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Page hearing Bill describe his experiences as I had, and he'd just say, "I want everyone to read this transformational grammar book for teachers" They simply didn't know where he was coming from. He was so wildly enthusiastic about new ideas;
he simply assumed we would be, too. He was always trying to see how things applied either to improving our teaching or to analyzing sign language. I don't think I've ever seen anyone who was more open to research. I mean he actually read this stuff while most of us were sitting around trying to figure out how to teach a, an, and the.
Bill was reading deeply in the field of linguistics, stuff that the rest of us either couldn't or didn't want to comprehend. Bill was so serious about all of this, one could almost say he was childlike in his enthusiasm. He simply couldn't comprehend that we were not as convinced as he. He really didn't understand it when people couldn't follow him. He was a true intellectual, fascinated by anything that had to do with language.
Covington remembers a particular project on which she, Stokoe, and several other members of the staff collaborated:
We could never connect. He was too theoretical, we were too practical. The generating English sentences project that we worked on was supposed to be a developmental text, but Bill was developing pages and pages of these complicated trees,
diagrams that had been inspired by his reading of transformational grammar. We would spend hours watching him draw trees when we were trying to write grammar. Originally, Bill had been asked to get the book ready for the students to use as a grammar exercise book, but after a couple of years of doing the typing and editing, I just gave up. Bill rewrote the whole text. When the members of the department saw those trees and heard the term "transformational grammar" they branded it as "Bills book" another Calculus of Structure, and wouldn't use it. Our feelings were really very hurt because the exercises were good. Some of the best teachers in the department had worked on that book, but by then we simply couldn't bring ourselves to do it over, to cut down the trees so to speak. So the thing just died. 46

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