One of the first questions I ask when I am Instant Messaging someone who only responds with single words (which is like 99% of Asians on IM) is, "Can you speak in full sentences?". Why? I have found that those who do not prioritise speaking in full sentences are much less likely to realise how important grasping and reinforcing the common sense notion of causality is. And the consequences and consequences of consequences of not doing so. They are much less likely to grasp, without it being pointed out, that there is a reason why Man invented sentences and paragraphs.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=printDevoid of ContentBy STANLEY FISHChicagoWE are at that time of year when millions of Americancollege and high school students will stride acrossthe stage, take diploma in hand and set out to thewider world, most of them utterly unable to write aclear and coherent English sentence. How is thispossible? The answer is simple and even obvious:Students can't write clean English sentences becausethey are not being taught what sentences are.Most composition courses that American students taketoday emphasize content rather than form, on thetheory that if you chew over big ideas long enough,the ability to write about them will (mysteriously)follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and adelusion, and it should be banished from theclassroom. Form is the way.On the first day of my freshman writing class I givethe students this assignment: You will be divided intogroups and by the end of the semester each group willbe expected to have created its own language, completewith a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules fortranslating the text and strategies for teaching yourlanguage to fellow students. The language you createcannot be English or a slightly coded version ofEnglish, but it must be capable of indicating thedistinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood,agency and the like - that English enables us to make.You can imagine the reaction of students who thinkthat "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay,guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribeinhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't theslightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner"and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weekslater - and this happens every time - each group hasproduced a language of incredible sophistication andprecision.How is this near miracle accomplished? The shortanswer is that over the semester the students come tounderstand a single proposition: A sentence is astructure of logical relationships. In its bare form,this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why Iimmediately supplement it with a simple exercise."Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turnthem into a sentence." (The first time I did this thewords were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.)In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences,all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Thencomes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that youdid? What did it take to turn a random list of wordsinto a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling andfalse starts follow, but finally someone says, "I putthe words into a relationship with one another."Once the notion of relationship is on the table, thenext question almost asks itself: what exactly are therelationships? And working with the sentences theyhave created the students quickly realize two things:first, that the possible relationships form a limitedset; and second, that it all comes down to aninteraction of some kind between actors, the actionsthey perform and the objects of those actions.The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explorethe devices by which English indicates anddistinguishes between the various components of theseinteractions. If in every sentence someone is doingsomething to someone or something else, how doesEnglish allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (orwhat) is the doee; and how do you know whether thereis one doer or many; and what tells you that the doeris doing what he or she does in this way and at thistime rather than another?Notice that these are not questions about how aparticular sentence works, but questions about how anysentence works, and the answers will point tosomething very general and abstract. They will point,in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselveswithout content, are necessary to the conveying of anycontent whatsoever, at least in English.Once the students tumble to this point, they are morethan halfway to understanding the semester-long task:they can now construct a language whose forms do thesame work English does, but do it differently.In English, for example, most plurals are formed byadding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way toindicate the difference between singular and plural?Obviously not. But the language you create, I tellthem, must have some regular and abstract way ofconveying that distinction; and so it is with all theother distinctions - between time, manner, spatialrelationships, relationships of hierarchy andsubordination, relationships of equivalence anddifference - languages permit you to signal.In the languages my students devise, the requisitedistinctions are signaled by any number of formaldevices - word order, word endings, prefixes,suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you nameit. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the pointis that they know what it is they are trying to do;the moment they know that, they have succeeded, evenif much of the detailed work remains to be done.AT this stage last semester, the representative of onegroup asked me, "Is it all right if we use the sameroot form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguishbetween them by their order in the sentence?" I couldbarely disguise my elation. If they could formulate aquestion like that one, they had already learned thelesson I was trying to teach them.In the course of learning that lesson, the studentswill naturally and effortlessly conform to therestriction I announce on the first day: "We don't docontent in this class. By that I mean we are notinterested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. Wedon't have an anthology of readings. We don't discusscurrent events. We don't exchange views on hot-buttonissues. We don't tell each other what we think aboutanything - except about how prepositions orparticiples or relative pronouns function." The reasonwe don't do any of these things is that once ideas orthemes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from theforms that make the organization of content possibleto this or that piece of content, usually somerecycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assistedsuicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the deathpenalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, thetask of understanding and mastering linguistic formswill have been replaced by the dubious pleasure ofreproducing the well-worn and terminally dullarguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talkshow.Students who take so-called courses in writing wheresuch topics are the staples of discussion may believe,as their instructors surely do, that they are learninghow to marshal arguments in ways that will improvetheir compositional skills. In fact, they will belearning nothing they couldn't have learned better bysitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. Theywill certainly not be learning anything about howlanguage works; and without a knowledge of howlanguage works they will be unable either to spot theformal breakdown of someone else's language or toprevent the formal breakdown of their own.In my classes, the temptation of content is felt onlyfleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the taskof understanding the structure of language - a taskwith a content deeper than any they have been asked toforgo - they become completely absorbed in it andspontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. Andwhen there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, andsome student voices his or her "opinion" aboutsomething, I don't have to do anything; forimmediately some other student will turn and say, "No,that's content." When that happens, I experience purepedagogical bliss.Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University ofIllinois at Chicago.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=printcheers../balaBala Pillai bala@apic.netKnowledge Economy Brands-in-the-making (since 1995) Sydney, Australia Knowledge Management + Social Networks + Citizen Journalism + Complementary CurrencySee http://www.malaysia.net/bala-interview http://www.ryze.com/go/balahttp://www.malaysia.net http://www.tamil.net http://www.singapore.net http://www.indonesia.net http://www.teleindia.com (soon)Phone: + 61 2 9807 8589 Yahoo IM: bala2pillaiSome people make the world happen, more watch the world happen, most wonder what happened.