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A4A Volume 1: Autumn Issue 3 - 2012
‘THE MATHEMATICS OF WRITING’ By David Didau (@LearningSpy)
8 weeks ago I took over an AS
David Didau: During the day he is an associate member of SLT and the Director for English and Literacy at Clevedon School in North Somerset. He is also an associate of Independent
Thinking Ltd.
David is also author of
‘The Perfect Ofsted English Lesson’
“ I had an argument with Phil Beadle recently in which he maintained that he’d never met an English teacher who a) knew what a sentence was and b) knew how to use a comma. I was shocked. ”
English Language class in which none of the students had a clear understanding of the difference between a noun and a verb. How is that they have got so far through formal education with absolutely no explicit understanding of how sentences work? The answer, my friend, is that teachers’ own language skills are just not up to snuff. I had an argument with Phil Beadle recently in which he maintained that he’d never met an English teacher who a) knew what a sentence was and b) knew how to use a comma. I was shocked. Could this really be true? Obviously I proceded to demonstrate my own understanding in true show off style but this merely disguises the problem he was trying to describe. It really doesn’t undermine his argument to say, I’ve only met one English teacher who knows what a sentence is. (See below for definitions.) Like most English teachers, I’m a graduate of English Literature and, like most people my age, I escaped any hint of grammar teaching in my own education. My great good fortune was to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) before becoming a ‘real’ teacher. I had to get to grips with my trusty copy of Michael Swann’s Practical English Usage in fairly short order to be able to field the steady stream of questions about present participles and phrasal verbs. As products of this system, the modern English teacher is very comfortable discussing metaphor, alliteration and other literary techniques but is often rather out of their depths with semi colons and conjunctions. Needless to say, if we don’t know these things, there’s little chance they will! My personal bête noir is the lie that you put a comma where you take a breath. I’ve lost count of the number of children that I’ve had to disabuse of this misapprehension: it is simply not true. That said, knowing that punctuation marks where originally notation for actors on how to read scripts does give some credence to this theory and while it’s still fairly useful advice that you might take a breath where you see a comma, it’s certainly bad advice for our putative writer. So what to do? Well, the teaching of punctuation deserves a post of its own; here it
is my intention to demonstrate how approaching sentence construction from the logical and precise stand point of the mathematician might be helpful. Basically, one has to start by knowing that a sentence contains the following elements: A subject. This is the noun (or noun phrase) about which the sentence is about A verb. This is the process by which the subject interacts with the object. It is not a ‘doing word’. An object. This is (usually)the noun (or noun phrase) with which the subject is interacting. Sometimes it isn’t, so if you’re not happy with object, refer to it as ‘other’. It’s all good. For instance: I (the subject) am (the verb) a teacher (the object). The observant among you may have noticed that I failed to label ‘a’ (an indefinite article) and that’s deliberate. For one, I don’t want to over burden anyone and also they aren’t required in a sentence. A better, purer example perhaps might be: David (subject) loves (verb) English (object). This understanding of the SVO structure can then be applied to existing sentences. Here’s one entirely at random from earlier in the post: Like most English teachers, I’m a graduate of English Literature and, like most people my age, I escaped any hint of grammar teaching in my own education. Now, this is a fairly complex sentence made up of 4 different clauses which I’ll try to deconstruct into its component parts:
And other stuff:
We could then instruct them to write a sentence which did this: S V O; S V O. Or this: V, S O. And, by God, they’d know how to do it! But language is messy. Maths on the other hand is neat and ordered. If algebra makes sense to you, it is a realm of certainties. So, can English harness some of this logic and precision? Can we, as English teachers (and don’t forget that every teacher in English is a teacher of English) give students the mental tools to be able to construct technically accurate sentences? And does it even matter? Some may argue that all this emphasis on grammar stifles creativity. To them I say, pah! We wouldn’t value a mathematician so focused on a creative solution to a problem that they couldn’t add up, or an architect whose ‘creative’ buildings were unbuildable. We value precision in so many other fields, why is it OK for writing to be sloppy? I’m pleased to report that after 8 weeks of an intensive crash course in grammar, my AS class are now able to write. They are so much more thoughtful about how they’re writing rather than just dumping their thoughts on the page. I would argue, and so would they, that this has allowed them to be much more confident and creative in their writing. Most of all, it’s allowed them to decide when, where and why they might want to break the rules. And crucially, none of this need be dull. Just as there are bucket loads of creative, exciting maths teachers out there, so too can there be regiments of outstanding grammarians. Take a leaf out of the wonderful Dancing about Architecture for some excellent ideas on how to combine the physical with the abstract.