The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

A community college teacher emphasizes the dynamic aspects of language correctness and helps his students understand that achieving correctness is not simply a matter of following a set of rules. His students write letters and speeches in which they demonstrate the relationships among language, power, purpose, and audience.