Editor:

Christopher Alexander's April 9 commentary, "Make students competent writers," offers a disturbing view of mysterious forces at work in the English composition program, where, Alexander claims, "a graduate student teaching a freshman composition course is instructed not to grade grammatical mistakes" (his emphasis). Not only is Alexander's column inaccurate in my experience of teaching composition, business writing and technical writing for the past four years as an English graduate student, his piece is replete with excessive verbiage (known to many English graduate teaching associates and their composition students as "deadwood"). It is also cowardly, for Alexander does not name his source(s), nor does he quote a single faculty member or administrator in the department or composition program who might have refuted his charges and explained the program's mission. The item reeks of awkward writing such as the noun-phrase pileup "one of the graduate student friends of mine," which Alexander employs rather than naming the student(s) he supposedly interviewed (assuming that he actually has located more sources than one - he says "several," but who are they?). Moreover, the piece maligns without substantial support for counter-argument, a rhetorical flaw Alexander could have learned to avoid in English 101 had he been paying attention.

"Graduate student friends of mine," would certainly elicit an "awk" in the margin if submitted as finished work by a student in one of my sections, where the attention to grammatical correctness, like the attention to structure, content, and style, is exigent, and where returned papers bear the marks of more care about the details of good writing than Alexander has shown in his rather substandard piece. I give him a C- with two weeks to revise.

Ruthe Thompson
English graduate teaching associate