, we’ll find that the fragment fits, but sometimes the syntax doesn’t: 

Or, if you went somewhere, such as a restaurant, and you liked the food and the service, you might want to write a letter telling the owner how you feel about the restaurant. Or to let the owner know if there was something you did not like about the restaurant, so that he might change the problem. 
Semantically, the fragment belongs with the preceding sentence. If we examine it closely, we may be able to understand why the student made it a fragment. The two "or’s" outline two cases: a) you like the restaurant, and b) you don’t. The student, however, and quite correctly, doesn’t perceive a need for reiterating the main clause -- "you might want to write a letter" -- in the fragment. But the student is unable to subordinate the fragment to the main clause for several reasons. First, the sheer number of words makes the lines of syntactic connection difficult to follow. Second, the infinitive "to let" semantically parallels the gerundive "telling." The writer, who was attempting to explain why people should learn to write, could have made the constructions parallel by using "letting" instead of "to let": 

you might want to write a letter telling ... or letting ... 

but the gerundive would be so far removed from the verb "want" that it would lose the sense of purpose. Hence the student instinctively opted for the infinitive, an infinitive of purpose. Unable to perform this syntactic analysis, the student ended the thought after restaurant with a period and expressed the complementary, and also complete, thought in the fragment. The easiest solution to this particular sentence is probably to make the second "or" join two infinitives: 

you might want to write a letter to tell ... or to let ... 

For students to be able to see this on their own, however, they have to be able not just to recognize constructions, but also to untangle their interrelationships. 
In the right context, some fragments are not only "acceptable," but even excellent writing: 

No sooner had the leaves begun to enjoy their ravishing youth when they were torn from the security of their home to lie on the ground and be trampled on by others. Never again to relish life except for in the whirlwind periodically. 
This broken sentence is, after all, about broken leaves. At the end of a paragraph or paper, it could be very effective. The question is not whether or not the student does or does not write fragments; the question is "Does the student control the syntax, or does the syntax control the student?" 

Other infinitive errors 

     In Chapter Six we noted that sentences such as "They made Bill captain" can be analyzed as having an ellipsed infinitive ("to be") as the object of the verb, with "Bill" as the subject and "captain" as the predicate noun of the infinitive. In its simplest form, the infinitive as direct object causes students no problem. But as Kellogg Hunt noted, when more constructions are packed into a sentence, the chance of problems increases: 

A doctor told me that a 5% loss of water will make the skin shrink, the mouth and tongue become dry and hallucination begins and a 15% loss is fatal. 
In this sentence, we can almost trace what went wrong. The student, who did not write "will make the skin shrinks," would probably not have written "will make hallucination begins." But the student has three infinitives as objects of "make," and the second of them, "become," causes the problem since it is both the infinitive form ("to become") and the finite plural ("they become"). In writing "become," the student slipped from the infinitive to the finite, and followed through with "hallucination begins." 

     What Mina Shaughnessy called "blurred patterns" are much more likely to occur when gerunds and infinitives, especially ellipsed, appear in the same clause: 

Computer modernization has made the process of obtaining lengthy information and hard to find facts much more readily available. 
The object of "made" in this sentence is "the process ... *to be* readily available," which is probably not what the student meant. The student probably meant what she wrote: "has made . . . hard to find facts *to be* much more readily available." But the voracious verbal "obtaining" seizes "information" and "facts" as its objects, such that they cannot function as the subjects of the ellipsed infinitive, especially when the infinitive already has a subject in "process." The sentence also illustrates Shaughnessy’s statements about the interrelationships of syntax and vocabulary, but from a somewhat different perspective. Most of Professor Shaughnessy’s comments concern students’ lack of vocabulary. Here, however, it is a matter of precision. Does this writer need "modernization" as well as "computer(s)"? "The process" as well as "obtaining"? The extra words clutter the sentence and contribute to the blurring of the pattern. (That we normally make paper assignments in terms of number of words doesn’t help.)

     What should we do about such blurred sentences? Some teachers promote "KISS" ("Keep it simple, stupid.") But KISS is only part of the answer. Although "computer modernization" could probably be simplified to "computers have made" without any loss of meaning, how do we simplify the rest of the sentence: 

...has made lengthy information and hard to find facts much more readily available? 

... has made the process of obtaining lengthy information and hard to find facts much quicker? 

But what if the student meant both: 
has made the process of obtaining information quicker and hard to find facts much more readily available. 
The final version is still awkward, but the addition of "quicker" makes it syntactically correct and it now expresses two distinct ideas. Forcing students to keep it simple may force them to keep their ideas simple as well. Once again it seems that the best thing we can to is to teach students how to analyze and discuss sentence structure so that they can see the problems and decide for themselves how the syntax can best support their ideas. 
 
 

The Other Constructions 

Fragments 

     We have now arrived at the latest of the late-blooming constructions, the appositives and noun absolutes. Young children, of course, use appositives ("Uncle Bill"), but these appositives are short and undeveloped. The maturer writer tends to modify the appositives, and some of the modified appositives are cut off as fragments: 

The shadows are diminishing as the smell of freshly cut grass emanates from the house across the street, via a crisp, chilly breeze. A breeze that seemed to signify the prelude of a new season coming forth, a breeze that falsified the radiating warmth of the sun. 
The traditional textbook definition of appositives, which limits them to nouns, may result in some teachers failing to see that the following is an appositional fragment: 
The sea represents physical love, for in the town there is only a well and it is stagnant. Stagnant as the girls’ sex lives. 
Likewise, noun absolute fragments are typical of the more mature student writer: 
There was Ken’s room, and Davy’s room. Ken’s room being "Off Limits" to Davy, and vice versa. 
As with most of the fragments we have examined, these are punctuation errors, but the best way to help students control (not necessarily avoid) them is to help students understand both how the syntax works and the importance of punctuation to the reading process. With a period after "room," readers tend to process the noun absolute as a subject: they then find no verb for it, crash, and have to reprocess. 

Appositives 

     Except for their being punctuated as fragments, appositives cause few problems. When other problems do occur, however, they are interesting: 

Christian religions condemn it by saying it is an act of adultery; one of God’s commandments. 
The essence of the appositive, of course, is that both elements have the same semantic reference. Here, however, the student has created an appositive of antonyms. 

     A more common, but still relatively rare problem involves keeping appositives parallel: 

Within the conscience there are two types of voices, the one that says "go ahead" even when one knows he should not, and the other voice says "do not do it" even though one may really want to. 
The student begins nicely, with "the one" in apposition to "voices," but this appositive is modified by three clauses. Having completed the triple embedding, the student reverts to the finite "the other voice that says," probably because he lost track of the appositional structure. Such sentences should be expected from students who are assimilating appositives. 

Noun Absolutes 

     The same kind of reversion to a finite verb appears when students subordinate ideas with noun absolutes: 

Imagine for example a student writing a paper which is due the next day and the power goes off. 
Students who do not understand syntax do not realize that the "and" connects "imagine" and "the power goes off." The subordinate clause, "which is due the next day," was probably enough to distract this student from the absolute construction, and thus he reverted to the finite verb. 

     The absolute, of course, may easily become entangled with gerundives and dangling modifiers: 

First of all, children’s appearance should be acceptable, with hair neat and combed and wearing nice clothes. 
Currently, few students would realize that this sentence means that the children wear clothes in their hair, which is rather strange for an "acceptable" appearance. 
 

Coordinating Conjunctions 

     Over and over again I have to tell students that the smallest and simplest words cause the biggest problems. I have reserved a discussion of coordinating conjunctions until last because, although they cause problems at all age levels, the most severe problems result at more advanced levels when students attempt to compound clauses, gerunds, and other developed constructions. It annually amazes me that most college Freshmen do not know what coordinating conjunctions are. If they do "know," they have usually only memorized definitions which they are unable to apply. The interference caused by these conjunctions has been implicit in many of the previous examples, but note how the "and" functions in:

Squadsmen will always remember how the evening that began with excitement ended with tragedy, and with thoughts of how lucky they are to be alive and well. 
In commenting on and grading a set of papers, no teacher could even begin to explain what the problem is here. Does the "and" join two prepositional phrases: "ended with tragedy and with thoughts"? Or does it join two clauses: "how the evening ... ended ..., and ... how lucky they are ...."? Or perhaps the "and" should have been omitted? Perhaps "with thoughts" is a prepositional phrase modifying "will remember"? Each variation changes the meaning, and a reader has no way of knowing which was intended. And all we can do as teachers is to put an "SS" in the margin, an "SS" that mollifies our conscience, even though we know that it will be meaningless to the student. We have not taught students to untangle the syntax. 

* * * * * 

     Near the beginning of this chapter, I stated that almost all errors can be attributed to one of two causes, an underdeveloped sense of nexus, or a misunderstanding of modification. The poor sense of nexus is reflected in semantic subjects placed in prepositional phrases, in major ideas presented in subordinate constructions, and in some fragments. A misunderstanding of modification results primarily in prepositional phrases and gerundives that dangle or modify the wrong thing.

     But we have also seen three other factors that underlie students’ errors. First, every student has a sense of the "appropriate" length of a sentence, and if his sentence becomes longer, he is liable to put a period in the middle of it. This accounts for subordinate clauses, gerundives, infinitives, appositives and noun absolutes all being punctuated as fragments. Second, we have seen what might be called "developmental" errors: as students attempt to include more advanced constructions in their writing, they make mistakes. Some of these mistakes simply result from the students’ being unable to keep track of syntactic connections among a larger number of words. Other mistakes result from the students’ lack of knowledge (or confidence) about the use of constructions, but even here the mistakes form a pattern -- in attempting to use clauses, gerunds or infinitives as subjects, students frequently support the subject with a superfluous "it" and/or place the gerund or infinitive in a prepositional phrase, or use an adverbial rather than a noun clause. Finally, some problems may result from our own instructions -- telling students not to use the first person or not to end a sentence with a preposition.

     The patterns in these problems, their interrelatedness, suggests that they can be solved with a simple solution, if that solution addresses the cause of the problems. The ultimate cause of the problems is that students do not understand how syntax works. In the preceding chapter, I have proposed a sequence for teaching students just that. Students do not need "remedial" instruction in avoiding errors; if we teach students how to analyze the syntax of their own sentences, they will eventually eliminate their errors themselves. All we have to do is be patient and expect errors as our students continue to grow. 


Questions for Discussion

1. What makes an error an error?

2. Do you or your schools distinguish between errors of usage and errors of syntax?

3. The chapter argues that many syntactic errors are signs of syntactic growth. Is that argument convincing, and, if so, what are its implications?

4. The chapter also argues that the best way to deal with students' syntactic errors is to ignore them and focus on teaching students to anaylze "correct" sentences. Do you agree or disagree with this strategy? Why?
 


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