Syntax, meaning & lies

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 12, Issue 558, 18 October 1994, Page 4

Syntax, meaning & lies

• A radio report this morning told of concern among certain university teachers about the standard of 'writing' produced by many of their students. Of course by 'writing' they could have meant legibility of handwriting. A few years ago that was something of a problem.

Some people engaged to mark School Certificate and University Entrance scripts stated that they could not mark what they could not read. Others stated that since they were paid a set sum for each script marked they were much less disposed to be liberal with marks when a scrawled script took an hour of their time while an easily read script required only 30 minutes. However I think that by 'writing' precision, unambiguity, and grammar

was meant. I passed Proficiency in 1931 and a few years later entered Teachers Training College. By that time the 'New Education' revolution had been blessed by Dr Beeby, Hon. P. Fraser, et alii. We were instructed that grammar was passe and irrelevant in a society where training for the use of leisure would be essential. Thus grammar became an outlawed word and a forbidden idea in the views of most school inspectors and

headmasters. It puzzled me because at primary school I enjoyed grammar lessons. I think I enjoyed opportunities to get things right. I can remember that in 'Jill has a skipping rope' 'skipping' is a present participle, whereas in ' skipping improves one' s breathing' it is as (a) gerund. I doubt that such knowledge has been particularly profitable for me — except in the study of foreign languages. But syntax and sentence

structure became derelict too, and notions of style. I had the good fortune to have to read the Bible regularly as a boy and I am positive that it influenced my appreciation of style. It meant something to me when a teacher claimed that 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow' is a more effective statement than 'Consider how the lilies of the field grow'. And, to descend from the sublime, a fiery Holly wood actress once said of her estranged husband, 'Him, I would shoot!' Besides all that I can remember someone telling me that punctuation in the Bible could be wrong: it states that Jesus said, 'Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise' and yet He stayed in the grave for three days. The shifting of the comma, could put it right, 'Verily I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in paradise. I felt that was something I could understand. I was about eleven. When I transferred to secondary schools I had to adjust my methods of teaching. In time I found this method to be fairly successful. When marking written work I would print M in the margin whenever there was some kind of grammatical or syntactic error in the adjoining sentence. When a pupil asked what that was for I would say that the meaning of the sentence was not clear and why. Then we would re-write the sentence until it was stating exactly what the child wanted to say. I remember a curious one: 'The boy who fell off his horse's leg was broken and he had to go to hospital.' Kids wanted to be understood and sometimes I'd be tackled during interval, during lunch time, after school and, at least once, I was telephoned. With 6th and 7th forms, I used to copy bizarre, outlandish, or fantastical sentences into my work and often write one on the board a few minutes before the bell went. Then I would call on anyone to tell what it really meant. After the customary flippancies I would say, ' Well one of you wrote it.' That would usually sober them up and we could get down to business. Now I ponder: After sixty years, will grammar receive its due again? Apropos of the recent brouhaha: According to the newspaper the lad's words were, 'That' s a lie', and Mr Bolger's were. 'Are you calling me a liar?' If that is so, I maintain that the lad was merely denying a statement with a statement with no reference to a person. Mr Bolger chose to resort to an 'ad hominem' tactic. Frederic Edward Woods. P.S. The best N.Z. tool for English that I know of is the Style Book published by the Govemment Printer. Another was written by Strunk and White for 'The New Yorker' magazine.