atw: Re: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"

Hi Stuart,
 
Thanks for the response. I like your thought experiment, but why do you
limit it to Strunk and White  versus some desk-thudder of an academic
textbook? There are plenty of mid-ground non-prescriptivist language guides
about that will better equip your imaginary student. (Note the deliberate,
idiomatic split infinitive, with the infinitive understood in the
Common-Man-on-the Clapham Omnibus sense. But Michael Lewis is right.) Try
the works of David Crystal, Pam Peters, and a score of others.
 
I'm staggered that some correspondents to this thread are arguing that
such-and-such a usage should be followed because it is logical or sensible.
What natural language is logical or sensible? Perhaps we should stop using
the irregular nouns and irregular verbs, for they are certainly illogical. I
before E except after C? How ridiculous is that. Let's immediately stop
following that silly rule (with its own silly exceptions). Verb-subject
agreement? Well let's make that logical: I has a problem. You has a problem.
She has a problem. There, that's fixed that. Funny how just some apparent
illogicalites are taken up and others ignored. Poorly repressed school-m'am
fear, I suspect. The old I-was-taught-that-so-it-must-be-right retort. Yes,
and I was taught that the fundamental particles of matter are the proton,
neutron and electron. 
 
Folks, we write to communicate. We don't write to instantiate some Platonic
rule of linguistic perfection. If you want to communicate, you use the
language that your intended audience finds most familiar, not some invention
of gerund-grinders like John Dryden and Lyn Truss. What's the point in never
splitting an infinitive (a la  Clive James) or never stranding a preposition
(a la Dryden) if by doing so your reader is distracted by what they perceive
... yes, a deliberate plural pronoun following a singular subject, with a
history going back to 1492 ... what they perceive to be quaint, archaic,
odd, unidiomatic language. You may be "right" (in some sense) and yet fail
to get your message across due to all the distraction caused by your
so-called correct but non-idiomatic language. Orwell got in right in his
famous 1946 essay when he wrote: 

        "The defence of the English language . has nothing to do with
setting up a 'standard English' which must never be departed from [nor with]
correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes
one's meaning clear ."

So while we are on the subject of thought experiments, here is another one.
Consider Lynn Truss, author of that maddeningly silly book Eats,shoots and
leaves: A zero tolerance approach to punctuation. Suppose Lynn comes down
with an incurable dose of gerund-grinditis. She has made so much money out
of her little book on punctuation that she can afford to go on cryonics. She
gets thawed out in 2409 when a cure for gerund-grinditis is discovered, and
launches into a new book. In it she follows all the so-called inviolable
rules of grammar and punctuation that she was so adamant, back in 2009, were
as sacred and as true as Descartes' cogito ergo sum. But no one finds her
book all that readable. Language has changed dramatically between 2009 and
2409 (as it did between Shakespeare's Elizabethan period and 2009). Would
you say that Lynn Truss, in 2409, was a good writer, even though no-one
found her work particularly readable?
 
Cheers
 
 
Geoffrey Marnell
Principal Consultant
Abelard Consulting Pty Ltd
T: +61 3 9596 3456
F: +61 3 9596 3625
W:  <http://www.abelard.com.au/> www.abelard.com.au
 

  _____  


Here's a thought experiment. A student has the potential to be an excellent
writer but her writing suffers from many of the problems encountered by
Professor Strunk back in the Age of Flappers. I say, "Read this little book.
Some points are outdated but on the whole the advice will make you a much
better writer. Ask me if you have any questions."

Horrified, you glove up and flick EOS into the bin.

"English syntax is a deep and interesting subject," you say. "It is much too
important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions.
What you need is a proper text book, (thud) written by people who've spent
much of their scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way and
who have kept up with the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics."

Which path helps her write better essays?

Stuart

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