Re: _Verum Et Factum Convertuntur_ (or: Surprised By Syntax)

My comments below are, obviously, addressed to Stanley Fish, who isn't here to read them. Is there a rhetorical term for this, addressing a person who isn't present for the benefit/interest of people who are?

JHM wrote: 
_Verum Et Factum Convertuntur_ (or: Surprised By Syntax)
  1 June 2005

(( Now all we need is Bernard Shaw write a play about it so it catches
on, at least outside besottedly materialistic circles.  ))

Devoid of Content  // By Stanley Fish
  (Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.)

 <<  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html >>

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.


Do you have a reference for this assertion?

[snip] 
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.

Why must it be capable of indicating the distinctions that English in particular enables us to make?

[snip] 

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?

Since all your students *speak* English, and you can understand them when they speak, they obviously know how to indicate this, whether or not consciously, and they know all the other rules too. One would think from your discussion that you were teaching language to a bunch of anaglots. The problem isn't whether or not they apply linguistic rules, the problem is why they have trouble "writing"with them.

[snip] 
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.


Again, why?
.

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