Mina Shaughnessy on error

Anyone who has read, say, a comma-free student essay (comma-free for fear that using commas might mean making mistakes), will see the wisdom in Mina P. Shaughnessy’s observations about error. From Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977):

The discovery by a student that he can do something he thought he couldn’t releases the energy to do it. Students who make many errors feel helpless about correcting them. Error has them in its power, forcing them to hide or bluff or feign indifference but never to attack. The teacher must encourage an aggressive attitude toward error and then provide a strategy for its defeat, one that allows the student to count his victories as he goes and thereby grow in confidence. . . .

The alternative course of ignoring error for fear of inhibiting the writer even more or of assuming that errors will wear off as the student writes more is finally giving error more power than it is due. The “mystery” of error is what most intimidates students — the worry that errors just “happen” without a person’s knowing how or when — and while we have already noted that some errors can be expected to persist even after instruction, most of them finally come under the control of the writer once he has learned to look at them analytically during the proofreading stage of composition. Freedom from error is finally a matter of understanding error, not of getting special dispensations to err simply because writing formal English is thought to be beyond the capabilities or interests of certain students.

Shaughnessy is sometimes criticized as reducing students to their errors, or patterns of error. I can’t agree with that criticism: understanding patterns of error is what makes it possible to move beyond them.

[A new habit for the end of a semester: pulling out a handful of books I haven’t looked at in years.]

Bob Brozman (1959–2013)

Bob Brozman was the best friend the National guitar ever had. Here is the obituary from his hometown newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

A YouTube sampler: “Highway 49 Blues,” “Minnie the Moocher,” “Moana Chimes,” “Ua Like.” The last two are duets with Ledward Kaapana.

NYT cursive debate

In the New York Times, four responses to this question: Should schools require children to learn cursive?

Suzanne Baruch Asherson thinks that cursive matters. Kate Gladstone thinks that handwriting matters, not cursive. Jimmy Bryant sees cursive as a way to carry on the tradition of the handwritten letter. (A little optimistic, that.) All three (wisely) avoid using writing and wall in the same sentence. Only Morgan Polikoff looks forward to a future without handwriting. Says he, “The writing is on the wall.”

Sigh. A Google search for cursive “writing is on the wall” yields 379,000 results. The joke should be allowed to die, or at least to retire.

As you may already know, Orange Crate Art is a handwriting-friendly zone. My thoughts on the advantages of writing by hand may be found this post.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Who’s who on Route 66

[George Maharis as Buz Murdock and Martin Milner as the other guy, “The Swan Bed,” October 21, 1960.]

When Route 66 aired on Nickelodeon some years ago, we were never able to keep track of the other guy’s name. You know, the one played by Martin Milner, who later starred in Adam-12. Elaine came up with the name Not Buz.

We are now watching Buz and Not Buz on DVD, with more than cursory attention. Among the actors in the first four episodes: Lew Ayres, Whit Bissell, Keir Dullea, Betty Field, Henry Hull, Patty McCormack, and Everett Sloane. Mind, boggle.

Elaine has now come up with a name for the series: Naked Country. Like Naked City (also filmed on location), Route 66 was the creation of Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard.

Related reading
The end of the trail (Route 66, Santa Monica)
Naked City posts

[It’s a shame that George Maharis never got to play Jack Kerouac, though in a way, as Buz Murdock, he did. Not Buz’s real name: Tod Stiles.]

Cartoonists against gun violence

A surprisingly affecting video: Cartoonists Demand Action to End Gun Violence (YouTube).

The World in Words

I just discovered a worthwhile podcast from Public Radio International’s The World: The World in Words. The most recent episode: How to Fake an Accent and Get Away With It.

How to improve writing (no. 43)

Here’s the work I did to improve two sentences in a recent post. The first draft:

If the most powerful and moneyed interests who now seek to reshape higher education have their way, what we call “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing reserved for a privileged few and credits and credentials — haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed — for everyone else. If this future weren’t already in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that accompanies it — get on board or risk being swept away — might alone be reason enough to object.

The work of revising, with additions in red, some deleted:

If the most powerful and moneyed interests who now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, what we call “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing reserved for a privileged few (MOOC stars have to teach somewhere, right?) and credits and credentials,  /  haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed,  /  for everyone else. If this future vision prospect weren’t already in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that accompanies sells it — get on board or risk being swept away — might would alone be reason enough to object.

Most of the changes are in the interest of concision, fewer words with no loss of meaning or detail (the noun clause “what we call ‘college,’” for instance, reduced to “‘college,’” with the quotation marks doing the work of the deleted words). I used a pair of commas to avoid the ungainly repetition of dashes. I hit on prospect as a better choice than the trite future or the loftier vision, and chose sells as a far better verb than accompanies. The aside about MOOC stars came to me while revising: and yes, I do think there’s shameless cynicism in trading on prestigious names to sell a feeble replacement for real-presence education. The aside is practical too: the interruption eliminates the slightly misleading and of “a privileged few and credits.” The revised sentences:

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few (MOOC stars have to teach somewhere, right?) and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else. If this prospect weren’t in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that sells it — get on board or be swept away — would be reason enough to object.

The changes are all minor. But such changes, multiplied over sentences and paragraphs, add up. Are they worth the time and effort? They are.

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
Draft, draft, draft, draft (John McPhee on revision)

[This post is no. 43 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is one of two about my writing. Here’s the other.]

William Zinsser, listening

“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not”: William Zinsser, now blind, coaches writers by listening to them read their work.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

From Richard O. Boyer’s three-part profile “The Hot Bach” (New Yorker, July 1, 1944). Ellington is talking to fans on a train and has turned to the subject of food:

“I have special places marked for special dishes,” he said. “In Taunton, Massachusetts, you can get the best chicken stew in the United States. For chow mein with pigeon’s blood, I go to Johnny Cann’s Cathay House in San Francisco. I get my crab cakes at Bolton’s — that’s in San Francisco, too. I know a place in Chicago where you get the best barbecued ribs west of Cleveland and the best shrimp Creole outside New Orleans. There’s a wonderful place in Memphis, too, for barbecued ribs. I get my Chinnook salmon in Portland, Oregon. In Toronto I get duck orange, and the best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself a half-dozen chickens and a gallon jar of potato salad, so I can feed the sea gulls. You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder. There’s a place in Chicago, the Southway Hotel, that’s got the best cinnamon rolls and the best filet mignon in the world. Then there’s Ivy Anderson’s chicken shack in Los Angeles, where they have hot biscuits with honey and very fine chicken-liver omelets. In New Orleans there’s gumbo filé. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurants at Forty-ninth and Broadway a couple of times a week to get their broiled lamb chops. I guess I’m a little freakish with lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressing room, where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go. In Washington, at Harrison’s, they have devilled crab and Virginia ham. They’re terrific things. On the Ile-de-France, when we went to Europe, they had the best crêpes Suzette in the world and it took a dozen at a time to satisfy me. The Café Royale, in the Hague, has the best hors d’oeuvres in the world — eighty-five different kinds, and it takes a long time to eat some of each. There's a place on West Forty-ninth Street in New York that has wonderful curried food and a wonderful chutney. There’s a place in Paris that has the best octopus soup. And oh, my, the smörgåsbord in Sweden! At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs. Wagner there makes a toasted bun that’s the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, then another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the button. Her hotdogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate thirty-two one night. She has very fine baked beans. When I eat with Mrs. Wagner, I begin with ham and eggs for an appetizer, then the baked beans, then fried chicken, then a steak — her steaks are two inches thick — and then a dessert of applesauce, ice cream, chocolate cake, and custard, mixed with rich, yellow country cream. I like veal with an egg on it. Monseigneur’s, in London, has very fine mutton. Durgin-Park’s, in Boston, has very fine roast beef. I get the best baked ham, cabbage, and cornbread at a little place near Biloxi. St. Petersburg, Florida, has the best fried fish. It's just a little shack, but they can sure fry fish. I really hurt myself when I go there.”

Duke’s audience seemed awed at his recital, and he looked rather impressed himself. “Gee,” he said admiringly, “I really sent myself on that didn’t I?”

Duke Ellington’s music has been making my life better for more than thirty-five years. For an introduction, I recommend The Great Paris Concert. If you’d like to browse other Ellington posts, they’re listed at Pinboard.

[Boyer’s profile is reprinted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).]

The irregular restrictive what ?

John McPhee’s “Draft No. 4” (in the April 29 New Yorker) has a passage that puzzled me, about “the irregular restrictive which ” (italics mine), a term that McPhee learned from the New Yorker editor William Shawn, who “explained that under certain unusual and special circumstances the word ‘which’ could be employed at the head of a restrictive clause.” In other words, which can sometimes substitute for that .

Which in fact often substitutes for that ; there is no absolute rule that that divides their use. Many writers, however, prefer to reserve that for restrictive clauses, which for nonrestrictive. The distinction brings a small (very small) element of consistency to writing:

There are three magazines on the table. I want to read the magazine that arrived today.

[That introduces a restrictive clause: “that arrived today” identifies magazine .]

There are two pieces of junk mail and a magazine on the table. I want to read the magazine, which arrived today.

[Which introduces a nonrestrictive clause: “which arrived today” is not needed to identify magazine .]

McPhee explains that “the irregular restrictive which ” is reserved for sentences in which “words or phrases lie between the specific object and the clause that proves its specificity.” The term “irregular restrictive which ” seems to be a Shawn (or Harold Ross?) creation: the only evidence for it that I can find is McPhee’s essay.¹ This use of which , however, goes back at least as far as H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926), where it is explained in the entry “That, relative pronoun.” Fowler’s defining and non-defining are the equivalents of restrictive and nonrestrictive :

Each that -clause is, or at least may be meant as, defining; but between each & the actual noun of the antecedent . . . intervenes a clause or phrase that would suffice by itself for identification. In such circumstances a that-clause, though correct, is often felt to be queer, & it is usually possible, though by no means necessary, to regarded it as non-defining & change that to which .

McPhee gives three examples from his recent writing of “the irregular restrictive which .” Here is one:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe which would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

Try it the other way:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe that would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

I find it hard to see any difference: name seems the obvious antedecent each time. McPhee’s other examples leave me just as confused.

But I found a way out of my muddle by consulting Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009). In the entry "Remote relatives," Bryan Garner addresses “the exceptional which”, his name for what Shawn called “the irregular restrictive which.” Garner presents this use of which as an attempt to avoid ambiguity:

Garner’s final four sentences are a model of clear reasoning about usage. Now I know that I need not spend another second thinking about “the irregular restrictive which.” Clarity!

*

11:21 a.m.: Not done yet. The New Yorker ’s Eleanor Gould credited William Shawn:

[Quoted in Barbara Wallraff’s Word Court (2000). The sentence in question referred to “a dispute about language which they would like this column to resolve.”]

¹ Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, was a Modern English Usage devotee. From a 1949 letter to Kay Boyle:

We think ourselves into knots over style things around here, although we’ve long since cracked most problems. We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that that is a little gem. Fowler, in Modern English Usage, differentiates between them and, somehow or other — I don’t know how, so help me — we got to following him in the editing of all house (or unsigned) stuff and then in practically all fact stuff (the writers are around the office and can be talked to from hour to hour), and then in more or less all the fiction, most of the writers falling into line.

Notice that Ross doesn’t use “the irregular restrictive which ”:

We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that that is a little gem.

The logic of “the irregular restrictive which ” would have the sentence read:

We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that which is a little gem.

I found this letter quoted in John Updike’s More Matter: Essays and Criticism (2009).

[I wonder: does “exceptionally well-edited” mean persnickety ?]