Re: Writing in the workplace (long)

["Sara Glennon" <SGLENNON@landmarkcollege.org>]

I'm having a very busy Monday, and can't keep up with the twists of 
this thread, but I have to ask about what we mean by "grammar"?  
My students often say their biggest writing problem is grammar, and 
they often mean "correctness"; they want to make sure they haven't 
broken any grammatical or punctuation rules.  But "error-free" 
writing can still be bad, unclear, excessively wordy. What do we mean 
by "grammar".  Sentence-level issues?  Even at the sentence level 
good writing involves attention to the more subtle issues of word 
choice, concision, syntax.  But these choices are  not black and white, and
investing in thinking about them can be scary for students, because there are no 
right or wrong answers.  I guess one of my points is that I think 
it's a false dichotomy to say we have to choose between focusing on 
grammar (sentence-level) or organization (long documents.)  Thanks 
Leigh for getting this all started.   



> When we speak of higher order concerns, sometimes we mean things like
> transitions and thesis sentences.   In the workplace, those niceties are
> often replaced with bullet points and headings, and properly so.  Nobody
> told me about either one of those strategies in freshman comp.  
> 
> While I would never argue that grammar should always be first, I would
> argue that the kind of reality check that Leigh offers should at least
> encourage us to ask ourselves what we might need to do differently.
> 
> Jeanne Simpson
> csjhs@eiu.edu
> 
> 
Sara Glennon
Director
Center for Teaching and Learning
Landmark College
Putney, VT 05346
(802) 387-6746       email: sglennon@landmarkcollege.org