Should I be teaching good grammar?
An English university has damned proficiency in English as homogenous, North European, white, male and elite. Am I being dragged into the culture wars?
I’m preparing for a writing class tomorrow. My part of the agenda is all about grammar: common mistakes, common misconceptions and how to turn the English sentence from foe to friend.
I’ve done classes like this many times over the years. I realised quite early on that very few people, even in a highly-qualified media and marketing sector stuffed with Humanities graduates, have ever been taught the basic parts of the English sentence; and how to put them together in a way that makes reliable good sense.
Come to think of it, I haven’t either, apart from one English lesson when I was 15 and Mrs Bolter, exasperated by our inability to tell our its from our it’s, said ‘right, shut up everyone, we are going to have an old-fashioned English lesson. You’re going to learn about grammar, spelling and punctuation. I’m going to do this once, and I won’t expect to see the same boring mistakes ever again’.
English teachers were tough in those days. I’m much nicer. Inspired by Mrs Bolter, I became something of a grammar geek, never happier than when I had my nose buried in a copy of Usage and Abusage (still the best book ever written about correct English style).
But now, for the first time, I’m fretting about my grammar course. Is it what people want? Is it what they need? Is it right for our times? Has the sainted Eric Partridge finally had his day?
The Hull Challenge
Students studying at the University of Hull will not be marked down for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in exams because it would be 'elitist'.
[The decision] comes as lecturers have been told that insisting on good written English discriminates against ethnic minorities and those who went to "underperforming" schools.
...a new policy says the requirement for a high level of proficiency in written English can be seen as "homogenous, North European, white, male, and elite".
Instead it plans to encourage students to develop a "more authentic academic voice… that celebrates, rather than obscures, their particular background or characteristics". [News story, 14 April 2021]
Well, this was a jolt.
Instant reaction? That in seeking not to discriminate, Hull is setting up its students to be discriminated against in later life. Like it or not, some employers and many people still judge people negatively if they can’t spell, their grammar is slack and their punctuation is all over the place.
But is that just me being homogenous, North European, white, male, and elite? (I did go to an underperforming school, but that’s probably not enough to counteract those other sins). In seeking to entrench – and teach – a standard set of grammatical rules, an established and Establishment form of English, am I suppressing people’s ‘authentic voice’?
That’s not a rhetorical question and please don’t read any sarcastic intent into the way I quoted the Hull statement. I have a slight and unprovable suspicion that they put this out for the publicity value and to set themselves apart in the quest to widen their undergraduate recruitment pool. It doesn’t matter even if that is the case. They have raised a big and important question. Their challenge deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed (as of course it was, in some quarters) as Woke at its wackiest and most dangerous.
Good news – we don’t have to worry about learning the subjunctive. Credit: University of Hull
English is a big, baggy and chaotic language. It’s a nightmare to learn properly, especially the spelling. Spelling reform has been tried again and again, most comprehensively by Noah Webster, who gave American English ‘thru’ and ‘nite’.
But I don’t think the Hull academics are lobbying for spelling and grammar reform. Their argument, if I understand it correctly, is that we must express ourselves in whatever way feels right and natural to us, that best reflects our identity.
Now, I don’t think you can accuse the English language of being closed off to different cultures and modes of expression. It has randomly mashed up French, German and Latin, threw in regional British dialect words, absorbed countless variations from the British Empire and beyond and waved through an endless stream of technical, jargon and vogue phrases. It grows at an estimated 40,000 new words a year. In the 18th century, we had the choice of following the Academie Francaise by policing the language and banning barbarous and foreign entrants. As Dr Johnson, the compiler of the first dictionary quickly realised, that was an impossible task as well as an unpalatable choice.
So English grew and grew, its wonder and breadth matched only by its hideous complexity and endless contradictions.
Again, I stress this is not Hull’s point. It’s about your language, not the language.
They went public with this policy just weeks after Megan Markle and Prince Harry gave their Oprah interview, where Ms Winfrey invited them to speak ‘their truth’.
Meghan and the truth: personal pronoun before definite article
I think that was a big moment. We are being asked to accept that subjective truth matters more than objective. If I feel this thing is true, then you must accept and respect that, because that feeling is genuine and I am a genuine person who is seeking to be true to myself. You can set all the fact-checkers in the world onto what I say [and in Meghan’s case, the British and international media sure did] but that won’t alter my truth.
In case you think I’m making a political point and that this is an anti-woke diatribe, let me say at once that exactly the same operation was at work during the Donald Trump presidency. It’s been estimated that Trump told over 30,000 ‘mistruths’ at an eye-popping rate of 21 a day during his time in office. Did that affect his support, his ‘base’? Not much, that I can see. He was speaking his truth and it was the truth an awful lot of Americans chose to share.
The late, brilliant and often dastardly spin doctor Tim Bell put it to me this way once: it’s all about the communicator, not the communication. Nearly two years after his death, what he noticed, the triumph of the subjective over the objective, is more ‘true’ than ever.
The English language is not the central player, or (if you prefer) culprit, here. It is being pulled in different directions to suit ever more polarised agendas. There is less and less consensus in politics and culture. What chance does a consensual view of language have, especially one that relies on the kind of rules I am going to be outlining in my grammar class?
I’ll be speaking, by the way, in my authentic voice which celebrates, rather than obscures, my particular background and characteristics. That background just happens to be North European, white, male and elite. I’m not sure what I can do about that.
But if you DO want to learn about grammar…
You’ll find out things like:
Why I’m allowed to start the sentence above with a ‘but’
What different jobs those three dots and that colon do
Should you fear and shun the semi-colon?
Why the writers of corporate English avoid verbs
Will before would and other elements of persuasive writing
Grammatical ‘rules’ you don’t need to bother about, even if others do
Grammatical rules you should bother about, even if others don’t.
More here.
Let’s end with a sublime song
There are lots of reasons why Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love is one of the finest love songs ever written: the restraint; the rhythm; and, well, the verbs.
I don’t know why modern English, corporrate English especially, has become so shy of verbs. They are, after all, the doing words. But you often have to hack through a forest to find the poor thing hiding shyly in a forest of nouns and sub-clauses.
So listen to Cohen’s song and how every line begins with a verb. And what verbs they are : dance…lift…let…show…raise…touch..dance.