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

Sorry, can't help myself:  deliciously eviscerating review of Truss's
efforts in The New Yorker -
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books1

The review provides ample examples of punctuation from the book, and they
are clunkers.  As in: self evidently wrong, no second reading required.

I'm so glad I wasn't suckered by the hype, I would have been mightily pissed
off had I wasted my time and money.




On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Geoffrey Marnell
<geoffrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>  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: 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Carolyn Hart

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