A paragraph, students are being taught, should have five sentences. The first sentence, the topic sentence, announces the subject of the paragraph. The three sentences that follow provide information to support the topic sentence. A concluding sentence summarizes what has been said in the previous four sentences, for the benefit of a reader with an extremely short attention span. Thus students learn how to construct a proper paragraph in five sentences.
Barbara Phillips Long, a devoted reader of this blog, has little patience with this mechanical approach to writing. She pointed out the prevalence of the five-sentence model in a comment on yesterday’s post. She followed up with a private e-mail listing such sources for the practice. They included AllExperts.com, A Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) prep site, and Mrs. Hicks’s Powerpoint on the paragraph.
Ms. Long doubts that this highly artificial five-paragraph structure appears anywhere outside textbooks.
This Procrustean pedagogy appears to be widespread, with little apparent benefit for students. During the two grisly semesters that I taught freshman composition at Syracuse University in the 1970s, we were hobbled by the requirement to use Sheridan Baker’s Practical Stylist. The “Baker essay” also had a fivefold structure, with a paragraph stating an assertion, three paragraphs of support, and a paragraph of conclusion. The products of this exercise were entirely mechanical and lifeless. Looking at the papers of undergraduates I taught in other classes, I saw little evidence that their schooling in the “Baker essay” had done much to enlarge their powers of argument and organization.
As I have said before, mastery of the craft of writing has always been limited to a very small minority. The system of public education that we inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and which has largely broken down) merely aimed to provide the majority of students with enough basic literacy and numeracy to function in an industrial society. Many of my students at Syracuse were less interested in learning, as such, than in acquiring a veneer of private-university status to fit them for the upper middle class. Don’t, pray, tell me that it’s all the fault of the Sixties, because you should remember perfectly well that the Fifties were the era of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” articles. There was no golden age when everyone who got a diploma could write clearly, forcefully, and grammatically.
In the face of an educational system that shortchanges its students, both the well-off and the poor, we do what we can. In blogs like this one we try to undermine ill-informed dogmatism about grammar and usage. In our classrooms we try to nudge students beyond the silly mechanical formulas that they have been burdened with. In our own writing we try to model an informed and flexible literacy. We know every day as we push the boulder up the hill that it will roll back down again, but we persevere.
For the benefit of those who haven’t noticed, the preceding is a five-paragraph essay in which each paragraph has the five-sentence structure. This is what you want for your children?
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The uses of subliteracy
I do carry on some about the defects of people’s education in writing. But I have support, as in this week’s New Yorker profile of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
Duncan often says “screwed” or “lied to” when he describes what American students face—low standards, chronically underperforming schools, inequities in spending and opportunity. He also repeats the claim, sometimes several times a day, that American schooling is stuck in old ruts while that of other nations has improved.
Amen, Brother Duncan.
But all the same, subliterate writing has its uses, as I was reminded by this message that came to my Gmail account this afternoon, purportedly from “Google Team”:
Gmail is built on the idea that email can be intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun.
Now we are experience congestion and a very slow red, so we need you to verify your account by clicking the reply button and send your account domain below.
Google Team will be eliminating all unused/unwanted account causing red Congestion. Gmail is sorry for any inconveniency for all our regular Users. Send us your Domain Login below for verification.
Even without the fishy demand for account information — Google certainly knows what accounts are in Gmail — you would have to be thick as a plank not to recognize from the substandard English of the second and third paragraphs that this message is a fraud.
Tell me that it’s “just spelling.” Hmpf.
Duncan often says “screwed” or “lied to” when he describes what American students face—low standards, chronically underperforming schools, inequities in spending and opportunity. He also repeats the claim, sometimes several times a day, that American schooling is stuck in old ruts while that of other nations has improved.
Amen, Brother Duncan.
But all the same, subliterate writing has its uses, as I was reminded by this message that came to my Gmail account this afternoon, purportedly from “Google Team”:
Gmail is built on the idea that email can be intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun.
Now we are experience congestion and a very slow red, so we need you to verify your account by clicking the reply button and send your account domain below.
Google Team will be eliminating all unused/unwanted account causing red Congestion. Gmail is sorry for any inconveniency for all our regular Users. Send us your Domain Login below for verification.
Even without the fishy demand for account information — Google certainly knows what accounts are in Gmail — you would have to be thick as a plank not to recognize from the substandard English of the second and third paragraphs that this message is a fraud.
Tell me that it’s “just spelling.” Hmpf.
Saturday ruminations
Saturday, particularly a Saturday with snow starting to fall, offers a chance to catch up with miscellaneous items that accumulated over the week. Not that this post will be much read, because most of you are not goofing off at work by trolling the ’Net, and the headline isn’t one to draw a crowd, either.
When crashes blossom
The amiable Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has an article in Sunday’s “On Language” column in The New York Times about the headline term crash blossom, which has soared to popularity in the paragraph game over the past several months. A crash blossom is a headline that appears to lead in one direction but turns out to mean something else entirely. It results from the elliptical nature of headlines and the ambiguities endemic to English.
Mr. Zimmer observes that “English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, ‘-s.’ In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of ‘to be’ — robbing the reader of crucial context.”
I supplied him with the classic Evening Sun headline from an article on home canning and preserving, “You can put pickles up yourself,” but, sadly, he lacked the space for it.
A better life of Johnson
Last August, I wrote about a disappointing biography of Samuel Johnson by Jeffrey Meyers — about which I will say no more, lest you be tempted to read it.
Since then, I have come across a much more satisfactory effort, David Nokes’s Samuel Johnson: A Life (Henry Holt, 419 pages, $32). After the largely unrelieved gloom of the Meyers book, it was refreshing to find Nokes saying, “Johnson’s sense of fun was eager and boisterous, often striving for a kind of rivalry with men younger than himself.”
There are many perceptive comments about Johnson: “The role of the ‘common man’ ... was one Johnson greatly affected; first, because, being poor, he was not much above them; second, because being angry, he could understand their resentment; and third because being human he reached out to their sufferings.”
His evaluation of the biographies written by Boswell and Mrs. Thrale is balanced and perceptive, and he sketches Johnson’s milieu without losing momentum in his account of the life. If you are at all interested in Johnson, you owe it to yourself to look into Mr. Nokes’s book.
I’ve ordered his life of Jonathan Swift and am waiting impatiently for it.
Suspicions confirmed
I may have mentioned that there are twenty-two suffering souls in my editing class this semester. I polled them on Thursday as I was carrying on about the superstitions people are taught about grammar. Nearly all of them had been told, or had been given to understand, that they should never use the passive voice. Nearly all had been told that it is sinful to end a sentence with a preposition. Nearly all of them had been instructed not to split infinitives. So, as usual, the first few weeks of the course go to the correction of nonsensical or inadequate instruction.
In the second half of the semester, when we shift from mechanical to analytical editing, I expect to find, as I have found in each of twenty-eight previous semesters, that they have little or no experience in examining the structure and organization of articles.
And these are students who have attended well-thought-of suburban public schools or whose parents have been at some expense to have them privately educated. The teaching of English and writing in this glorious Republic appears to be almost as defective as the teaching of mathematics, and increasingly looks analogous to our health care system: Much is expended for disappointing results.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
If a reader should order the book from Amazon.com by clicking on this link, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
When crashes blossom
The amiable Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has an article in Sunday’s “On Language” column in The New York Times about the headline term crash blossom, which has soared to popularity in the paragraph game over the past several months. A crash blossom is a headline that appears to lead in one direction but turns out to mean something else entirely. It results from the elliptical nature of headlines and the ambiguities endemic to English.
Mr. Zimmer observes that “English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, ‘-s.’ In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of ‘to be’ — robbing the reader of crucial context.”
I supplied him with the classic Evening Sun headline from an article on home canning and preserving, “You can put pickles up yourself,” but, sadly, he lacked the space for it.
A better life of Johnson
Last August, I wrote about a disappointing biography of Samuel Johnson by Jeffrey Meyers — about which I will say no more, lest you be tempted to read it.
Since then, I have come across a much more satisfactory effort, David Nokes’s Samuel Johnson: A Life (Henry Holt, 419 pages, $32). After the largely unrelieved gloom of the Meyers book, it was refreshing to find Nokes saying, “Johnson’s sense of fun was eager and boisterous, often striving for a kind of rivalry with men younger than himself.”
There are many perceptive comments about Johnson: “The role of the ‘common man’ ... was one Johnson greatly affected; first, because, being poor, he was not much above them; second, because being angry, he could understand their resentment; and third because being human he reached out to their sufferings.”
His evaluation of the biographies written by Boswell and Mrs. Thrale is balanced and perceptive, and he sketches Johnson’s milieu without losing momentum in his account of the life. If you are at all interested in Johnson, you owe it to yourself to look into Mr. Nokes’s book.
I’ve ordered his life of Jonathan Swift and am waiting impatiently for it.
Suspicions confirmed
I may have mentioned that there are twenty-two suffering souls in my editing class this semester. I polled them on Thursday as I was carrying on about the superstitions people are taught about grammar. Nearly all of them had been told, or had been given to understand, that they should never use the passive voice. Nearly all had been told that it is sinful to end a sentence with a preposition. Nearly all of them had been instructed not to split infinitives. So, as usual, the first few weeks of the course go to the correction of nonsensical or inadequate instruction.
In the second half of the semester, when we shift from mechanical to analytical editing, I expect to find, as I have found in each of twenty-eight previous semesters, that they have little or no experience in examining the structure and organization of articles.
And these are students who have attended well-thought-of suburban public schools or whose parents have been at some expense to have them privately educated. The teaching of English and writing in this glorious Republic appears to be almost as defective as the teaching of mathematics, and increasingly looks analogous to our health care system: Much is expended for disappointing results.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
If a reader should order the book from Amazon.com by clicking on this link, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Steam escaping under pressure
Some of the people who commented on this week’s posts “Keeping up with the Joneses” and “English, the slut language” acted as if they were apprehensive that I had gone off my medication. To reassure them, some responses.
It’s only spelling: Yes, I know that using it’s for its is just a spelling error and not a capital offense. It’s just a spelling error when people make nouns plural by adding ’s. Seeing that does not raise my blood pressure. The people who are sacking three-fifths of the copy desk at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis — there you’ve got a felony offense. It wouldn’t be disproportionate for the people responsible to spend a day or two in the stocks, subject to verbal and physical abuse from passers-by.
But there are people who will think less of you if your writing is littered with spelling errors and typos, and those people will begin to think more about your trivial errors than they do about what you are saying. (Public speaking in analogous; the same people will notice that you have spinach between your incisors and that your fly is open.) I am not saying that these people are right to be so distracted, only that you should be aware of the likelihood.
That damn apostrophe: Yeah, yeah, we didn’t always use it to show possession, and we might not have to, and why not let it go away altogether except to make plurals at the produce section of the supermarket, where it will be found forever. You know, I don’t legislate for the language; I’m just explaining the conventions of formal written English as they exist today. The apostrophe may go by the time the state has withered away, and take whom with it, but this is today.
Chill, bro’: (There’s that damn apostrophe again.) I am not a peevologist. I do not maintain a kennel of pet peeves. I try to express an informed prescriptivism and give my reasons rather than resort to mere dogmatism.
I also teach editing, a complex and subtle craft that takes a great deal of time to master. That is why I begrudge the necessity of spending the first few weeks of every semester TEACHING UPPER-CLASS UNDERGRADUATES THE MECHANICS OF GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION THAT I LEARNED IN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH GRADES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN — OF ALL PLACES — EASTERN KENTUCKY* NEARLY HALF A CENTURY AGO.
Sorry. Sorry. Perhaps it is time for me to take my medication.
The Hamilton Tavern opens in half an hour.
*A region not famed, then or now, for book-learning.
It’s only spelling: Yes, I know that using it’s for its is just a spelling error and not a capital offense. It’s just a spelling error when people make nouns plural by adding ’s. Seeing that does not raise my blood pressure. The people who are sacking three-fifths of the copy desk at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis — there you’ve got a felony offense. It wouldn’t be disproportionate for the people responsible to spend a day or two in the stocks, subject to verbal and physical abuse from passers-by.
But there are people who will think less of you if your writing is littered with spelling errors and typos, and those people will begin to think more about your trivial errors than they do about what you are saying. (Public speaking in analogous; the same people will notice that you have spinach between your incisors and that your fly is open.) I am not saying that these people are right to be so distracted, only that you should be aware of the likelihood.
That damn apostrophe: Yeah, yeah, we didn’t always use it to show possession, and we might not have to, and why not let it go away altogether except to make plurals at the produce section of the supermarket, where it will be found forever. You know, I don’t legislate for the language; I’m just explaining the conventions of formal written English as they exist today. The apostrophe may go by the time the state has withered away, and take whom with it, but this is today.
Chill, bro’: (There’s that damn apostrophe again.) I am not a peevologist. I do not maintain a kennel of pet peeves. I try to express an informed prescriptivism and give my reasons rather than resort to mere dogmatism.
I also teach editing, a complex and subtle craft that takes a great deal of time to master. That is why I begrudge the necessity of spending the first few weeks of every semester TEACHING UPPER-CLASS UNDERGRADUATES THE MECHANICS OF GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION THAT I LEARNED IN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH GRADES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN — OF ALL PLACES — EASTERN KENTUCKY* NEARLY HALF A CENTURY AGO.
Sorry. Sorry. Perhaps it is time for me to take my medication.
The Hamilton Tavern opens in half an hour.
*A region not famed, then or now, for book-learning.
Grammarpalooza
As you make your own plans to celebrate National Grammar Day on March 4, this account from the archives, published the day after the first National Grammar Day in 2008, may guide you.
One day past, the exhilaration of National Grammar Day has yet to fade. The cheers of the crowds lining the streets at the parade still echo in one’s ears. It was a swirl of events, the hourly cannon fire salute from the Citadel, the Te Deum sung at the Cathedral, the torchlight procession and laying of a wreath at the Cenotaph of the Unknown Copy Editor*, the fireworks display, the Semicolon Ball at the Ducal Palace, the governor’s generous clemency in releasing the detainees from the stockade at midnight. A glorious day.
*Hell, pretty much all copy editors are unknown.
One day past, the exhilaration of National Grammar Day has yet to fade. The cheers of the crowds lining the streets at the parade still echo in one’s ears. It was a swirl of events, the hourly cannon fire salute from the Citadel, the Te Deum sung at the Cathedral, the torchlight procession and laying of a wreath at the Cenotaph of the Unknown Copy Editor*, the fireworks display, the Semicolon Ball at the Ducal Palace, the governor’s generous clemency in releasing the detainees from the stockade at midnight. A glorious day.
*Hell, pretty much all copy editors are unknown.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
English, the slut language
Yesterday’s post on plurals and possessives stirred up some comments worth addressing.
This one, from The Ridger:
You know you can't tell them apart when you say them. Dogs, dog's, dogs' Is it any wonder people make spelling errors? Lighten up on them.
And please don't attack me; I did say they were errors. I just don't think they're harbingers of doom. Show a person who confuses "it is" with "its" (not "it's", "it is") and I will concede that he "doesn't know the difference" as opposed to "can't spell well".
And these two, from mike:
I would argue (and have) that it's a melancholy state of orthographical protocol that seems to require repeated tutorials to master these rules. The fact is, the system we have for when and when not to use the apostrophe is ridiculously complicated, and gets in the way every single day of what the ultimate purpose of writing is: to get information down on paper, real or virtual. If it seems that a majority (let's assume) of people who write English cannot seem to master these rules, where's the problem, with the people or with the rules? In my business (computers), if people can't seem to figure out how to use a program, you blame poor program design, not ill-educated users.
FWIW, apostrophes have been used "incorrectly" throughout the history of English to mark plurals. Dryden did it consistently, for example.* (Have a look at handwritten manuscripts from days of yore. You might be surprised at what you find for spelling and punctation.) As I say, it's just too confusing. More and earlier education is _not the answer_. A more logical system is the real answer. Writing ordinary English should not require a decade of study.
The root of the matter is that writing is not natural. Speech is. A child who is not impaired or kept in isolation will learn language ⎯ vocabulary and grammar both ⎯ in just a few years because the capacity for that feat is evolutionarily hard-wired into the species.
But writing has been among us for a comparatively short time, and it must be learned laboriously through schooling.
That is why, as The Ridger points out, that we generally know exactly what a speaker means, because we mastered spoken English in infancy and early childhood. But our grasp of written English, even after much schooling, is tenuous.
Add to that the kind of language that English is. For all its richness and flexibility, and its grand literature, it is just a slut, picking up vocabulary and grammar promiscuously from other languages. It started out as Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language, and then slept with Norman French and Latin.
This is part of the reason that English orthography is a nightmare, some of it from Anglo-Saxon patterns and some of it from the classical languages that English shamelessly plundered. Standardization of spelling dates pretty much from the nineteenth century, so we haven’t even been at that for very long.
The hope for “a more logical system,” is, I fear, a chimera. Noah Webster wanted to reform the spelling of American English, and he had a limited degree of success (color and honor instead of colour and honour, for example. Big whoop). George Bernard Shaw campaigned tirelessly for a simplified spelling. He failed. And even the formidable Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune must see with chagrin from his celestial tower that the World’s Greatest Newspaper has long since abandoned his pet spellings.
No, English is, as she always has been, a wayward wanton, and we have to accept her as we find her, not as we would wish her to be.
Maddening and irregular as they are, the conventions of spelling, the conventions of punctuation, and the inconsistencies of plurals and possessives remain there to be learned by anyone who has any pretension to mastering the craft of writing.
*Be careful, mike. You will probably want to use Dryden as a bad example for his insistence that English sentences should not end with prepositions. In any event, persons writing before the publication of reliable English dictionaries or standardized orthography are not the best examples to cite in this connection.
This one, from The Ridger:
You know you can't tell them apart when you say them. Dogs, dog's, dogs' Is it any wonder people make spelling errors? Lighten up on them.
And please don't attack me; I did say they were errors. I just don't think they're harbingers of doom. Show a person who confuses "it is" with "its" (not "it's", "it is") and I will concede that he "doesn't know the difference" as opposed to "can't spell well".
And these two, from mike:
I would argue (and have) that it's a melancholy state of orthographical protocol that seems to require repeated tutorials to master these rules. The fact is, the system we have for when and when not to use the apostrophe is ridiculously complicated, and gets in the way every single day of what the ultimate purpose of writing is: to get information down on paper, real or virtual. If it seems that a majority (let's assume) of people who write English cannot seem to master these rules, where's the problem, with the people or with the rules? In my business (computers), if people can't seem to figure out how to use a program, you blame poor program design, not ill-educated users.
FWIW, apostrophes have been used "incorrectly" throughout the history of English to mark plurals. Dryden did it consistently, for example.* (Have a look at handwritten manuscripts from days of yore. You might be surprised at what you find for spelling and punctation.) As I say, it's just too confusing. More and earlier education is _not the answer_. A more logical system is the real answer. Writing ordinary English should not require a decade of study.
The root of the matter is that writing is not natural. Speech is. A child who is not impaired or kept in isolation will learn language ⎯ vocabulary and grammar both ⎯ in just a few years because the capacity for that feat is evolutionarily hard-wired into the species.
But writing has been among us for a comparatively short time, and it must be learned laboriously through schooling.
That is why, as The Ridger points out, that we generally know exactly what a speaker means, because we mastered spoken English in infancy and early childhood. But our grasp of written English, even after much schooling, is tenuous.
Add to that the kind of language that English is. For all its richness and flexibility, and its grand literature, it is just a slut, picking up vocabulary and grammar promiscuously from other languages. It started out as Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language, and then slept with Norman French and Latin.
This is part of the reason that English orthography is a nightmare, some of it from Anglo-Saxon patterns and some of it from the classical languages that English shamelessly plundered. Standardization of spelling dates pretty much from the nineteenth century, so we haven’t even been at that for very long.
The hope for “a more logical system,” is, I fear, a chimera. Noah Webster wanted to reform the spelling of American English, and he had a limited degree of success (color and honor instead of colour and honour, for example. Big whoop). George Bernard Shaw campaigned tirelessly for a simplified spelling. He failed. And even the formidable Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune must see with chagrin from his celestial tower that the World’s Greatest Newspaper has long since abandoned his pet spellings.
No, English is, as she always has been, a wayward wanton, and we have to accept her as we find her, not as we would wish her to be.
Maddening and irregular as they are, the conventions of spelling, the conventions of punctuation, and the inconsistencies of plurals and possessives remain there to be learned by anyone who has any pretension to mastering the craft of writing.
*Be careful, mike. You will probably want to use Dryden as a bad example for his insistence that English sentences should not end with prepositions. In any event, persons writing before the publication of reliable English dictionaries or standardized orthography are not the best examples to cite in this connection.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Coming attractions
Where to Turn: Resources for Editors
I will be conducting another audio conference for McMurry, publisher of Copyediting, on Thursday, February 18. Details at the link.
National Grammar Day
For the run-up to National Grammar Day on March 4, I am in the middle of writing another grammarnoir serial, “Pulp Diction,” which will appear at this blog.
ACES national conference
The fourteenth national conference of the American Copy Editors Society will take place April 15-17 in Philadelphia. If you have not signed up, there is still time to register.
Annie
The Memorial Players production of the musical Annie will be presented on the evenings of April 23-24 and April 30-May 1, and on the afternoons of April 25 and May 2, at Memorial Episcopal Church, Bolton Street and Lafayette Avenue in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill Neighborhood.
Details are at the link, but one detail not mentioned there is that I have been cast as Franklin Roosevelt in this production.
I will be conducting another audio conference for McMurry, publisher of Copyediting, on Thursday, February 18. Details at the link.
National Grammar Day
For the run-up to National Grammar Day on March 4, I am in the middle of writing another grammarnoir serial, “Pulp Diction,” which will appear at this blog.
ACES national conference
The fourteenth national conference of the American Copy Editors Society will take place April 15-17 in Philadelphia. If you have not signed up, there is still time to register.
Annie
The Memorial Players production of the musical Annie will be presented on the evenings of April 23-24 and April 30-May 1, and on the afternoons of April 25 and May 2, at Memorial Episcopal Church, Bolton Street and Lafayette Avenue in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill Neighborhood.
Details are at the link, but one detail not mentioned there is that I have been cast as Franklin Roosevelt in this production.
Keeping up with the Joneses
Yes, Joneses. That’s how it’s done. Today we’re going to have a little refresher tutorial on plurals and possessives. If you’ve already got that down, or think you do, you may go to the library and find a book to read until the next post.
Singular
mule
man
Compson
Snopes
Singular possessive
mule’s
man’s
Compson’s
Snopes’s or Snopes’
Plural
mules
men
Compsons
Snopeses
Plural possessive
mules’
men’s
Compsons’
Snopeses’
Be careful
No matter how many times you have seen it done, do not make nouns plural by adding ’s. The Smith’s is not a proper plural. Neither is the Jones'. The apostrophe can, however, be used to make individual letters — all A’s in the editing class — or numerals — aces and 8’s — plural.
Either Jones’s or Jones’ may be used for the singular possessive. Both usages are current; which one you choose will depend on the style your publication prefers.
Watch out for words that form plurals without adding s or es. If you write childrens’ — and people do — your literacy will be called into question.
Such is the melancholy state of education in this proud republic that I must conduct this elementary review every semester for juniors and seniors at a private university. It would therefore not come as a great shock if some of you would benefit from it, too.
Singular
mule
man
Compson
Snopes
Singular possessive
mule’s
man’s
Compson’s
Snopes’s or Snopes’
Plural
mules
men
Compsons
Snopeses
Plural possessive
mules’
men’s
Compsons’
Snopeses’
Be careful
No matter how many times you have seen it done, do not make nouns plural by adding ’s. The Smith’s is not a proper plural. Neither is the Jones'. The apostrophe can, however, be used to make individual letters — all A’s in the editing class — or numerals — aces and 8’s — plural.
Either Jones’s or Jones’ may be used for the singular possessive. Both usages are current; which one you choose will depend on the style your publication prefers.
Watch out for words that form plurals without adding s or es. If you write childrens’ — and people do — your literacy will be called into question.
Such is the melancholy state of education in this proud republic that I must conduct this elementary review every semester for juniors and seniors at a private university. It would therefore not come as a great shock if some of you would benefit from it, too.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Mumpsimus redux
Mumpsimus is an obstinate determination to hold on to a belief or practice even after it has been demonstrated to be faulty ⎯ a mulish resistance to being informed.
Michael B. Quinion described the origin of the word at World Wide Words in 2001. A medieval priest, either out of deficient literacy or reading from a corrupt text, garbled a phrase in the Latin Mass. Instead of saying quod in ore sumpsimus, “we have taken,” he said quod in ore mumpsimus, which is nonsense.
Corrected by a younger priest, the elder got his back up and, pointing out that he had been saying Mass that way for forty years, declared, “I will not change my old ‘mumpsimus’ for your new ‘sumpsimus.’”
This story, which may have been a scholarly joke of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, came to mind as I read the comments on yesterday’s post about the bogus doctrine of the split infinitive in English. These whippersnapper linguists, the outrage goes, are trying to upset all the rules of grammar that have been in place since God handed them down to an eighth-grade schoolteacher. You know, the “new sumpsimus” that says that the split infinitive is perfectly natural in English. They are not going to give up their “old mumpsimus” until it is pried from their cold, dead hands.
But the plain fact, as anyone who troubles to read the entry in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage or Garner’s Modern American Usage or any other reputable source, for Fowler’s sake, will find that the split infinitive has always been used in English, including by the best writers, and that the prohibition against it was instituted by eighteenth-century grammarians who thought that English ought to resemble Latin. It is not a rule but a superstition, a dogma without foundation.
Significantly, instead of addressing the scholarship, which is upheld by descriptivists and prescriptivists alike, the defenders of this faux rule merely state, over and over, that it is a rule and that anyone who questions it is undermining the standards and purity of the language and opening the gates to the barbarian hordes.
Here is a sample of that line from a comment on yesterday’s post:
I will also recognize that I have been too dependent upon my trust in my teachers and professors who required me to adhere to the aforementioned canon. (Even when I completed my doctorate I received a written form which listed unacceptable language variations, including the split infinitive) in my dissertation.
It is regrettable, deeply regrettable, that the standards of teaching, in elementary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities, have been so deficient that it falls to me to break the news that possession of a doctorate, or the authority to approve a dissertation, does not convey infallibility in questions of faith, morals, and grammar.
Henry David Thoreau said, “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” Somewhat more elegantly, H.W. Fowler deplored “the havoc that is wrought by unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma.”
Some of those people up on the battlements braced for the barbarian blitzkrieg are defending the wrong side.
Michael B. Quinion described the origin of the word at World Wide Words in 2001. A medieval priest, either out of deficient literacy or reading from a corrupt text, garbled a phrase in the Latin Mass. Instead of saying quod in ore sumpsimus, “we have taken,” he said quod in ore mumpsimus, which is nonsense.
Corrected by a younger priest, the elder got his back up and, pointing out that he had been saying Mass that way for forty years, declared, “I will not change my old ‘mumpsimus’ for your new ‘sumpsimus.’”
This story, which may have been a scholarly joke of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, came to mind as I read the comments on yesterday’s post about the bogus doctrine of the split infinitive in English. These whippersnapper linguists, the outrage goes, are trying to upset all the rules of grammar that have been in place since God handed them down to an eighth-grade schoolteacher. You know, the “new sumpsimus” that says that the split infinitive is perfectly natural in English. They are not going to give up their “old mumpsimus” until it is pried from their cold, dead hands.
But the plain fact, as anyone who troubles to read the entry in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage or Garner’s Modern American Usage or any other reputable source, for Fowler’s sake, will find that the split infinitive has always been used in English, including by the best writers, and that the prohibition against it was instituted by eighteenth-century grammarians who thought that English ought to resemble Latin. It is not a rule but a superstition, a dogma without foundation.
Significantly, instead of addressing the scholarship, which is upheld by descriptivists and prescriptivists alike, the defenders of this faux rule merely state, over and over, that it is a rule and that anyone who questions it is undermining the standards and purity of the language and opening the gates to the barbarian hordes.
Here is a sample of that line from a comment on yesterday’s post:
I will also recognize that I have been too dependent upon my trust in my teachers and professors who required me to adhere to the aforementioned canon. (Even when I completed my doctorate I received a written form which listed unacceptable language variations, including the split infinitive) in my dissertation.
It is regrettable, deeply regrettable, that the standards of teaching, in elementary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities, have been so deficient that it falls to me to break the news that possession of a doctorate, or the authority to approve a dissertation, does not convey infallibility in questions of faith, morals, and grammar.
Henry David Thoreau said, “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” Somewhat more elegantly, H.W. Fowler deplored “the havoc that is wrought by unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma.”
Some of those people up on the battlements braced for the barbarian blitzkrieg are defending the wrong side.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The battle rejoined
I understand that there was some kind of football extravaganza over the weekend, which may have distracted some of you from the back-and-forth in Facebook over that exploded doctrine, the split infinitive.
Mignon Fogarty drew fire on her Grammar Girl page on Facebook for pointing out, yet again, that there is no legitimate foundation for the bogus rule against splitting infinitives, A couple of those comments:
A good writer/speaker does not use them. Man, no wonder my students find professional writing so hard!
I respectfully disagree with Grammar Girl on the issue of split infinitives. There is indeed a 'rule' or 'convention' which 'prohibits' them. It is certainly no myth.
You can see more of the same in her 2006 post on the same subject at her Web site, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing:
I have been studying (American) English since 1956, Latin since 1965, and Spanish since 1969.
I agree with those who have said that infinitives should never be split. Sorry, Grammar Girl, but your laxness on this matter is surprising and disappointing. Please change your mind, thus correcting yourself. [Contrary to what our modern world mistakenly thinks, there really are "right" and "wrong" actions in life.]
And this:
Most grammar texts still consider split infinitives incorrect. The English language has been butchered enough without resorting to putting everything into the vernacular. You might as well teach Ebonics or Sponics or whatever.
Either stick to the rules or shut up is my answer.
Some constructions that split infinitives can indeed be ungainly, but that does not mean that all such constructions are wrong. Many writers come up with maladroit metaphors, but no one concludes that all metaphors should therefore be banned. (Except maybe for Plato, who wants to have no truck with poetry in his nasty little Republic.)
What is on display in the comments — and it is profoundly discouraging that some appear to come from teachers — is an uninformed and dogmatic attitude toward language: “I don’t care about the history of the language or what linguists say or even what informed prescriptivists say. I was taught a rule, and that is the law, and anyone who disagrees with me is a barbarian who is tearing down all the standards of civilization. Shut up.”
It is rather the attachment to the split-infinitive superstition that stands in opposition to learning.
Écrasez l’infâme.
Mignon Fogarty drew fire on her Grammar Girl page on Facebook for pointing out, yet again, that there is no legitimate foundation for the bogus rule against splitting infinitives, A couple of those comments:
A good writer/speaker does not use them. Man, no wonder my students find professional writing so hard!
I respectfully disagree with Grammar Girl on the issue of split infinitives. There is indeed a 'rule' or 'convention' which 'prohibits' them. It is certainly no myth.
You can see more of the same in her 2006 post on the same subject at her Web site, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing:
I have been studying (American) English since 1956, Latin since 1965, and Spanish since 1969.
I agree with those who have said that infinitives should never be split. Sorry, Grammar Girl, but your laxness on this matter is surprising and disappointing. Please change your mind, thus correcting yourself. [Contrary to what our modern world mistakenly thinks, there really are "right" and "wrong" actions in life.]
And this:
Most grammar texts still consider split infinitives incorrect. The English language has been butchered enough without resorting to putting everything into the vernacular. You might as well teach Ebonics or Sponics or whatever.
Either stick to the rules or shut up is my answer.
Some constructions that split infinitives can indeed be ungainly, but that does not mean that all such constructions are wrong. Many writers come up with maladroit metaphors, but no one concludes that all metaphors should therefore be banned. (Except maybe for Plato, who wants to have no truck with poetry in his nasty little Republic.)
What is on display in the comments — and it is profoundly discouraging that some appear to come from teachers — is an uninformed and dogmatic attitude toward language: “I don’t care about the history of the language or what linguists say or even what informed prescriptivists say. I was taught a rule, and that is the law, and anyone who disagrees with me is a barbarian who is tearing down all the standards of civilization. Shut up.”
It is rather the attachment to the split-infinitive superstition that stands in opposition to learning.
Écrasez l’infâme.
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