After reading this excerpt from The Phenomenology of Error, I do not even know where to begin. There were some very valid points made, but personally I see a lot of this as pure babbling on Williams' part.
The one part of the excerpt that I found very interesting was when Williams' talked about the steps on how an error occurs. He talks about how an error has to start somewhere, to end up on a paper of a student. I agree with how he says this, but also I believe that things change over time. I think that if an error is made enough times, then it starts to become a habit. It is just like when you played the game “telephone” as a kid. Someone starts by saying a phrase or sentence and you try and get the sentence to the end of the line without any errors. There are many times that you will get to the last person and the sentence comes out totally different than when it started. I guess that I am trying to say that errors happen unintentionally all the time. Something might be interpreted wrong or someone hears it wrong, and that is where the error originates. Errors cannot always be caught and therefore that is how errors happen.
Williams' did open my eyes to all of the different errors that someone can make, but he did it in a way that I do not like. Reading this was kind of intimidating and made you feel like you didn't know any of the words in the English language. Even though he explained it in a very complex way, he did get his point across.
I think you're pretty close to his main point, Aarin. The language is purely academic - which can be a little dense/annoying if you're not used to it.
ReplyDelete