Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/06/06

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Subject: [Leica] Good Writing is Harder Than Good Photography
From: msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)
Date: Mon Jun 6 18:59:44 2005
References: <000701c56aeb$2db0d6b0$121afea9@Hausner> <BECA1B46.16607%mark@rabinergroup.com> <000701c56aeb$2db0d6b0$121afea9@Hausner>

At 09:16 PM 6/6/05 -0400, Tina Manley wrote:

>
>I'm normally a stickler for good grammar and punctuation.  My pet peeve is 
>that most people today, even professional writers, don't know the 
>difference between lie and lay.


Tina

"Lie" and "lay" give me problems on occasion, and they shouldn't, as I have
a working knowledge of Old and Middle English and of the Indo-European
which came before.  My mother and father never had a problem with them, and
the difference is in the English teachers they had in school.

They enjoyed years of the demanding, stiff, formal, grammar-intensive
English teachers who simply required that you get it right to the point
that it was, in the end, simpler to come over to their side than to
continue fighting a losing battle.  Patience, persistence, and perfection,
and they knew and taught them all.

I am 55.  My English teachers were all budding literary critics with one
exception, my 11th grade English teacher, Miss Barbara Sipe, and she was
damned by a literary-criticism curriculum through which she still tried to
teach us real grammar and real syntactical relationships, and I will
cherish her lessons for a long time.

It was only in graduate school that Donald Kagan pulled me aside and gave
me an hour's lecture in his office of just how to write a paper -- before
you submit it, go over it in the mindset of your most bitter enemy, hoping
to find grammatical howlers he can point out to make you seem a fool.  That
lesson stuck, and stuck well.  (I have been chewed up one side and down the
other for the content of my two books and many articles, but no one has yet
found a grammatical mistake in the lot.)  Kagan also taught me that
"hopefully" is an adjective and that it is not a replacement for "I hope
that".

There was an English teacher in a local High School here in Roanoke who
seems to have been much akin to Miss Sipe:  several of her students have
commented on her setting them right on grammatical absurdities.  One of her
students, a real estate agent who is a good friend of mine, taught me the
correct pronunciation of "harass", as well, though the common pronunciation
seems justified historically.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!

NEW FAX NUMBER:  +540-343-8505





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