by Jerreck McWilliams
Staff writer
Professor Horace “Skip” Robinson, director of the Center for Rhetoric & Professional Development at Southeastern, recently published a book titled “Proper Form: Pure and Simple.”
According to Robinson, the book is a compilation of instructional devices that he developed over his career of teaching English 1113 at Southeastern 40 times.
After accumulating so many semesters’ worth of classes, one might expect Robinson’s book to cover a topic that could be appreciated only by other academics.
That is not the case with “Proper Form: Pure and Simple.” Instead, Robinson has chosen to educate his readers on the basics of English grammar.
“My scholarship will not reveal itself in the book,” Robinson said, “it will be revealed when the reader has comprehended its material.”
Robinson explained that he encounters all too often students in his classes who do not understand the basics of proper sentence structure.
“It’s not to say that these students are deficient in any way,” Robinson said. “They have just never had anyone sit down and explain to them what a gerund is or what a direct object is. There are CEOs of major corporations who do not know proper form.”
Robinson recounted an example of himself as a young college student not knowing proper form.
“When I was a freshman in college, I had a Latin class,” said Robinson. “The teacher told us that we were going to conjugate verbs tomorrow. The first thing I did when I went home, got my dictionary and read to figure out what conjugation was.”
According to Robinson, there are many reasons students come to college and leave without knowing proper form. Anything from personal trauma during the learning experience to simple laziness could account for this. No matter the reason, Robinson professed that the knowledge of proper form is essential to the modern professional.
“Nowadays, businesses don’t have time to teach you,” Robinson said. “They’re going to look at two employees and see that this one knows how to write properly, while the other one doesn’t. The one who doesn’t will reach a plateau, while the one who does can continue to go on and be promoted.”
Because of this importance, Robinson said he wrote his book to be comprehensive to someone of any educational level.
“You cannot assign a grade level to this book,” said Robinson.
To him, the goal of the book is to communicate to the reader as effectively as possible and make it easy for them to learn proper English form without being overwhelmed by the terms of sentence structure.
Robinson compared it to another form of labor that requires skill, construction work, by saying, “If you ask a student to build a wall who’s never done any masonry before, what kind of wall do you think they would make?”
Robinson then explained that by viewing proper form from that perspective, one can understand how the bricks of a sentence – the subject – cannot be put together properly by the mortar – predicate, direct object etc. – without knowing the order in which to assemble them.
Now that his book has been published by a firm in Oregon, Robinson said his goal is to get it approved for the Oklahoma State Department of Education Reading List so that it can be used to teach Oklahoma’s public school students, although there is no guarantee this will happen.
Robinson said he also intends to use his book to teach his rhetoric classes, citing the fact that the book is composed mostly of material which he has been using to teach for the past few years.
Currently, the book is available in the SE campus bookstore.