Word: grammars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strikingly craggy face familiar around the boulevards. He also continued to write and yearn for literary immortality. Even when he did gripe about reviewers, one could wonder whether he really cared what they were saying-or even quite understood. "They just said I was a bad writer, bad grammar, blah, blah, blah," he told one interviewer. It was as if the fine points of writing did not matter that much to his work. And perhaps they did not, any more than the fine points of draftsmanship mattered to Grandma Moses when she sat at her pine table...
Such freedom as Colin possesses is merely the badge of his isolation. Coached by his coal-miner father, he has made it past the crucial examinations into grammar school, the English ticket out of the working classes. But the long bus rides, the harsh school regimen, the summers spent working as a farm laborer are only the downpayment on his escape; the price for fulfilling his parents' dream is one that Colin, severed from a past which lingers to haunt him, must keep right on paying...
Traditionally, educators have blamed the fact that Johnny can't write on inadequate training in the basics of grammar and syntax. Not so, says A.D. (for Albert Douglass) Van Nostrand, professor of English at Brown University. He contends that the problem is not so much that Johnny can't parse a sentence as that he can't think. Or more precisely, he cannot think on paper. Even a student who is a whiz at grammar, Van Nostrand argues, may be a dunce at stringing together sentences and organizing paragraphs...
...graying, bespectacled and energetic Harvard Ph.D. (American literature). He had been lecturing on the American novel for 13 years at Brown when, in 1964, he volunteered for a job that his colleagues regarded with horror-teaching the required freshman writing course. His students, he soon found, often had grammar down cold but were shaky about organizing their ideas. Later, as a communications consultant to various business firms, he noticed that many executives labored over letters and short messages that turned out to be nearly incomprehensible anyway. The professor's prescription was to isolate the steps involved in writing...
...little. "I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected," Hine modestly remarked. "I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." This ambition arose quite early. Born in 1874 in Oshkosh, Wis., the son of a coffee vendor, Hine grew up working. "After grammar school in Wisconsin's 'Sawdust City,' " he recalled, "my education was transferred to the manual side of factory, store and bank. Here I lived behind the scenes in the life of the worker." But in 1901 he moved to New York and taught photography-the rudiments...