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This is an attempt to reconstruct, from memory, a handout that my
eleventh grade English teacher distributed on the first day of class in
September of 1962. I didn't save it. I didn't see any particular need to
save it. I was in eleventh grade at the time, y'know?
First, here is what Mr. Barnett (Or was it Burnett? I'm embarrassed to
admit I don't recall.) explained about the use of the handout and its
history.
He told us that we were to follow each of the rules in everything we
would write for him. He would read each draft we turned in and mark the
first two violations of the rules, after which he would stop reading and
draw a red line across the paper at that point, assigning a provisional
F to the paper. The provisional F would remain until we handed in a
draft with fewer than two errors, at which point he would read the paper
to the end and assign a grade based on its quality. The number of drafts
preceding would not affect the grade. The maximum number of drafts a
person could hand in for any given assignment was seventeen, after which
the F was permanent.
He told us that his freshman composition professor at the college he
attended (University of Minnesota, if I recall correctly) had employed
the same system, with the same handout, but with only fourteen
permissible drafts. As we were still in high school, he thought
seventeen was fairer.
In response to questions about exceptions to rules, he allowed that one
might intentionally and judiciously break the rules once one had learned
to follow them. He discouraged us from doing so in his class, though.
I should add that this was very much a tough love approach, before that
phrase was current. The man was a warm and loving teacher and clearly
enjoyed helping people learn to write. He spent at least part of a class
each week just reading to us, reading beautifully written work and
reading it beautifully (so long as it didn't happen to contain any
French words, which he invariably mangled to our great amusement). He
was scrupulously fair in his grading, and I do not recall ever hearing a
peep of protest about any of the marks he gave. I do not recommend this
method of teaching to anyone who might use it as a way to humiliate
students, but for someone with the right attitude, I think it could
still be an effective antidote to several years of Whole Language
instruction and protecting our children's fragile self-esteem by
refusing to correct their work.
The Rules, to the Best of My Recollection
1. Spell and punctuate with care.
2. Memorize and follow all of the rules in _Warriner's Handbook of
English_ [which would be the Harbrace Handook today, I believe].
3. Double-space and maintain one-and-one-half-inch margins on all sides.
4. Avoid unintentional shifts in person, gender, number, and tense.
5. Avoid contractions.
6. Do not use abbreviations.
7. Avoid slang, vulgarity, and colloquial expressions.
8. Avoid a "dashy" style.
9. Avoid excessive use of quotation marks [a bit of self-referential
irony here that was not lost on us 15-year-olds].
10. Avoid excessive use of parentheses.
11. Maintain parallel construction.
12. Do not begin a sentence with an expletive ("It is," "There is")
13. Do not confuse "that" and "which."
14. And do not begin a sentence with a conjunction.
15. Avoid the passive voice.
16. Take care that every pronoun you use has the appropriate antecedent.
17. Vary sentence structure to maintain the reader's interest.
18. Begin each paragraph with a lead sentence. Each paragraph should
express a complete thought.
19. Maintain unity, emphasis, and coherence throughout.
20. If you find a sentence in your essay that you are particularly fond
of, delete it. [I like Bruce Byfield's version better. He wrote: "I've
heard this rule formulated in two ways. One of my teachers phrased it as
"'Murder your darlings.' Robert Graves said, 'The writer's best friend
is the wastebasket.'"]
21. If you have three arguments that support your thesis, place the
weakest of them in the middle and the strongest at the end.
I am certain the list was longer than this by perhaps two or three
items, and the sequence above is only approximate.
Dick
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