We were talking about the space between
us all
And the people who hide themselves
behind a wall of
illusion.
-George Harrison
How about prepositional
phrases? You are probably remembering instances (likely, fairly
often) of lengthy sentences, developed, almost yeoman-like, with
enough prepositions to fill a handbook:
We drove along the endless highway towards the setting sun in a
red Convertible with a
million dollars in the truck for our vacation in Mexico.
Students’ ability to
proliferate the prepositional phrase is astonishing. And more than
a little impressive. Or so says David Bloomer, psychologist from
MIT. In a recent article, Bloomer claims that he has been able to
deduce, fairly accurately, a student’s IQ from the number of
prepositional phrases she uses in an essay. The more abundant the
phrases, the higher the intelligence quotient.
Sort of.
Bloomer’s formula is not based
simply on the number of phrases, but also the placement of them.
Adding a slew of phrases to the end of the sentence, as in my
example above, is not as impressive as when a student will vary
placement: using prepositional phrases at the beginning, in the
middle, and at the end of sentences in an essay. That flexibility
with phrases, says Bloomer, “is a surprisingly acute measurement of
a person’s intellectual capacity overall” (73). The connection
between the use of words like “of” and mental prowess is a new
argument, a subtle teasing out of linguistic clues in order to
glean a better picture of the person behind them.
Bloomer studied writing
examples from over 2,500 high school students in the Boston area,
comparing their writing with the scores from the Wechsler exam for
intelligence. In the writing prompts, students were asked to write
a response to an excerpt from an article by George Plimpton.
Bloomer broke down the writing samples into T-units—a T-unit was
originally defined by Kellogg Hunt in 1965 as the “minimally
terminable unit” of a sentence (or, in Ed Varva’s words,
“essentially a main clause [. . . ] including all subordinate
clauses and other constructions that go with it”). Once Bloomer had
the T-units, he then counted the number of prepositional phrases in
each writing sample, calculated the ratio between phrases and
T-units, and then catalogued the positions of the phrases:
introductory, interruptive, or conclusive.
The students who scored highest
on the IQ test had the highest T-unit to prepositional phrase
ratio, and also had the greatest variability in the positioning of
their phrases. The upper five percent of these students accounted
for 43% of the interruptive phrases. Those who scored at the median
or below on the IQ exam tended to use prepositional phrases mostly
in the conclusive position, and had fewer prepositional phrases in
their writing overall. “Obviously,” argues Bloomer, “we can now
begin to measure intelligence through rhetorical acuity, and
presume a higher correlation between syntax and mental ability than
previously” (81). Bloomer’s research also indicated that the
variety of T-unit length was greatest with this group of students.
Not everyone, though, is
following Bloomer. Mark Newman, of Stanford, in a sharp review of
Bloomer’s work, says the study “should be relegated to the sandbox
on the linguistic playground” (22). Bloomer fails to convince that
any correlation exists, and fails to account for the idea that
prepositional usage is an imitative activity as much as an
indicative one. “If a writer,” says Newman, “has been exposed to
the linguistic habit of varying prepositional usage, then the
writer will be more likely to produce those variations in her own
writing. The prompt is cultural, not intellectual” (25).
There is also the problem of
the writing prompt itself, an excerpt that has few prepositional
phrases, and, should students be imitating the style of Plimpton’s
writing in their own replies, there would be little incentive to
make the stylistic choices that would lead to an abundance of
prepositional phrases. Other studies (Clapton 1984; Heath 1983;
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, 1990) have shown that students often
“throw back” the language used on tests when forming their answers.
Bloomer fails to account for that in his study.
The fallout from this argument,
for those of us interested in writing in our classrooms, is not
necessarily minor. Certainly, teachers have long considered more
complex sentence structures as a marker of student performance, but
to fasten those sentences so firmly to intellectual capability
could be problematic. Instead of working with students to expand
their syntactical repertoire, teachers could, with Bloomer’s lead,
attribute the lack of complexity to mental deficiency.
Bloomer does argue against that
move, acknowledging towards the end of his piece that the study has
a limited scope, especially given the idea of multiple
intelligences put forth by Howard Gardner and others. Also, in a
wonderful turn at the end of the piece, Bloomer cites his own
article as an example of a work that would suggest a lower IQ if
read through the lens of his study (he utilizes fewer prepositional
phrases per T-units than many of the students studied, and he has a
penchant for introductory positioning). In short, Bloomer’s
proposition of prepositions, by most accounts, fails to convince.
But, the idea of varying
prepositional phrases is a good one. Students should be given
incentive for learning when and how they can include information in
their writing, and should consider how to vary the positioning of
prepositional phrases, and to match up their use of them with the
conventions of whatever writing situation they find themselves in.
They might not be heading to Mexico in a red convertible with a
million dollars in the trunk, but they can, in many ways, head
towards better writing with a supply of phrases that will serve
their sentences well.
So, by all means, consider how
your students use prepositional phrases. Count them. Compare them.
Encourage them. Before you do, though, be sure to review the
opening sentences of this article. For, as much as I am interested
in the placement of prepositional phrases in sentences, I’m also
intrigued by the first letters of sequential words, and what they
can tell us about writing, too.
Works Cited
Bloomer, David. “’Before, On,
After’: Prepositional Phrases as a Marker of the Intelligence
Quotient.”
Studies in Psychology and Linguistics 84 (April
2003): 61-100.
Clapton, Erich. “Following
Orders: Student Answers Mimic Teacher Language.” Academic
Inquiry
44 (April 1984): 23-47.
Emerson, Ralph, Ina Lake, and
Robert Palmer. “The Machine Responds: A Longitudinal Study of
Student Replies to Short-Answer Questions Across Disciplines,
with Both Pre- and Post-Test
Variables.” TMT Journal 56 (April 1990): 2-5.
Heath, Shirley Brice. ways
with words: language, life, and work in communities and classroom.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Newman, Mark. “’After’ the
Fact: A Rebuttal.” Linguistics and Us: A Contemporary Journal.
002
(April 2004): 20, 22, 25, and 33.
Varva, Ed. “Definitions of the
‘T-Unit.’” 9 June 1999. <http://nweb.pct.edu/homepage/staff/
evavra/ED498/Essay009_Def_TUnit.htm.>
__________________________________________________________________________________
MM
If you have comments or
questions on this piece or others, or suggestions for future
topics, please call or email: 426-3585 or
michaelmattison@boisestate.edu