Judy Perry wrote: "For the life of me it just isn't clear why higher ed places such emphasis on where to put commas, dates, and other things over what really ought to be more important, namely, CONTENT."
Another argument I had at SIU Carbondale was why the English department adhered to the Chicago Style Manual and the Linguistics Dept. to the LSA. The latter one was incredibly tedious, insisting that Bibliographic refs. has author's names in 10 point capitals, while everything else was in 12 point. My thesis committee sent my thesis back 5 times for formatting revision! What was more interesting was an obsession held by the Old English prof. about my syntax; something about 'comma splices'. Eventually, having got really upset by the silly prof's going on about this, I went to my TA supervisor ( Dr Lise Weiner - now at McGill ), a wonderful Canadian; she contacted an expert at the Oxford University Press who replied saying something about the pedantic nature of this woman, and what was termed 'a comma splice' was perfectly acceptable in 'British' English. When I went to the United Satets of America I felt extremely refreshed by the seeming capability to be endlessly creative with the English language, which did not seem to be the case in Britain at that time. Then I found that the counterpart to that creativity was an awful stuffiness about English in the University. I failed their "Grammar" test, yet was told that the Free-Writing piece was the best they had ever seen (as far as I remember it was about Samuel Boswell's sexual peccadillos, written in highly colourful and metaphorical language). However, the exultation of FORM over FUNCTION and CONTENT is something that has happened repeatedly in institutions and societies; in religious bodies, educational bodies and so on. I, for one, love that aspect of Runtime Revolution that allows for an extremely high level of flexibility. ------------------------------------ Sivakatirswami wrote: "This one just pushed my buttons...." I apologise, Sivakatirswami, if I 'pushed your buttons'; that was far from my intention. Your comments about profs at Carbondale is generally true, and may be extended to other educational institutions. As an admirer of A.S.Neill, Bryn Purdey, and Kurt Hahn, I would much prefer blowing all educational institutions up and returning to some sort of more anarchistic method for educating people. However, the nature of the societies we live in seems to mitigate against that. I am, myself, in an ambivalent situation, having to teach EFL students who either cannot cope, or are not prepared to put up with a long disquisition about the subjectivity of what constitutes a paragraph. HOWEVER, were RR to include 'PARAGRAPH' in its lexicon of terms that would have to involve some sort of relatively rigid definition. --------------------------- Back to my "Applescript in a Nutshell" (which is an endlessly tedious book): page 430: "A paragraph object is a chunk of text that is terminated by a new line or paragraph character." Can anybody tell me what a 'paragraph character" would be? sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. ____________________________________________________________ A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ____________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
