Can I just burn our English book already?

[Kuyerjudd]

Hi there,

In our English class, we were forced to buy an English book written by the professors of the college in which I study. I have no problem with that and the fact that the number one rule at school is "nothing is compulsory," but the thing is that it's terribly written. I lost two points off an exercise because of a 'stray' adverb.

In the chapter passage it says: "It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary" (or something like that).

But in the True or False exercise, it says, "It would take nearly three days to read the English dictionary."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't "whole" and "nearly" two different things?

And here's another brilliant one:

"1. English continues to grow through borrowing, which means ______.

a. inventing
b. buying
c. acquiring
d. lending"

I was convinced the correct answer was "c. acquiring." Imagine my surprise when our English prof said it was "d. lending."

College may be all too new for me but even I know that lending and borrowing don't mean the same thing.

Furthermore, upon inspection (i.e., visually editing the book and leaving proofread marks), the monstrosity should not have been published and forced upon the minds of students in the college I go to.

Now, how would a freshman student like me go about fixing this (if the question is at all appropriate where I posted this)?

[Joe Carillo]

You’re absolutely right! The words “whole” and “nearly” are two entirely different things and it looks like the authors of that English book—all professors of your college, as you say—are semantically insensitive and have no business writing English-usage books at all. In the context of the usage you cited, my digital Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines those two words as follows:

whole
“3 a : constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety  : ENTIRE  <owns the whole island>  b : each or all of the  <took part in the whole series of athletic events>”

nearly
1 : in a close manner or relationship  <nearly related>
2 a : almost but not quite  <nearly identical>  <nearly a year later>  b : to the least extent  <not nearly as good as we expected>

So, if the passage in the chapter under study says “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary,” it would be semantically wrong to say that the following statement is True: “It would take nearly three days to read the English dictionary.” It would be False because “nearly three days” is not the same as “three whole days.” Even if the adverb “nearly” is changed to “almost,” the statement would still be False. The only adverb that could conceivably make that statement True is “exactly,” but then it would have shown that the original statement itself, that “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary,” is semantically defective and, to be frank about it, unrealistic, imprecise, illogical, and almost absurd.

The sentence “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary” is, to begin with, not an appropriate referent statement for the True and False question because its parameters are highly questionable and not well-thought-out. Below are three fatal semantic defects of that statement:

1. English dictionaries vary widely in number of entries and textual content. The highly abridged ones may have only a few thousand word entries with very brief definitions, thus making them fit in just a few hundred pages. My Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate, however, has 165,000 entries and 225,000 definitions in all, and runs to a total of 1,624 pages; the unabridged Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, on the other hand, lists 450,000 words and 10,000,000 usage examples, and runs to 2,662 pages. And the latest printed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary consists of 20 volumes, with a total of 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. Clearly then, it would take much more than just “three whole days”—in actuality probably several months or years—to read a respectably sizable dictionary straight and without stopping (a very bad idea to begin with), so to say that “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary” is a badly informed statement and is nothing less than puerile, bad thinking.

2. People read at widely varying speeds, so assuming that they start reading a copy of the same reasonably authoritative dictionary simultaneously and do so until the last page, it would take them a highly variable number of weeks or months to do so. With this fact taken into account, the statement that “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary” becomes even more unrealistic and absurd.

3. The statement that “It takes three whole days to read the English dictionary” is actually a semantic cop-out because it doesn’t identify the person who takes only that long to read the English dictionary. If the statement at least said that a speed-reading world champion can do that and if at least specified a particular abridged dictionary, perhaps it would have acquired at least a bit of verisimilitude or truth. As it is, however, the statement is bizarre and definitely out of this world.

Now, as to this filling-the-blank test statement:

“1. English continues to grow through borrowing, which means ______.

a. inventing
b. buying
c. acquiring
d. lending”

You’re absolutely right! The correct answer should be “acquiring,” not “lending” as your English professor said. In the context of that statement, “borrowing” means “to appropriate for one’s own use,” “to derive,” or “to adopt,” definitely not “to lend.” The action of “borrowing” in this context is that of the entity making the acquisition, not of the entity from which the acquisition is taken.

In sum, Kuyerjudd, if indeed the authors of that English book are blind to these distinctions between “borrowing” and “lending,” and couldn’t even compose a proper and logical True-or-False question, then I agree with you that it would be dangerous to make those professors continue teaching English, and even more dangerous for them to be allowed to write English-usage textbooks.

So, you ask, how should a college freshman student like you go about fixing this very serious problem? You’ve actually made a very good start by describing your predicament in this Forum. Just keep on doing so whenever you discover patently absurd things about English and language in general that are being taught or being foisted on you in school or elsewhere. And yes, I think you are well-advised to burn that English-usage book authored by those professors. You may do it right now, but please do it in a place where it’s safe and where you won’t start a major conflagration.

[Joe Carillo]

RELATED READING:
Regional education official orders pullout of set of error-riddled English workbooks being used in Lipa City’s 66 public elementary schools (July 12, 2010).

Read “The workbooks that need more work” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer now!

[Kuyerjudd]

"Many of the errors in the workbooks are obviously encoding errors that could have been caught by proofreading. A [G]ood editing would have done wonders for the workbooks." I actually don't have any problem with workbooks being badly-written, as long as they're not about English-usage. And, sure, I guess they make a valid point there, saying a badly-written book is better than no book, but it just ticks me off that they force that stuff on students.

***

I've finished reading the whole book. Not all of it is badly-written; I figure it's just the parts that one terrible writer wrote. Although, I do have to say that even the parts that were "okay" lack proper editing, with all the orphans and widows, and annoying mid-paragraph breaks -- oh, and don't get me started on the alignment! They could have at least proofread it.

Also, there was this section on how to write summaries. They used a summary of Twilight that was taken off some site. The URL was scattered across the page, which made me question if the writers knew what a bibliography was. Plus, why Twilight? Couldn't they have used Literary Fiction? It's not that I despise Twilight (and that's not to say that I don't), but wouldn't a book like "Tuesdays with Morrie" or "The Five People you meet in Heaven" make more sense in a college-based workbook? Sure, it easily captures the attention of its teenage readers, but a terribly written summary of half of Twilight taken off some shady website? 

The exercise after the section begins with the phrase, "Assuming all of you have read Twilight[...]." And then I couldn't read on without cringing.

And then there's another multiple choice question in the Critical Reading section (before which were paragraphs you had to read to answer said questions):

"3. 'He felt that something ominous is about to happen.' Ominous means _______.

a. Good
b. Evil
c. Jolly
d. Great"

I tell you, it's like reading a book meant for grade-schoolers; and also, that's supposed to be "was" there, right?

***

Once, our professor corrected part of a paragraph in the book, in class. I guess that's all good, but I couldn't help laughing silently to myself.

[Joe Carillo]

I'm glad to know that you didn't burn that problematic English-usage book after all. I can see that it gave you a lot of practice not only in proofreading but also in copyediting and styling. As some wag has said, even bad things have their uses.

You're right, of course, that in the sentence "He felt that something ominous is about to happen," the verb "is" should be in the past tense "was" because the reporting verb is in the past tense. The grammar rule here is that when the reporting verb is in the past tense, the verb in the reported statement--in this case "is" in "Something ominous is about to happen"--takes one tense backwards. This means that the reported statement should be constructed this way: "He felt that something ominous was about to happen."

[Kuyerjudd]

I sort of agree, but when the bad grammar and terrible semantic sensitivity the authors have in writing the book affect my grades, that's where I draw the line! Just this week, we had a seat work, and I failed, with only seven out of fifteen questions right.

The analogy part of the exercise has three questionable questions (no pun intended):

"1. Author:Writer

A. Publisher:Printer
B. Reader:Scholar
C. Lawyer:Litigant
D. Doctor:Patient"

I was sure the closest pair was A. Can you imagine my shock when the professor said it was B? *facedesk*

"2. Book:Page

A. House:Room
B. Sea:Ship
C. Rooster:Hen
D. Title:Content"

I answered A. The "correct" answer was B.

"3. Evaluate:Examine

A. Scope:Distance
B. Study:Probe
C. Rehearse:Exercise
D. Summarize:Recap"

I answered B (but C and D are possible answers, too), but the professor said the correct answer was A. This is wrong in so many levels, especially since the given pair are verbs and choice A has nouns. That isn't analogically correct, is it?

Shocking, really. It's as if we were meant to choose the pair least likely to match the given pair, sort of like an anti-analogy test. But the thing is, there weren't any instructions. It just has the test title in bold text, "B. ANALOGY," and nothing else. The author was really careless here. 

But then it becomes less a question on neglecting to put instructions than a question on whether or not the writers actually know what they're doing. Take these questions from the sentence completion test for example:

"1. The introductory part of the book which often summarizes the purpose of writing can be referred to as ________ or __________.

A. Index ... Glossary
B. Front Cover ... Title Page
C. Details of publication ... copyright
D. Preface ... Foreword"

Firstly, the "often" there is unnecessary. I mean, if that's the part's function, then why should it NOT "often" serve its purpose, right? The writers of the book obviously don't know how to use adverbs efficiently; and ironically, there is a section on Rhetorics in the book!

Second, the sentence is missing two "the" determiners before each blank.

Lastly, our professor said the answer was B, when I was convinced it was D.

And then:

"5. This indicates the materials used in the texts and shows whether the writer is up-to-date and thorough in his approach. This is ___________.

A. Glossary
B. Bibliography
C. Acknowledgements
D. Contents"

So, our prof got the answer right (I think), with B. But then, the sentence structure is a bit offish:

1) "Whether" is usually accompanied with an "or" statement, as in "whether or not..." or "whether ... or...."

2) It's missing a "the" determiner before the blank.

3) It's just plain offensive and hypocritical to me, as a writer myself. (So, that was a bit subjective, but can you blame me?)



After all these, I thought that maybe the answer key had typos, but then I remembered that even if there were typos, our English professor should've been aware of all these things as a COLLEGE PROFESSOR.

And the worst part is that she genuinely doesn't have any idea about these errors.

I really want to approach her and just give her my copy, which I edited, but I don't want to seem impertinent, and also as I am afraid of getting a 5 at the end of the semester.

But I am appalled at her blaming the typist for these errors. Sure, spelling is still excusable, but you have to draw a line for the grammar and semantics of what they "write."

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that the mean, old professor doesn't let students take the quizzes in the book unless they've bought a copy for themselves, which is why I can't really burn it. I have since referred to commenting on it here as figuratively burning it.

[Joe Carillo]

I sympathize with you and your classmates for having been obliged to answer what I believe are very incompetently formulated and semantically insensitive analogy tests, and then forced to accept your professor’s far-out irrelevant and incoherent answers for them. Having managed an English-proficiency test development group for nearly five years, I can tell you with a fair degree of certitude that only Test Item No.1 could conceivably have a correct and logically defensible answer, and that correct answer is A and definitely not B as declared by your professor. The other two tests, Test Item No. 1 and No. 2, No. 3, fail miserably as analogy tests because all of their answer choices are absurd and nonsensical. Indeed, if I were asked to take those two tests, I would have failed to answer them correctly myself. This is because in the case of those two particular test items, only the person who developed the test question could really be sure of the correct answer—and only because he had arbitrarily planted in his mind that it’s the correct answer and not really because it’s truly analogous to the idea-pair that it’s being compared with.

Now for the particulars…

For Test Item 1, I think you were correct when you chose A as the correct answer. “Publisher:Printer” is analogous to “Author:Writer” in the sense that they are practically synonymous—both pairs being in the same business of producing the printed word. “Reader: Scholar” definitely couldn’t be analogous to “Publisher: Printer” because “Reader” has nothing conceptually in common with “Scholar,” so by no stretch of the methodical imagination could B be the correct answer. Of course, both “C. Lawyer:Litigant” and “Doctor:Patient” are obviously wrong answers themselves because the elements in each set are opposites.     

Test Item “2. Book:Page” is, to my mind, a totally absurd analogy test. There’s no commonality whatsoever between that pair and any of the pairs in the four answer choices. In other words, there’s no correct answer to the test question, and it’s total balderdash to claim that “Sea:Ship” is analogous enough to “Book:Page” to be the correct answer. It’s not, for the simple reason that there’s nothing common to the two pairs. For the same reason, A—your answer—is also wrong, but so are “C. Rooster:Hen” and “D. Title:Content.”

Test Item “3. Evaluate:Examine” is, like Test Item 2, is a similarly absurd analogy test for which there is no logically and semantically correct answer. Only by a perverse logic could “Scope:Distance” be the correct answer as your professor declared, but all the other answer choices are actually in the same tottering boat. And I must say, too, that I disagree with you that C and D are possibly correct answers. To my mind, there’s absolutely no correct answer to that test item.   

As to the two sentence-completion tests you cited, I agree with your observations. Those test statements are seriously flawed both semantically and grammatically, and I’m afraid that the problem isn’t due simply to bad proofreading and typographical errors. Like the analogy tests, those sentence-completion tests are incompetently formulated and semantically insensitive.

It’s really horrible how this state of affairs could be happening in your particular English class and in your particular college, but there it is. In the end, I guess, it’s when more students like you, making use of their God-given powers of logical thinking, shall have become courageous enough to bring these problems to light that this country could solve them not only in a piecemeal but in a broader and lasting way.

[Kuyerjudd]

But doesn't a book contain pages just as a house has rooms in it?

***

And I just have to ask. Is a gerund classified as a noun or a verb? I know it's essentially a verb that's used as another part of speech (a verbal), but there was an activity in the book where you had to get certain words of each part of speech (particularly a "Verb," a "Noun/Object," and a "Prepositional Phrase") from each part of a book.

(And, also, it just says in the instructions, that we may use "any book," and not "any non-fiction book," because a fiction book would not contain most of the parts which we had to check the words for.)

So, anyway, I had no problem with it, except for the last item, which was to check the "References" part of the book. As you may well know, that part of the book contains only titles of books the writer used as reference in writing his work, and you can just imagine how difficult it was looking for verbs in all the titles and names.

Some titles in our English book's "References" section are: "Contexts: Writing and Reading," "Psychic Reading with an Architect," and "Teaching Children Literary Skills in a Second Language."

My classmates put the gerunds under "Verb," but I argued that they didn't function as verbs in the books' titles.

And I seriously didn't get the whole point in suddenly focusing on grammar when the section of the book was clearly discussing the parts of a book, and more specifically, a non-fiction book. 

[Joe Carillo]

That’s right, a book contains pages just as a house has rooms in it, but you said that the professor specified the correct answer to be “Sea:Ship.” As they say, you can’t buck city hall, which can do no wrong. When the author of the test himself or herself insists on a logically wrong answer to a test question, what it means is that he or she really believes that it’s the correct answer. Of course, it also means that the thought process in making that question was logically flawed, and that the test item itself is defective and has no logically correct answer. In fact, Kuyerjudd, I’m beginning to suspect that the instructions for some of the analogy tests you described might not have been given properly to begin with. In Test Item No. 3, in particular, if your professor indeed insisted that the correct answer is “Scope:Distance,” then he or she must have been proceeding under the assumption that the test-taker was to look for the least analogous answer rather than the most analogous one. It’s either this or the test developer wasn’t semantically sensitive and competent enough to be making analogy tests. 

***

A gerund, of course, functions as a noun, no longer as a verb. It was therefore wrong for your classmates to classify gerunds as verbs, even if the base words of those gerunds are verbs. And yes, I agree with you that in a test for identifying parts of a book, it doesn’t make sense to be asking students to classify words found in the reference section into their respective parts of speech. Something’s terribly wrong in the testing situation you have described.

[Joe Carillo]

Education department to hold seminar on error-avoidance in textbooks

The latest news about the sick textbooks affair is that the Philippine Department of Education is going to hold a seminar this coming August 5 on how to avoid errors in public school textbooks. The seminar will be attended by education officials, authors, and publishing houses.

According to a news report in the July 21 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “sick books” crusader Antonio Calipjo-Go would be talking the whole morning of that day as a resource person. It will be recalled that Mr. Go, academic supervisor of Marian School of Quezon City, had been slapped with libel suits because of his one-man crusade against error-riddled books being used in the Philippine public school system.

But one big question that remains is this: When will the same effort be undertaken for error-riddled textbooks in the Philippine private schools? Aren't private school students and pupils equally entitled to have error-free textbooks as their public school counterparts? 

Read “DepEd invites ‘sick books’ crusader to face authors” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer now!

[Kuyerjudd]

Oh, thank god! I study at a public school, and I hope they invited the professors at our college. They could learn a thing or two. I mean, not all of them. Just the ones that write for more income (and then force us students to buy and read their books).

So, basically, CHED has no say in this?

I hope they know the authors/professors are (figuratively) shoving error-riddled books down our throats where I'm from. Is there any way for a non-education-official like me to attend the seminar, so I may address the concern? Or could somebody else do it for me? I would really like the government to know what's going on.

But you know, I can't really blame my English professor now, after I found out our college wasn't giving her and the other faculty members proper wages. I mean, they have to come up with income-generating projects, like books. And since no one in his right mind would dare buy a clearly badly-written book, the authors sick 'em on the students.

I study at a state university, and the government basically funds all the expenses. The way I see it, if they'd have provided public schools with enough money to pay their teachers, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.  I mean, it's probably not that they don't, but you know....

Oh, and my English professor found out about her book being butchered on the Internet. I have yet to see how she reacts.  I don't even know how she found out. I haven't even mentioned her name or her book's! (Maybe it was the "burning" that gave me away.) 

[Joe Carillo]

Rather belatedly, I'm posting this note of a U.S.-based Filipino reader, Roger Alvarez, regarding the matter of the error-riddled public school textbooks in the Philippines:

July 17, 2010

Dear Mr. Carillo,
 
I do not remember having these kind of problems with our English courses in both high school and engineering school.  Of course, I do not remember our textbooks and I do not remember some of our teachers (from late 1950's and early 1960's) but they were never bad; a few may have been mediocre but they were never bad.  Does this mean that English instruction in the Philippines deteriorated over the last 40-50 years or is this an exceptionally bad sample case?  Please let me know what you think.

My best regards!

Roger Alvarez

Comments, please!

[Kuyerjudd]

I don't think so. I studied at a private high school, and the English classes I had were okay. It may just be my current school ... or maybe I've just become more sensitive to these things lately that I never really noticed back then.

Also, what I don't get is how my English professor can be the editor-in-chief of a magazine, aside from her many other writerly-related credentials, and NOT see the difference between "nearly" and "whole." She also gave a lecture on how "Filipino English" is bad, and yet many of the errors in her book constitute that which she impugns.

Actually, I may have to agree with Mr. Alvarez that the English instruction in the Philippines may have deteriorated. Our lesson proper consists of my professor's life (which is inclusive of her love interests, her many accomplishments, and her so-called writerly exploits) and only snippets about English. She even talks in Enggalog for about 50% of the time she spends in the classroom.

The subject she teaches us involves only the "thinking skills in English," but, I don't know, does that grant her freedom to use both languages? I mean, sure, maybe if her students couldn't understand English and she had to go back to basics, but in this case, it just makes her look hypocritical (both because of her badly-written book and the way she teaches).

And, again, I must emphasize that she even blamed "the typist" for the many errors in the book, which is just plain stupid, as most of the errors had little to do with spelling and spacing, and more, grammar. It is the writer's duty to edit the book if an editor is unavailable.

So, yes, maybe the English instruction in the Philippines has deteriorated after all....