Gwynne's Grammar by N.M. Gwynne

Author:N.M. Gwynne [Gwynne, N. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35294-9
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

1 For organisational simplicity, the United States Postal Service does in fact abbreviate the names of states down to two capital letters and without the period, as in MA for Massachusetts. Abbreviations for other purposes, however, commonly keep the period, as on signposts giving “The Mass. Pike” to indicate the Massachusetts Turnpike.

CHAPTER 9

Putting What Is Being Learnt into Practice

Many books on grammar, and most of them today, have exercises at the end of each chapter or section of a chapter, to give the pupil practice at what has just been learnt. None are included in this book, and the reason is of some interest. Experience shows that, although practice-exercises in a grammar textbook are useful up to a point, they are useful only up to a point—so much so that it can by no means be certain that they are worth the space that they would take up.

By that I mean that it is an interesting facet of psychology that students, probably especially—though not only—young ones, are only too capable of learning a new grammar rule, doing exercises on it without making any mistakes and then, in their ordinary writing, continuing to break the rule as consistently as they had been breaking it before.

Does this seem improbable? Here is a very experienced schoolmaster of the past, Lancelot Oliphant, in the first chapter of his A Matriculation English Course, confirming what I have found repeatedly in my teaching:

Young people … may, for example, be able to punctuate with meticulous accuracy a piece of prose given them as a punctuation test, but fail to make adequate use of their knowledge of punctuation in their ordinary written work. They may be able to detect the most subtle grammatical errors in “sentences for correction,” and yet unwittingly introduce those identical errors into the very next essay they write. Such undigested knowledge is of little use. You must not only possess the knowledge, but know when and how to apply it.

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