I’m excited about my column in this month’s Cambridge grammar newsletter: it’s about a technique to help students move towards the register of academic writing by changing subordinate clauses into relative clauses. The idea came to me when I was teaching our pre-matriculation ESL undergraduates last session. I had several students who were writing quite accurate sentences with interesting content, but in a style that seemed wordy and prosaic. Fortunately, I had just been reading some research in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Ho, 2009) which found that at the university level, more sophisticated writers tend to choose embedded clauses (i.e. restrictive relative clauses) over clauses with subordinate conjunctions (such as because, even though, etc.). We also know that coordinated clauses (and, or, but) are more frequent in spoken, informal, and less mature English (e.g. Brisk & De Rosa, 2014, in de Oliveira and Idding’s great new volume). Sure enough, I was able to pick out sentences in my students’ papers with lots of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that would be more academic and effective with relative clauses, especially when reduced. I think some of it even sunk in! Take a look at the article and the worksheet, and let me know what you think. Next month, in part 2 of this thrilling mini-series, I take on another SFL staple, nominalization. Theory into practice: it really works.
Happy Grammar Day, incidentally.
Nigel Caplan 