<p>I also hate possessive (proper) nouns on welcome mats but it was fun to try to figure out how to write them anyway. Thanks for the Saturday fun bovertine :)</p>
<p>FWIW I put the apostrophe after the s, without an additional s. The Jones’ yard for the Jones family, the Jone’s yard for the Jone family. Never The Jones’s though The Joneses as a plural works for those who try to keep up with them…so I guess if we were talking about a possessive plural it would be The Joneses’ yards?</p>
<p>Sometimes you just get a mental block that’s hard to shake.</p>
<p>I remember on some forum we had a 1000 page argument about an airplane on a conveyor belt. I could sense many posters going off the deep end until it finally clicked for them.</p>
<p>I’m a big fan of clear, coherent, grammatically correct writing. It’s an essential skill for the well educated individual, even those in traditionally STEM or blue collar industries. Oregon students have abysmal writing scores and I believe it’s because these kids don’t write enough.</p>
<p>Teachers either don’t have the time or the inclination to correct essays once a week, so kids read about how to write, rather than actually writing. </p>
<p>DD was mortified freshman year when her paltry writing skills landed her in the “regular” class. Her teacher is the most difficult and feared instructor (and the only nun) in the school and DD HATED Sister You-will-learn-to-write. Students start with a C and anything above that has to be earned. A’s are rare in that class – your basic nightmare for an honors kid focused on the “A.”</p>
<p>Every day DD came home with a two to three page paper covered in red. And every day, DD corrected and rewrote. The strangest thing happened after about 8 weeks – DD improved and the red marks were fewer. By the end of the first semester, Sister You-will-learn-to-write was the favorite teacher. DD got an A in the class.</p>
<p>Agent…my D’s always gotten As in school and I never looked over her shoulder much. She’s in “pre-AP” English (10th grade) this year and on her first paper she got a 79. Distressed, she showed it to me. </p>
<p>Whoa.</p>
<p>Disorganized, no flow, boring despite the many many superlatives she used, apparently trying to liven it up. A red pen wouldn’t be effective here, the whole thing was, IMO, cr@p from thesis to conclusion. Kid is NOT a good writer, though she can spell and her grammar is fine. She loves science and math and has only written as little as she could get away with.</p>
<p>This is the teacher and the year that she will get better. I started helping her, working with her on coming up with an interesting and clear thesis, outline, making a point and carrying through all the way. Her teacher provides a very detailed rubric on which writing is graded, and we work with that.</p>
<p>She re-wrote that paper and got only an 81…next paper I stepped in to help guide her, 89, next one - a bigger research paper, 92…she really is getting it, slowly but surely. There are at least a dozen papers this year, ranging from 2 to 12 pages each. Some are research, some are essays on literature…this teacher is not messing around, she plans to make them all write and write well. I help however I can but am careful never to write FOR her.</p>
<p>I wonder about the kids who never get this experience of feet held to the writing fire.</p>
<p>I’m wondering whether you’re one of those “damned intellectuals need to be put in their types” I’ve observed among some crappy middle school teachers or certain crackpot dictators like Mao Zedong who was fond of sending intellectuals and their families to the countryside to perform forced labor on farms and factories. </p>
<p>One byproduct of that happening in China during the Cultural Revolution from 1966-76 was that all educational/research institutions effectively ground to a halt and a whole generation ended up going without any meaningful education. </p>
<p>So as someone whose great-aunt/uncle and their kids were subjected to that BS, pardon me if I’m reminded of Mao’s idiotic policies and his political hacks calling for the glories of intellectuals being coerced into performing farm/manual labor.</p>
<p>Scientists and mathematicians need to be able to write clearly, just like everyone else.</p>
<p>However, there are differences in scientific writing for other scientists (e.g. journal articles in Nature and Science), scientific writing for the general public (e.g. articles in Scientific American), and writing focused on fictional literature (what is taught in most high school and college English courses).</p>
<p>OHMom: My daughter is also a science and math kid. She will moan and groan about writing for english but can crank out a 12 page paper on physics. The kid can’t spell, but neither can her dad.</p>
<p>What’s wrong with kids getting a job, working on a farm or waiting tables? We have a farmette and both my kids have learned amazing skills just from having to be resourceful.</p>
<p>*“damned intellectuals need to be put in their types” *
Life is out there for the taking cobrat. No one’s consigning smart folks to manual labor as a class statement. So much to be gained from climbing out of our boxes, once in a while. Interacting with all sorts. That’s not anti-intellectual- it can be an expansion of our learning, observation and the practice of our intellectual skills. Sort of a Why Not? Youth is a great time to develop that appreciation for more than our chosen paths. Anyone remember when the Princeton pres did a string of manual labor jobs when on sabbatical, wrote a book?</p>
<p>The fact that we are debating ‘The Caramoff Question’ so fiercely shows that we GET it, how crucial a grasp of good writing is for these kids setting sail. Edwin Newman would be proud.</p>
<p>My 7th grade teacher force-fed it to us under penalty of bad grades and being ostracized by our peers. This nearly 70-year-old woman made grammar & sentence structure a contact sport. And I thank her every day for that, because although I am not in journalism, I have written numerous articles for my trade journals & every EMail I send out is an example of my writing. Not too many throwaway EMails unless it’s in the back-and-forth conversational style when pressed for time & it’s faster than picking up a phone.</p>
<p>I can’t get over how Professor Toby (author of the article that launched this thread) had to retire from college teaching before he read any undergraduate writing. If I were he, I’d have complained to my department chair that all I got to do was teach large lecture classes. Any professors out there want to comment on a whole career spent standing in front of lecture halls filled with hundreds of students? Are there really professors who never teach anything other than jumbo-sized classes?</p>
I don’t know that it was really a debate as much as I was wrong and everybody else was right. Oh well, c’est la vie. (oh no, another apostrophe)</p>
<p>My problem was not so much applying the apostrophe rule but in using the correct noun. I think I’ve got it now, correct me if I’m wrong-</p>
<p>If the house belongs to the Edge family it is the Edges’ house.
If the house belongs to the Edges family it is the Edgeses’ house
If the house belongs to the U2 guitartist it’s The Edge’s house. </p>
<p>The Edgeses example seems wrong to me but I think it is correct.</p>
<p>No wonder they just call it the Moose Lodge</p>
<p>My W’s father was one of those “intellectuals” (actually, a chemist) who was sent to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, and he died an early death because of it. Yet, my W would love for our S to be required to do manual labor for a couple of months, maybe during a summer, and I would support that too. However, I doubt we could get S on board. I suspect he would make an argument similar to cobrat’s and protest “But, but, but… I am an intellectual!”</p>
<p>He taught large lecture classes and required nothing but multiple-choice tests for his entire career? As a “professor,” the man was a fraud. His continued employment does not speak well for the “education” purveyed by Rutgers during his tenure. One can only hope that he was the exception, rather than the rule.</p>
<p>I think that it is very clear at this point that a flexible approach to teaching reading and writing that includes both whole language and phonics, for those that need it, works best. We were exposed to very, very little in the way of phonics when I was a child. I can’t speak for all of my classmates, but I don’t think I needed more. I’m happy that my S, who learned to read fairly early and was an excellent speller, was never forced to sit through phonics and spelling drills because some ideologue thought that “all” children needed them.</p>
<p>Oh good grief, I hope you don’t hurt yourself with that leap! Someone saying that there is no shame and a lot of benefit in a student doing some kind of manual work isn’t even remotely comparable to Mao Zedong, “putting intellectuals in their places,” or forced labor. </p>
<p>I happen to agree a little bit of grunt work never hurt anybody - and it’s not “anti intellectual.” It’s only anti intellectual if you don’t believe you can’t learn life lessons anywhere than in an classroom or from a book or from only the appropriately vetted “smart” people.</p>
<p>No one’s obsessed with the fact that you went to Harvard, Beliavsky. We all know people who have gone there. It’s a great school. That doesn’t make everyone who went there some kind of exalted super-being as you seem to think. I am sorry to say that I know a Harvard grad who sexually abused his adopted daughter. Guess how much his Harvard degree meant to his daughter, huh?</p>
<p>And funny how the guy that you’re smarter than – he’s still your boss. Maybe there is more to getting along in life than SAT scores.</p>
<p>You said in a thread somewhere (not sure if this one) that you work in R&D. With all due respect, you are exemplifying the stereotype of the numbers-driven, can’t-see-outside-the-box stereotype of people in R&D. Which is why people who adhere to that stereotype never seem to understand why they are passed over for management jobs.</p>
<p>“But my SAT’s are higher!” “But I’m not a janitor’s kid!”</p>