Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Taking a stand for concision

Half of my department stayed home today, either sick or stuck because of the weather. Several of my commuting students stayed home for similar reasons, and I don't blame them: while the roads here in town are not bad (which is saying a lot for the Land that Snowplows Forgot), the outlying areas are pretty treacherous. I live in one of those outlying areas and I did not enjoy the trip to town this morning.

I did, however, enjoy my 8:00 class, and I have been relishing reading drafts of their papers, even the one that referred to a particular feature of the baseball stadium as the "concision stand." I would like to send a few students to the concision stand: the one who begins 90 percent of his sentences with "There is" or "There are"; the one who loves to turn the simplest of syntax into a quivering mass of embedded "that" clauses; the one whose thesis statement features the phrase "it is to be concluded that." Go to the concision stand and trade in those wordy constructions for more concise expressions; toss out the convoluted institutional syntax and trade up to clear and possibly even elegant sentences. We need a concision stand in every classroom!

Right now, though, we don't even have a teacher in every classroom. But that's okay: the roads will not be treacherous forever, and even the flu will eventually move on--and maybe one day some of my students will discover the concision stand on their own.

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