Sunday, March 4, 2007

"When a writer breaks the rules of word order that govern the English sentence, he usually disturbs the reader at a deep level"E.E 90, the first sentence came into my mind that it tells me how important the correctness of the word order thus the logic of the sentences.Some students due to careless so they pay little attention to that, so it can really make the readers confuse. So I think teach them to be logical in thier writings is very important and in this way, we can help them to build up a more concret foundations of thier techniques of writing.

3 comments:

Amy said...

I don't know, word order mistakes are certainly confusing, but the disturbing types must be rather rare among native speakers. Word order is easy to mess up in a foreign language, but the rules for word order aren't easy to break in your own language due to mere carelessness.

Native speakers will sometimes combine two possible constructions into one that doesn't make much grammatical sense, like starting a sentence with a prepositional phrase and then proceeding as if the object of the preposition is the subject of the sentence. But that's not exactly a word order error. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what errors Shaughnessy has in mind when she mentions word order.

imcriswell said...

Word order is a more complicated problem, better corrected once all of the problems Shaughnessy describes have already been corrected. Of course, the jumbling of word order is often used in corporate documents in order to confuse the reader. It's ironic that the convention is tolerated at that level while it is corrected in the high school and college levels.

wildcat007 said...

"Of course, the jumbling of word order is often used in corporate documents in order to confuse the reader. It's ironic that the convention is tolerated at that level while it is corrected in the high school and college levels."

I would imagine it is tolerated because someone stands to make money in those situations!