passive aggressive

Fourteen years ago, we taught students to use passive voice in scientific reports, because that's what scientists did. Mice were placed in a maze and were observed, etc. While making a report, the scientist removed himself/herself from the picture with the passive voice.

But the tide turned against the passive, and the prevailing opinion especially among social scientists was that it wasn't cool to deny one's responsibility, so the better writers just made those sentences active.

Now grammar-check, at least the prevailing grammar-check on the new Word 2008, has gone ahead and considered passive wrong, giving writers a green line under passive constructions and suggesting they iron them out and make them active like good writers do.

There are several problems with this. First, passive constructions aren't wrong; they're just bad style, and even then, they're not always bad style. Second, grammar-check is passing up boatloads of other bad grammar that is wrong, so it seems a little misguided to pick on something that's easy enough for a computer to find, but which really doesn't need to be changed all that badly.

Which brings up my last point. Grammar-check is being used by ESL students at all levels, all the way down to the point where they are first learning passive, but also, at the point where they are trying to produce all manner of interesting variants of good English. How are they supposed to know wrong from bad style? Obviously they don't. These days, when you present passive voice, or even discuss it with them, they look at you with a slightly quizzical look, as if to say, I know someone who calls this wrong. We have a case of conflicting authorities.

green line to the commons

No sooner did I begin to focus on passive, and the interesting set of verb constructions that my students come up with daily, than this afternoon, first thing, one of my better students called me over and asked me to explain a green line that was under a perfectly grammatical passive sentence; I couldn't find any grammatical problems with the sentence, and eventually I walked away and on to other pressing business.

Several things are remarkable about the event; I will get the exact sentence as soon as possible, as I had to leave her paper at school where the printer broke down minutes before I had to leave at 5:00, thus causing a certain amount of disorganization. But, I suspect a number of patterns here, one of which is that, as I have learned, grammar-check simply doesn't like passive, even when, given a certain noun and certain verb, passive is the best option. As a line-editor I tend to take the noun and verb given to me, and make the passive correctly, because it is easier for me, wanting to write as few words as possible, to add a "was" or "is" and leave the noun and verb in place. The student, after all, has supplied the noun and verb; why should I change them? Grammar-check, however, doesn't see it that way. Why not rewrite the sentence active? It's usually possible. But it requires rewriting the entire sentence.

What happens, I believe, is that students rewrite the whole sentence, and end up with a misformed but active sentence that grammar-check doesn't mind. This doesn't mean that they started out with a correct sentence; it means that the process of negotiating with the green line ultimately led them to a misformed active sentence that, ultimately, was acceptable to grammar-check.

More about this later. A collection of these "misformed actives" will follow, as soon as possible.

this is your brain on technology

ok ok so this site is getting sleepy...no posts since April. That's terrible. I have no excuse, absolutely none. I have reasons, but no excuse.

Reasons: One: too busy. Two: I wrote proposals about blogs for the TESOL ("When everyone publishes everything" was my favorite) but they were rejected for the first time; the chat one, however, was accepted. My thoughts about chat are here. But there's more to it than that.

Blogs have become somewhat humdrum; they have a little dip in popularity; they're a little too static and permanent for people. On Facebook, however, it's a happening thing, things you write disappear after a while. No pressure on you to make it a work of art, or make it permanent. So the world to some degree has left the blog media to its politics, its mommy blogs, and the static world of what we used to call "media." Using them to teach? How pedestrian.

Now in my own teaching world they are still lively; students have good ones; the classes have good ones; things happen. I still stand by them. I just take them for granted. Of course we put all our papers on blogs...why else would we write them? Of course we separate the abstract from the paper, and link it...why else would we write one? Yet, when it came time to write proposals, I was tapped out on the subject, and still am. Don't know if I want to do another showcase on the same topic...

I was drawn back to this blog for other reasons.

Spell-check: Good or Bad?

The new direction of my research is this: I am convinced that these programs, spell-check and grammar-check, influence the way we learn. I am not sure whether it is good or bad but I suspect that some elements of it are bad. Of course, one argument goes: why should we learn to spell if a machine will do it for us? It is possible that with a good enough grammar-check, we won't need to learn grammar either...then of course I might be out of a job. But I don't think this is going to happen right away.

This post contains a very simple but basic principle. This teacher is very self-aware and noticed the change in his own behavior from when he switched from a program with a comprehensive spell-check to one with a more klunky, awkward one: he learned faster with the second. The harder the work, the more you gain by learning; the more you gain, the faster you learn. Thus spell-check, by making correct spellings easily available, make people learn more slowly, or not at all.

It is well-known, I think, that spell-check has made the world into poorer spellers. We no longer see non-words on paper, but we also see a lot more wrong words, since spell-check does not tell you which one is right. And people don't look it up. Today I read about the permits in Egypt (they are famous; mummies are buried in them) and was fortunately, by context, able to figure out what the topic was. So you have people doing their best and still ending up way off base. But a more pertinent question is: does their learning catch up to them? Do they learn spelling more slowly, not at all, or what?

This is your brain: this is your brain on technology.