Notes from the underground A descriptivist’s journey into the land of prescriptivists
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Abstract
In the summer of 1980, I was offered a tenure-track position, teaching linguistics and ESL in the English Department at Indiana State University. Like many graduate students in linguistics these days, I had been a teaching assistant all through graduate school, so I was not overly
worried about teaching linguistics and ESL. The catch, however, was that I was entering an English Department in which every faculty member teaches at least one freshman composition course each semester. Needless to say, Assistant Professors teach more, and there are no exceptions. I had never even taken freshman composition; I certainly did not feel qualified to teach it, nor did I have the time in the month before I started to learn everything. Now, four years and seventeen sections of remedial freshman writing later, I would like to help pave the way for other
linguists who find themselves in a similar situation by describing the steps one might take and the problems that are often encountered.
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