Richard Braddock

I read with interest Braddock's research on how teachers tell students to put topic sentences where professional writers put them despite evidence that professional writers put topic sentences all over the place, and not always clearly. His research reminds me somewhat of Joseph Williams’ “The Phenomenology of Error” in which Williams pokes fun of prescriptive grammarians who commit the same errors in the same piece they are using as the vehicle to rage against student errors. To make his point in a good-natured way, Williams deliberately inserts 100 errors in his article, marks them in red pencil, gives the marked copy to Maxine Hairston, and challenges readers to get a copy and find them.

I found Williams amusing. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been on both sides of the issue—the rule-promulgator and the rule-breaker. I suspect the notion of what is correct and incorrect runs deep in human beings. Example: When I was twenty-three, I milked cows for four months in on a dairy farm in Washington state. The herdsman was a Mexican who had traveled in the mountains of Mexico as a medic. He said that in each village he stopped, the people spoke a different dialect, and they wouldn’t trust him because he didn’t speak their exact dialect. We humans are often like that.

Interestingly, Braddock concludes by saying he wishes writers would write clear topic sentences, so what he really seems to be against is teachers using false evidence to make a point. He is not as amusing as Williams, but I like that he encourages teachers to think critically about what we tell students to do.