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

You're quite right, Caz, as long as by "rules" you mean the current
conventions in place in the language group with which I want to communicate.
I don't need to "have a respectable level of knowledge and understanding of
the rules" pertaining to American English if I don't wish to, or need to,
communicate with an American audience. Rules of language are mere
conventions, and they differ from English variant to English variant, as
they have in any particular variant throughout history.
 
Further, someone might be a descriptivist in matters linguistic, but that
doesn't mean that they are necessarily a linguistic anarchist. A
descriptivist who wants to communicate, and communicate as effortlessly as
possible, will consult the contemporary language guides (with their
so-called "rules) of the audience they wish to communicate with. For without
any shared understanding of the meaning of words, punctuation marks,
syntactic structures and the like, there can be no communication. But that
is quite a different matter to arguing that there are absolute rules of
language usage. 
 
As for teachers, they were overly prescriptive prior to the 1970s. Then
there was no language teaching at all (which let everyone down). Now
language teaching has returned to the classroom ... and thank heavens it is
now delivered with a descriptivist bent. This is how we do it; this is how
the Americans do it; this is how the Indians do it; and none is any better
than another. (Crikey, who owns the English language, anyway?)
 
As for Truss, she didn't even have the sense to consider localising her book
on punctuation before it was published in America. No wonder she didn't get
a single positive review in America, only complaints that she was telling
the Americans that their punctuation practices of many many years were
wrong. How dare she. Here here.
 
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
 

  _____  

From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Caz.H
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 7:51 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"


Isn't it always a good rule to have a respectable level of knowledge and
understanding of the rules before one willy-nilly breaks them?  Otherwise
one ends up sounding like an uneducated, tin-eared flibbertigibbet, and it
would be true.  

The positions here strike me as being very much akin to the arguments within
eduction.  That is, there are those (mostly teachers) who don't believe a
solid foundation of basic skills are required before students should be let
loose to attempt the political, social, cultural, ethnic, gender based
analytic equivalent of a somersault with a triple twist and a half pike to
finish, versus those, with ever diminishing influence, who believe that
being able to spell, for example, is essential to, and helps engender, both
thought and expression.

Surely anyone with more than a few synapses firing is capable of adhering to
or discarding rules according to their own judgment and taste.  That's only
possible if they have exposure to the rules in the first place, including
conflicting tomes. 

Carolyn

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