When I was in elementary school, we always had to answer written questions in complete sentences. If the question on the worksheet was "What is the capital of Canada?" we had to write "The capital of Canada is Ottawa." Just writing "Ottawa" was wrong.
It just occurred to me that this rule has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the real world.
5 comments:
Were they perhaps teaching you how to write complete sentences? That's a useful skill.
It's not like we had no opportunity to use complete sentences. We wrote stories and journals and book reports and stuff.
True. It's only recently I realized that all those book reports and stuff we had to write were not so we could learn about the topic.
Yeah, I just recently figured that out about language classes. When the prof asks what I did yesterday, it doesn't matter if what I say is true, I just have to give her a reasonable sentence involving the right grammar features.
I think the complete sentence theory may be correct. I would guess answering written questions came before or at about the same time as the first stories, book reports and journals. It seems getting in the habit of using complete sentences would be good practice for those other forms of writing. It would be just like a teacher to do that, making us practice fundamental communication skills without us even knowing it. :)
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