The author's obsession with panning S&W reminds me of crazy Joe Davolla in an old Seinfeld episode ("Jerry, I've got a hair on my lip and you put it there" or something to that effect).
For me, S&W was helpful in some ways but also led me to feel that I was in a straight-jacket as I tried years ago to follow its prescriptions.
It is good to be simple, direct, brief, and clear. But simple, short, and active can become simplistic, monotonic, and rigidly unnatural. A bad writer may ignore good-writing rules, but an equally bad one will apply them one-dimensionally in arty or mechanical fashion. A good writer will do neither. Thus, while ill use of passive voice can lead to stylistic pomposity, a categorical exclusion of passive voice can lead to a staccato and unnatural style. The same can be said of any arbitrary attempt to use exclusively short words or sentences. Attempting to follow S&W without thought can lead a writer into this trap.
In my view, the best was to master English grammar is to master a highly stylized (inflected) language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English. Anyone who does this will have a much greater grasp of technical points of grammar than one gets through memorizing a few prescriptive rules such as those found in S&W. Once the deeper technical points are well-understood, one can "let them go" in developing a natural writing style that nonetheless reflects a high degree of excellence for having the technical mastery underlie it. This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics. With the deeper technical understanding, your work will be far more robust than otherwise. All this is another way of saying that, to achieve excellence in grammar as in anything else, there is no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance.
If S&W has one primary fault, it lies in stating or implying (incorrectly) that mastery of a few rules can provide a good shortcut to this goal.
> The best was to master English grammar is to master a highly inflected language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English.
I agree with everything you said until you got to here. There are reasons to learn Latin, and it will certainly help for writing English, but putting the time in to master Latin is hardly the “best” way to master English grammar, which differs from Latin grammar in as many ways as it agrees. My guess is that learning to read 3 or 4 other languages moderately fluently, or just putting that time into careful analytic reading and writing in English would be just as useful. (Of course, without evidence, both of our comments here are speculative. I’d like to see some comparative studies – though to do them properly would be difficult, so I’m not sure any have been done that would really settle the matter.)
Personally, I think grammar is one of those subjects whose formal study should be delayed as long as possible, assuming that students are spending time reading and writing and carefully analyzing rhetoric and logic of what they read and hear. The emphasis on tools over content, in language just as much as in mathematics, has the potential to devalue creativity and engagement, and lends itself to the kind of rote instruction that leaves humans bored out of their skulls.
> This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics.
Weak analogy. The particularities of Latin grammar are not of the same kind as the “deep principles of mathematics.” Maybe studying syntax in a linguistics course or two could be compared, but I still think it’s a stretch.
> no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance.
With the rest of this paragraph out of the way, you’re right again with this final statement, though it’s a bit of a platitude.
I think I did overstate the case for Latin in this context. It is a good way to help with English grammar, mainly because (in my view) it forces you to think about and apply important grammatical principles in ways that a rules-based approach to teaching English grammar often does not. But, point well taken, it likely is not the best way to make use of one's limited time for this purpose.
I like your other points about grammar as well - very thoughtful.
The presence of heavy inflection is a good way to jolt the mind of someone who, being monolingual in English, has to be taught some of the simplest things, like what a direct object is (notice how hardly anyone says "whom"). I think learning a Germanic langauge is still effective, but modern Latin education fetishizes grammar so much that it really emphasizes and analytical understanding of language. The fact that the language is effectively not living lets them get away with this; there are many cases in many languages of bad grammar becoming so common that it's understood as an exception rather than a mistake makes a living language easier to "cheat" with.
I see the wisdom of the link you posted, but I still think Latin is a good way to generically learn Indo-European grammar so long as you don't act like all Indo-European language must act like Latin, which is the grave mistake grammarians make in the examples pointed out.
It certainly helps to learn to be deliberate with language. Particularly in formal writing, and to a large extent in creative writing. This, I think, is the central problem in English instruction today. We try to teach arbitrary rules when what we need to teach is deliberateness.
Learning other languages certainly helps the user understand their own language more (nouns, subjects, objects, adverbs, etc.) in a nuts and bolts kind of way, but it doesn't really help with writing (well) or comprehending the more advanced forms of the language. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the writers of the King James Bible, Jefferson and Joyce are all vastly different from each other in their use of the language -- yet we hold all of them up as defining the flavor and character of the language in ways that are highly contrary to the thinking that produced S&W's Book and Lowth's Book.
Most of English grammar instruction, and particularly guidebooks like S&W and Lowth seek to define and tackle imaginary English language edge cases that simply don't exist in other languages. "Don't split and infinitive" is not an edge case useful for consideration in Latin-rooted languages because you simply can't. It's also not an edge case in German because infinitives are always split (like in English).
Other cases, like proscriptions to use "whom", fall flat because they are simply archaic or invented as a kind of shibboleth to demark persons with education from persons without. In modern usage, a person who uses "whom" is ultimately marking themselves as ignorant of the modern tongue.
Learning a bit of Latin is hugely useful for understanding individual English words with Latin roots, and for fudging your way around Romance speaking Europe (it's astounding how much French an well educated monolingual English speaker can translate). But so is learning a bit of Greek useful in a similar way, and again German in other similar ways.
Ultimately, the best way to learn about language is to study linguistics, not just another language. The very first thing you learn in linguistics is that there is none of this "correct" proscriptivist nonsense in a serious study of languages - at least not in the sense of the ignorant grade-school grammar guides we all grow up with.
The most salient point to all of this is that the authors of those guides could not even keep in agreement with their own rules within the same guide!
There are a lot of words in the dictionary you shouldn't use. They're obscure, don't have a meaning that isn't expressed equally well by another word (or limited number of other words) and/or don't actually mean that much. They exist on the fringe of a language and as such should be documented in a dictionary, but if your aim is to communicate clearly through writing, you shouldn't use them.
I haven't read S&W, but I have three main reasons for avoiding that word:
1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact.
2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be.
3) It's possible that many from the target markets in Asia/Europe/etc won't know what it means anyway. As such, I try not to use complex language unless it's crucial to the message.
edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.
> 1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact.
If the context for prestige is obvious but unfamiliar, for example if you are telling a fictional story and establishing background, then we don't have to assume prestige should be evident. Also, if the proper name of the subject is unknown then it would be impossible for the prestige to be evident.
> 2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be.
The subject may not be so important that it deserves so much attention. If the use of the word 'prestige' and its subject are secondary to the point of the sentence or paragraph, elaborating may distract from the main point. Such is the case with many abstract words that people interpret differently. If it's the main point then I agree.
> edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.
Many abstract words are subjective. I think that finding the balance between detail and abstraction is a core writing skill. Too much detail can be tedious, condescending, unnecessary and can obscure or confuse the main point. Too much abstraction and people will misunderstand the message without realizing they've misunderstood the message.
As far as #3 I would argue that you can't know what word a foreigner might find difficult. If you're coming from a Romance language, for example, words that may sound "fancy" or could be considered difficult by natives are actually easier because of their common Latin root.
And in this case specifically, prestige is a French word (pretty clear given the pronunciation) that's also been imported into several European languages.
When discussing English, the fact that a word is imported from any language should not matter, as English is a thief language.French however is VERY present in English, since about 1066 anyway. I've been told about half of our words in English have French roots. Further many of the "fancy words" are of French origin, due to the simple fact that the nobles spoke french, and that connotation still exists in the language.
Short version: lots of french words are in English, why does this one example warrant mention.
Boy, that post sure could've used some headings or something to liven up what is otherwise a monotonous, self-indulgent rant.
One thing one has to remember with grammar is that people can't even agree on whether it's prescriptive or descriptive.
It still bugs the hell out of me when (North) Americans say "Will you write me?" WRONG WRONG WRONG, at least in a prescriptive sense. In actual English it is "Will you write TO me?". Note the difference:
- Will you write me a letter? (indirect then direct object)
- Will you write a letter to me (direct then indirect; uses the preposition "to");
- Will you write a letter to me? (indirect object only)
Only Americans (and possibly Canadians) do it.
The point is than in a purely prescriptive sense, that's wrong and most people tend to argue that what they use is correct. Language and grammar evolves giving far more credence to the descriptive view.
This book is a simple, step by step guide to making you a better writer. By chapter 2 you're already writing much clearer prose. It's one of those books you want to read every couple of years.
I'd also recommend the essay "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell:
He's written articles pretty similar to this before, and I think in the last one, he did mention the the Cambridge Grammar. Half the comments were people jumping down his throat for having a conflict of interest.
Elsewhere (on the excellent "Language Log" blog) he recommends two books: for grammar/usage, the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage; for style, Joseph Williams's "Style: toward clarity and grace".
The first recommendation I ever saw for Williams's book, FWIW, was from Richard Gabriel (founder of Lucid Inc., author of the paper commonly but misleadingly known as "worse is better" and of "Patterns of Software", and these days concentrating on poetry rather than software).
It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.
He says that grammar can't be reduced to a bunch of trivial rules, but that doesn't mean there can't be a good alternative to Strunk & White for teaching grammar to students.
One grammar question that I don't know the answer to. When you have a statement using "than" (eg. A cow is bigger than an ant) using pronouns, what case is the word after "than" supposed to go into.
Is it always:
I am bigger than him.
I see him better than her.
He does it better than me.
Or is it:
I am bigger than he.
I see him better than herHe does it better than I
The first one is way more common colloquially, but I see the second one used in some formal styles. And it makes more sense too - it resolves the ambiguity between "I see him better than her" [I see him better than she does] and "I see him better than her" [he is more visible to me than she is].
The word "than" is not a preposition. It is a conjunction after which a verb and sometimes a subject are commonly omitted, but understood, because they are the same verb or subject as in the preceding sentence.
Therefore all you really need to do is understand that the portion of the sentence following "than" is itself a sentence. Just supply the missing words, and the correct case will shine forth.
In language, the "correct" case is the more common case for a given variant of the language. The class "English" is composed of the aggregate sum of many variants of the class (dialects, accents, etc.).
Languages change, what was "correct" a century ago may no longer be correct today.
This means the writer has to understand the variant of the language the reader is using, and target that. If your target audience prefers one over the other, that's the "correct" one.
There is no such animal as "correct English" since the definition of "correct English" is set merely by the most culturally powerful subgroup of users of some variant of the language.
Pay no mind to the people who commented before me.
The phrase that follows the comparative preposition "than" is not necessarily a reduced clause. It's actually almost always a simple noun phrase, taking the default accusative case.
"I am taller than him" is Standard American. If you were to say "I am taller than he" you'll sound like a twat.
Doesn't make sense? So what. Language isn't about making sense, it's about getting points across. There's plenty more in English that's even more confusing (exceptional case marking? oh yeah, baby, figure that one out).
Hell, even if it WERE a reduced relative clause there are plausible reasons why it could still be "him", namely, "nominative" and "accusative" are structural case, not semantic case, so they get assigned depending on the assignee's position in the sentence structure, and you could easily reduce a clause and, in doing so, put its subject into precisely the structure necessary for accusative case.
As an alternative to poor grammar and sounding like a twat, one might simply say, "I am taller than he is." Sure, it's an extra word, but it's both correct and sounds natural.
I struggle with that occasionally. Using "him" in that sentence would make me die a little inside, but I also don't want to sound like a prick.
Speaking of comparatives, a fellow grad student here at the University of Maryland is working on a phenomena called the comparative illusion, which involve sentences like the following:
is it just me, or is the author of that article trying too hard? there's the conspicuously correct use of a semicolon; long but perfectly structured sentence with many subclauses (followed by a short sentence for contrast); etc.
i agree with the author's general comments (although I haven't read "that book"), and i am sure there's nothing incorrect in what he's written. but it's not a comfortable, relaxed piece of writing, is it?
(edit: rereading that i realised i never made my point. which is that this happens a lot. it seems to be very hard for people to write well about grammar - they always end up writing something that feels "overworked".)
This is because if you make the slightest deviation from 'correct grammar' in a piece about grammar, you'll be attacked mercilessly. Every word, every m-dash, requires an unshakable argument for its correctness in that context.
Pity really, but as long as it's cheap and easy to attack anything with a whiff of hypocrisy...
If we're asking questions here... If a group was going into a restaurant, but saw it was dirty would it be "they changed their mind" or "they changed their minds"?
Technically, everybody takes a singular verb. Try replacing it with "every single body" or "every person".
The main ambiquity in the phrase is that 'their' isn't -technically- correct as a gender neutral third person possessive pronoun, despite its common usage in that form. (Say -that- five times fast!) If you replace 'their' with 'his or her', the agreement makes much more sense:
And you can get wonderfully creative with something like
"The group changed its mind"
and
"The group changed their minds"
depending on the meaning you want the statement to have. Are you emphasizing the concept of "group-think" or the independent conclusions of the individuals?
It's more poetic than
"The members of the group changed their minds".
or
"Each group member changed his or her mind".
But at least you get a ridiculous bag of options for a single sentence.
It would still be "minds", because "everybody" is referring to a plural subject. You can say "everyone put on their jackets" but not "everyone put on their jacket". The latter makes sense if the listener dismisses the absurd possibility that everyone is fitting into one jacket, but it's not correct.
While 'everyone' sounds like it refers to a plural subject, it technically is singular. Therefore, "Everyone put on their jacket." is correct. This is another one where I would rewrite the whole thing to make it sounds better:
what i've always wondered is how to handle apostrophes, parentheses and punctuation. it's not what is Right, it's what will look right to the audience.
If you're serious, which is likely since the internet is worldwide, I have some advice that can help you get started. Also, I'm going to believe that your lack of capitals is a conscious choice. A method of saving time... over time.
Besides apostrophes, commas, and question marks, I have always considered special punctuation as a kind of cheat. If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought.
One exercise I have employed, when organizing my writing, has been to write without punctuation and in lines, every thought on a new line. Like a poem. Punctuation is essentially there to separate these thoughts, so you can start by adding the periods, then arranging your thoughts into a paragraph.
Use of special punctuation, in my opinion, is mostly a means of controlling rhythm. And the ability to ease into the rhythm of writing is largely dependent on a reader's, or writer's, familiarity with the language.
So, I would focus on periods and commas first, until you have a good familiarity with the language. That is my advice to you.
"If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought."
Thank you. You've just fixed my writing style. I owe you a large drink.
(No, seriously. I use semi-colons, colons and em-dashes -- pretentious and pedantic though they be; fun though it be to be better educated than my audience -- entirely too often: see? With the above quotation in my arsenal, I shall cease forthwith. Consider me indebted to you for any clarity I may thus gain.)
Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation.
Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought".
Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).
Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought"
Which is fitting, since I consider the use of special punctuation a cheat. I don't hold myself above cheating all the time, and I did cheat. It helps to save time, since a single paragraph can be refined endlessly.
I have the same problem. I usually find that not only can I remove the parenthesis, but I can often remove the entire phrase. Usually it turns out that they were just extraneous things that I found interesting with no real pertinence to the rest of whatever I am writing.
Same here. I overuse parenthetical statements like crazy. Once, long ago, I was told that you should only use parenthetical clauses when the sentence will still make sense and give enough information if you were to just delete the clause entirely. So, with that in mind, I'll often just try to delete the parenthetical and move on. If I really care enough about what's between 'em, I'll try to rephrase, maybe by putting it in a new sentence.
Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.
What? Python has way too many parentheses. Why should I have to write foo() to call foo? That's what I want to do with it 99% of the time. Ruby has it right.
Many standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For instance, standard punctuation would have me write: Please append the extension ".txt." For clarity, I'd re-write: Please append the extension ".txt" to the file. Much of this comes from the notion that punctuation resides insides the quote marks. But the rule comes from a practice fueled by function: the period and comma were the two most breakable tiles for printers, and having them inside another tile meant they were far less likely to break. I increasingly find myself quoting text exactly, and I place punctuation not in the original outside the quotation.
But I also use "they" as a first person singular gender-neutral pronoun: I don't know the author of that article, but they certainly did a good job. I guess I'm a grammatical progressive.
More reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.
Good article but he digs too deep. I would be happier if students just learned to use "should have", not "should of", and related constructs. This seems prevalent even among the college-educated these days.
Does a programmer's spelling and grammar correlate with the quality of his[/her] code?
I've found that it doesn't correlate with their analytical ability or ability to architect a clean system. But it does affect the readability of their code.
For me, S&W was helpful in some ways but also led me to feel that I was in a straight-jacket as I tried years ago to follow its prescriptions.
It is good to be simple, direct, brief, and clear. But simple, short, and active can become simplistic, monotonic, and rigidly unnatural. A bad writer may ignore good-writing rules, but an equally bad one will apply them one-dimensionally in arty or mechanical fashion. A good writer will do neither. Thus, while ill use of passive voice can lead to stylistic pomposity, a categorical exclusion of passive voice can lead to a staccato and unnatural style. The same can be said of any arbitrary attempt to use exclusively short words or sentences. Attempting to follow S&W without thought can lead a writer into this trap.
In my view, the best was to master English grammar is to master a highly stylized (inflected) language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English. Anyone who does this will have a much greater grasp of technical points of grammar than one gets through memorizing a few prescriptive rules such as those found in S&W. Once the deeper technical points are well-understood, one can "let them go" in developing a natural writing style that nonetheless reflects a high degree of excellence for having the technical mastery underlie it. This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics. With the deeper technical understanding, your work will be far more robust than otherwise. All this is another way of saying that, to achieve excellence in grammar as in anything else, there is no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance.
If S&W has one primary fault, it lies in stating or implying (incorrectly) that mastery of a few rules can provide a good shortcut to this goal.