Re: I demand that he do, does, would do?

Solo Thesailor wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote:
Solo Thesailor wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote:
.... where I would have used a subjunctive. ....
.....rare indeed to find an engineering person using such terms as 'subjunctive'. Do your students write well?
I no longer have students; I was the victim of a budget cut last year,

Language usage....I would've used 'released to freedom' in place of 'the victim of'. No?

To be technically correct, I took "voluntary" early retirement. My
employer would not have put the scare quotes around "voluntary", but I
do because to me "voluntary" should have implied that there was an
option not to retire. At this time last year I was somewhat bitter about
the fact that the list of names of those who were to go (about 25% of
the staff) had been in existence for about six months but was still a
secret. Even a cat playing with a mouse completes the execution more
rapidly than that. By now, I have of course reached the point of being
pleased with having left the madhouse, but I would have preferred to
have had enough notice to arrange my financial affairs differently.

........discovered that English majors were even worse at writing than engineering students.

That is interesting. A linguist once told me linguists looked for engineers when recruiting because it was recognised engineers had great analytical ability and many were excellent at language. Similarly, at another university the largest group in the music club and particularly the perfoming band was engineers.

Some years ago I supervised a group project where the students had to
produce software to edit and print *** music. One of the students took
a leading role in the project because he knew very much more about fine
points of musical notation than the others. When I spoke to him, he told
me that it was a toss-up whether he was going to enrol for a music
degree or an electrical engineering degree.

Another interesting point: an eminent computer scientist - I think it
was Edsger Dijkstra - once tried to work out what sort of student made
the best computer programmer. His conclusion was that the best predictor
was the student's fluency in his own native language.

Frankly, though, I think the main reason the English majors did so
poorly on writing skills was a consequence of supply and demand. At the
time I made that observation, engineering degrees were so popular that
candidates had to have excellent high school results to get in, while
every man and his dog could get into an Arts degree because of a low
demand. By now the popularity of engineering has fallen (although that
of the arts degrees has not risen), and we'd probably find that the most
articulate students are now in fields like physiotherapy, which is
difficult to get into.

We had one period, years ago now, when people with teaching
qualifications were unemployable because of a huge over-supply of
teachers. (Presumably because nobody had bothered to look at birth
rates.) As an obvious consequence, teaching became an unpopular career
choice, and the only students doing education degrees were those who
were unable to get into anything else. It reached the point where
Education faculties were running classes on remedial spelling and basic
arithmetic, in order to get their students to the point where they could
study more advanced topics. This damaged the school system, in NSW at
least, for a considerable time. I recall mutterings about a local
selective high school (one that took only the most advanced pupils) to
the effect that it was becoming dysfunctional because the pupils were so
much brighter than their teachers. I hope that that unpleasant epoch is
over by now, but I haven't been keeping track.

....a senior newspaperman who complained bitterly that they were hiring people with journalism degrees who couldn't be trusted to string a short sentence together.

This is my bug-bear. (Uh, where did that term pop out from...) Concepts, beliefs, stereotyping, etc are propagated via the media and
there's great room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and follow-the-apparently-majority thinking.

That's not entirely the fault of the journalists. A major problem with
the Australian media - and I think a few other countries share this
problem - is that the owners of the media are dictating what may be
written and said. To make matters worse, the ownership has been
concentrated into a very small number of hands. When I first came to
Newcastle, the "Newcastle Herald" was one of the best newspapers in the
country in terms of lack of editorial bias. The owners owned the paper
but left the content in the hands of the editor. By now that newspaper
has been bought out by one of the major players, and it's just as crappy
as most other papers in the country.

I well recall the time when the newspaper "The Australian" first
appeared. For the first year or two its editorial quality was
impeccable, but the editors kept being sacked because they published
things the owner didn't want published. Finally an editor was found who
was willing to dump journalistic integrity and toe the line. Since that
time, the paper has been good for nothing but wrapping fish. (And it
can't even be used for that, under the current rules for hygiene in fish
shops.)

Whether we admit it or not, we're an elitist group. That's why we're rude to people like P.....

Wondering whether 'elitist' or 'exclusive' or sometimes, not necessarily in the cases mentioned, lacking of greater diversity and
sometimes aggressive/rude to 'ones who are not just like us' to the
point of serious bigotry?? This is an important point for me and I would appreciate your comments.

The newsgroup has had a record of making newcomers unwelcome, and now
and then there have been discussions over whether this is reasonable. My
own feeling is that we're not being unfair, because the bigotry - for
want of a better word - has been directed mainly at those who valued
their own self-importance so highly that they had to let the rest of the
world know about it. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of other people
who have arrived without a great deal of fuss, and settled in to the
point where it seemed as if they had always been there.

I'll skip your comments on various ways to tell people to bugger off, since that's really an offshoot of your discussion with Fran.

I believe posts in newsgroups are by and large for group consumption
and often written for the group audience to respond, unlike in chat
rooms where the exchange is more like conversations. Is that not the
case?

True enough. The other reason was that I had already written enough. I
have to fight my tendency to write lengthy messages, because I know that
long newsgroup postings, no matter how well written, usually end up
being boring.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer
receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet
address could disappear at any time.
.