[lg policy] Talking About Grammar Pedantry

Mon Mar 23 15:43:05 UTC 2015

Lingua Franca <http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca>

Language and writing in academe.
  March 23, 2015 by Anne Curzan
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/author/acurzan/>
Talking About Grammar Pedantry

Seven hundred and seventeen comments in four days. The readers of *The* *Wall
Street Journal* have many feelings about grammar.

On March 13, the *Wall Street Journal* published an essay
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/there-is-no-proper-english-1426258286> by
Oliver Kamm titled “There Is No ‘Proper English.’” In it Kamm makes
arguments with which I wholeheartedly agree, including: The English
language is not in deep decline; a wide range of variants are all
grammatical in the descriptive sense; Standard English is not “correct” and
all other dialects are not “improper” or “incorrect”; we need to pay close
attention to how people actually use the language as opposed to just how we
think they should use the language; people should not be discriminated
against based on their dialects; and language instruction should aim to
help speakers and writers address different audiences as effectively as
possible within that register.

I was delighted to see these perspectives getting aired — and debated — on *The
Wall Street Journal* website.

At the same time, I found myself mulling over the effectiveness of a couple
of the rhetorical strategies Kamm employs to present these linguistically
informed perspectives. In particular, I found myself thinking about loaded
words like *superstition* and *stupid*.

I am no fan of grammatical pedantry, as I have written about on this blog
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/08/14/dinging-for-grammatical-errors/>.
And I agree with Kamm that we could and should relax about some of the
stylistic variation that is available to us as writers (e.g., ending a
sentence with a preposition or pied-piping it — *That’s the rule I was
referring to* vs. *That’s the rule to which I was referring*). We may find
one variant more aesthetically pleasing or more formal than the other, but
there is no good reason to call one “proper” and one “improper” in some
more universal sense.

What may get lost in headlines like “There Is No ‘Proper English’” (and I
don’t hold Kamm responsible for the headline, as I know headlines often get
added by editors) is the point that there is nonetheless a cultural and
social value in standard English. Standard English, like all standard
languages, can serve as a kind of lingua franca, especially in writing, for
people who use different dialects. It also provides a target for speakers
learning English as a second or foreign language. The problems emerge when
standard English gets mistakenly equated with “the only kind of
good/right/correct English.” Kamm notes, later in the article, that
teaching the conventions of standard English is “vital,” but the comments
to the article suggest that this point was largely drowned out by the
assertion that most of the grammar and style rules we have learned are
“superstitions,” which suggests that most if not all of them have little
value at all.

Some rules (or, more accurately, “conventions for standard edited prose”),
such as not splitting infinitives and never using “firstly,” are not very
well founded. For example, they discriminate between constructions that are
arguably equally clear and idiomatic; or they present an aesthetic
preference as an issue of logic. You’ll notice, though, that I’m avoiding
the word *stupid*. I do not want to suggest that people are being silly or
stupid to believe that at this moment in time there are cultural and social
stakes involved in learning some of these conventions so that they can
decide whether or not to follow the conventions for a specific audience.

Other conventions for standard edited prose aim to minimize ambiguity in
the written standard language (e.g., rules about misplaced or dangling
modifiers) or strengthen the rhetorical force of the prose (e.g., avoiding
passive constructions that introduce unspecified agents). These goals can
enhance our ability to make effective written arguments in specific
contexts. For example, in most traditional forms of written language,
ambiguity cannot be relatively quickly resolved the way it can be in the
spoken. And while it is perfectly grammatical to write *The rustling of
papers was heard in the exam room*, to write *The rustling of paper filled
the exam room* does not introduce the question of who was doing that
hearing exactly. We can imagine contexts, though, where that question might
be one we want to raise. The point is that we can effectively teach these
kinds of conventions as part of the choices we make as writers (and
speakers) given what we want to accomplish — and we can do so without also
suggesting that what is a convention is in fact an unbreakable rule.

When we’re told to avoid a construction in standard edited English, it
probably isn’t because it is ungrammatical in the descriptive sense. Kamm
is absolutely right about that. It may be because the construction is
nonstandard or informal. But I wouldn’t call that advice about usage a
superstition. I would call it a convention.

Why not a superstition? To say that there are standard and nonstandard
grammatical structures, as well as more and less formal ways of saying and
writing things, is not to promote ideas with no validity or evidence (a
standard definition of a superstition).

To me, we get closer to the realm of superstition if and when we say a
nonstandard, informal, or new construction is indisputably “wrong” or “not
possible”—for example, that the pronoun *they* cannot be singular, when
usage tells us that it clearly can be and often is
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/05/10/singular-they-a-footnote/>.
That kind of statement promotes beliefs that our everyday usage as speakers
and writers somehow isn’t possible and breaks “rules of grammar.” That is
not true — but it is what can happen when standard English gets conflated
with “correct English” or just “English.”

My former colleague and mentor Richard W. Bailey once said, “There’s a
great deal to be learned if you just shut up and listen, rather than
saying, well, I have these academic credentials and therefore my opinion’s
the only one worth having.” And I appreciate that Kamm is urging us to
listen rather than scold.

Kamm rightly asks us to listen to usage, including all the different
dialects of English. Hear, hear! And while I agree that language is usage,
I would be sure to add that it is all kinds of usage. So formal usage and
informal usage, standard usage and nonstandard usage, and arguably spoken
usage and written usage. What a good usage guide can do is help us
understand and effectively navigate those distinctions to achieve our own
purposes as speakers and writers without ill-founded and sometimes snobbish
pedantry.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/03/23/talking-about-grammar-pedantry/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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