Grammar and privilege

[jlh]

Thanks to everyone for their feed suggestions yesterday!

So speaking of feeds, I was reading a post on Making Light that criticized the grammar of a writer on TAPPED, the blog of The American Prospect, who had been (perhaps is?) a Tufts student. The comments on Making Light and TAPPED brought up some thoughts probably better expressed here:

• Does going to a school like Tufts automatically mean that you are privileged, and therefore worthy of a larger heaping of scorn when you make a mistake? I'm not sure, to be honest, what privilege has to do with any of this, really.
  
• There's a comment that the TAPPED poster should have learned to avoid these grammar mistakes "in high school." I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't learn how to write in high school. Certainly not much more than, perhaps, what a topic sentence was. Not even everyone who goes to Tufts, if you want to say that Tufts is necessarily privileged, went to the kind of high school where by the time they were graduated they had mastered the five page paper.
  
• Is it just me, or does the Grammar Police make anyone else nervous? I always feel like they're reading everything I say with a red pen in hand, waiting for me to make an error. Now, the TAPPED post in question is badly written, no doubt about it, and deserves the critique; grammar exists to make our ideas clear to our readers. But do you read something to make sure that all the verbs agree, or do you read it to see what someone is saying? Does being a member of the Grammar Police get in the way of just reading someone's argument? Do you lose respect for someone who might have used the wrong tense in one sentence?
  
• On the same tip, am I the only one who has words that I can never seem to spell correctly or occasional problems with homophones? I can't imagine that it is all that unusual to have a voice talking in your head as you write, meaning that I think in spoken language and often forget which homophone I want to use. For that reason I always have the spell check on, and I always check my their/they're/there. My -ege endings always have a 'd' in them until I look up the word and see if it belongs and double letters always mess me up. Anyone else have the same kinds of stumbling blocks? Does that make me a bad writer? Should I have learned this in high school?
  
• But this is only possible in something edited, like this post or an email or similar. It's just embarrassing when people correct your writing in chat. Is there anyone so perfect in their written language that they can type at chat speeds and have everything 100% correct? If so, do you also floss? Are you practically perfect in every way?

Now, I could be in a mood, but watching these particular grammar cops have some kind of internecine war over Strunk & White vs. Orwell is a bizarre thing for a Thursday morning. Thoughts?

ETA: Post all your secret SPAG confessions here!

Comments

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

Oh man, the Grammar Police scare me. There are definitely words I have trouble with. Until about two months ago I would go between "weird" and "wierd" pretty interchangeably because I just couldn't get it in my head if it was i before e or the other way around (a friend gave me a handy mnemonic for it, though). I CANNOT work out lay/lie/laid or dieing/dying for the life of me. And there are more. When I try to write something, whether it's a post, an email, or a story, when I encounter these things I frequently do whatever I can to say what I'm trying to say a different way, because I just know if I get it wrong there will be someone out there going "OMFG GRAMMAR PET PEEVE! Why does she not KNOW this??"

On the other hand, unless a piece of writing is absolutely rife with mistakes, they don't really bother me. I've stumbled across a fanfic writer in SGA fandom who writes really fantastic stories, with great plots and characters etc., and inevitably, in every single story, she mixes up noun-verb tense agreement several times. And dude, I so don't care. I mean, would I rather enjoy what I'm reading and give my attention to a writer's ideas/arguments/story, or would I rather get on my high horse about grammatical perfectitude? I'll take Door #1, please.

However. Before I come off as too saintly (hah!), I do have my own grammar pet peeves. But that only means that if a piece of writing is filled with errors, my pet peeves are the only ones that will REALLY annoy me. And then I might snark a bit. Which is probably very hypocritical of me. Ack.

[soupkills.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you ever used phone on a vms system to chat. That program actually showed every letter as you typed it. You didn't even have the luxury of the entry buffer to fix a typo or change a thought.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

For some of us, and by some of us I mean "Emily" the Grammar Police is a burden and not a joy. I do not go around looking for problems in people's writing - and as you know from chatting with me, I myself am typo laden and also a poor speller. However, when the wrong "there" leaps out at me or a verb does not agree with its noun, it actually decreases my enjoyment of whatever I am reading. The Tufts argument, I feel, may be more of a "Can you believe this counts as a well-educated person in this day and age?" and less of a "This over-privileged person cannot spell, tee hee" I, for one, am much likelier to give my freshman students slack for these things than I am my fellow grad students in English, for instance.

[zorb]

Does being a member of the Grammar Police get in the way of just reading someone's argument? Do you lose respect for someone who might have used the wrong tense in one sentence?

Yes, a little bit. Like calloocallay said, I'm not seeking mistakes (unless I'm supposed to be editing the document), but they stand out anyway. This happens more since I've volunteered for FA, but I was always the "grammar check" for my friends' papers in high school. We had a fairly rigorous English program in my district, and when I got to college, it amazed me that most people hadn't gone through the same sort of intense training that we had since middle school.

However, I know that this is more of a personal quirk and I'm certainly not immune to making errors, myself, so I can work past small errors in what I'm reading and focus on content - unless it's obvious that the writer didn't try at all, in which case I consider them lazy.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Lie/lay/laid is evil. One word should not have as its past tense form another word with a different meaning. It's evil and wrong and I honestly just don't think about it anymore.

I have to go back through fiction to make sure my tenses are right because usually I'm trying to decide as I write when I want past and when I want present, and I change my mind, and I have to go back and fix it. I think that it's when grammar makes things unreadable that it's worth pointing out. Or when someone has actually asked you to look something over.

My only actual pet peeve is when people declare themselves the "grammer police." It's like, um, you are concerned with whether or not the "Frasier" actor is back on coke?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Ew, that would make me so nervous. I'd rather just talk to someone if it's going to be like that!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

You're not a poor speller; you're an average speller.

I wish that the comments on the Making Light thread were as you say; they are a little bit, but they are also, as Josh said to me earlier, "I have amazing grammar and I learned it in the ghet-to." They were both being snobs about privileged schools and being snobs about grammar, a bizarre mix.

I agree with you on the people who get more or less slack, too, and I think that situations matter. Blog posts should not have huge grammar problems, or homophone problems, or spelling issues, because hello, you have time to edit them. They're also public writing and you should care what you're putting out there. For me the SPAG thing is more, "If you don't care about this enough to give it the once over, then why should I care about it enough to read it?" Comments, since they're written more on the fly and one doesn't always want to preview spell check, should be given a bit of give.

Also? I will never remember lie/lay/laid. Never. I will look it up for the rest of my natural life.

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

1) No, going to Tufts does not necessarily make you privileged, and I'm with you in that I've no idea what that has to do with any of this.

2) High school? We had a few days spent on parts of sentences, but I still don't know wtf a gerund is, and I don't give a shit. I learned my grammar by reading a lot. Not a perfect method, but it seems to have worked marginally well.

3) I. Hate. The Grammar Nazis. I feel that in many ways they quash personal style. A while ago I spent an unproductive half hour arguing with someone about passive voice in a particular short story (that wasn't mine, I might add); she was going on about how a lot of Editors Don't Like Passive Voice in Stories, and I'm like, "So what?" The style worked with the story quite well, and yet it was somehow wrong or bad just because someone had spent too much time masturbating to Strunk and White.

And in all honesty, if I'm reading something and the verb tenses don't agree, I'll consciously or unconsciously mentally correct it and move on. It sometimes bugs me, but I'm not going to get into a snit about it. Unless I have a personal grudge and want to grind the author of said piece into little bits, and at that point good grammar is moot anyway.

4) You aren't the only one. I have difficulties with typos and homophones. I, too, hear my own voice in my head - because I am clearly so pleasant to listen to - so I mix things up all the time. I constantly type "it's" when I mean "its" and vice versa. Same with their and they're. I still have my pet peeves, of course - for instance, I can't STAND it when someone mixes up the words "then" and "than" consistently. Usually they act like the word "than" doesn't even exist and is just the product of some mass delusion. "Congradulations" bugs me, too.

...

Hmmmm, that was more ranty than I'd intended. Ooops. Don't get me wrong, I like clean writing and good grammar, but not with the same sexual fervor that seems to afflict Grammar Nazis. Or Grammar Police. Whatever.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

24/7 red pencildom is only for those among us with little else to occupy the mind. To notice something out of the blue is one thing, to hunt things down in casual, friendly communication denotes other problems.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

This is off topic. http://www.apple.com/trailers/picturehouse/prairiehomecompanion/

[didi75.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or does the Grammar Police make anyone else nervous?

YES! They make me so nervous. I am horrible at grammar, partly because I didn't learn all that stuff in high school, and I went to college at a foreign university. Grad school has helped me in that way, but at the same time, my profs usually care more about content, and rarely correct grammatical mistakes. Except for my adviser, who's an editor, and the Heinrich Himmler of the Grammar Police. That could be why I'm always so scared to give him a dissertation chapter. He can be so brutal. I think, when he finally loses it, someone will find him wandering around in rags babbling about passive voice! Fuck passive voice, he does it all the time in his stupid text books. /rant

On the same tip, am I the only one who has words that I can never seem to spell correctly or occasional problems with homophones?

I have trouble with the word embarrassed. The double r gets me every time. Kind of ironic, given that it's always embarrassing to misspell a word. I don't know what I would do without spell check.

It's okay to misspell words in chat. Who cares? Gah!

[didi75.livejournal.com]

"Congradulations" bugs me, too.

Hahaha! That's so funny. I have a friend who says expecially and kindiegarden. The sad thing, she's actually a kindergarten teacher. :| *shakes head*

[starrysummer.livejournal.com]

Here via didi75, without time for the thoughtful matters...

On the same tip, am I the only one who has words that I can never seem to spell correctly or occasional problems with homophones? I can't imagine that it is all that unusual to have a voice talking in your head as you write, meaning that I think in spoken language and often forget which homophone I want to use. For that reason I always have the spell check on, and I always check my their/they're/there. My -ege endings always have a 'd' in them until I look up the word and see if it belongs and double letters always mess me up. Anyone else have the same kinds of stumbling blocks? Does that make me a bad writer? Should I have learned this in high school?

YES. Though my problem isn't as much with homophones as it is with RHYMES. I have a running monologue of what I'm writing and if the monologue is ahead of the typing and I'm trying to catch up with myself, I'll often type not only homophones but rhymes instead of what I meant to write. Not sure anyone else does that one, though.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm so of two minds about this.

On the plus side, Altman! Also what a super cast!

On the minus side, I don't really like A Prairie Home Companion; I find it precious and not as funny as it thinks it is.

So I bounce back and forth between wanting to see it and really NOT.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I feel strongly that even if you're careful, and you have someone look things over, unless you are paying a professional copy editor, little mistakes are going to slip through. Also, word usage is slippery and punctuation rules vary (I get different messages about commas from nearly everyone I talk to). So I try not to hold it against people.

It really is one of those things that vary widely from school to school and anything like that hits all my insecurity meters because I went to a substandard, rural, lower middle class school so I had to learn a lot of things very quickly as a freshman in college.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

Okay! I have never actually listened to the show, as I don't listen to the radio at all. I was just like, Altman! Cast of Thousands! NPR, of which several of my nearest and dearest approve strongly!

[tnh.livejournal.com]

I'm not waiting to pounce on your grammar. Neither is Patrick. The original casus belli was a blogger on Midterm Madness whose primary sin was carelessness of thought and expression: a very different thing from mixing up lie and lay, or failing to use the subjunctive. What he'd fallen into is one of the recurrent failure modes of bad political writing. Patrick pointed that out, a bit colorfully.

I don't hate grammatical errors. I compulsively note their existence, because I'm one of those people who literally can't help seeing them; but I don't usually mention them. What I do hate are teaching methods that never give students a sense that they have any mastery of their language. Instead, what they instill is a lifelong sense that your grammar and usage are somehow always going to be wrong. Could there be anything more useless? Confidence is as important in language as it is in dancing.

Look at you guys. You all hang out online, which means you read and write for fun. It's obvious that you have a competent grasp of the process. You should feel secure. Instead, you're flinching at the idea that some random person is going to come along and correct your language. That's just not right.

Some English teachers are wonderful people. Some are insecure jerks. Comes with being human. The worst sort of language nazis, in and out of the classroom, are the ones who turn English into a gigantic game of Gotcha!: "Aha! You misspelled a word/split an infinitive/ended a sentence with a preposition/used a double negative to convey a negative! Gotcha!" It's pathetic, really. People are always going to misspell English words once in a while -- it's a damnably hard language to spell, and there's a strong hereditary component to one's ability to spell. Meanwhile, split infinitives, terminal prepositions, and the use of the multiple negative as an intensifier are natural features of the English language, not errors at all. There's not a lot of superiority in that superiority dance.

English doesn't actually have all that many rules. It has some rules, plus a bunch of ways it tends to go wrong and screw up your meaning. It's worth knowing about those so you don't write sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell or Having finished the assignment, the computer was switched off. The important point, though, is that learning all those rules won't make you a good writer. It does help, of course, but it's not nearly as important as getting your thoughts in order, stating them clearly, making good word choices, and having something to say.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I am so with you. That's why I'm all like, maybe I should see it even if I don't like Prairie Home Companion because, Altman! Cast of Thousands! John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson singing! Who knows, maybe it will make me like Prairie Home Companion more . . .

Which I think says, if people are going, I'm there.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

See, it's like you never stop paying for going to a shitty primary/secondary school, no matter how bright or hardworking you are or where your bright hard work got you later. It's a permanent class thing, or something, I guess. (There also seems to be a correlation of Anglophilia and Grammar Police that points to similar class consciousness, but that is a totally vague observation that I am not prepared to thoroughly argue at this time.)

One thing I find useful about getting out of passive voice, as a historian, is that it forces me to assign agency. Events don't just happen; someone or something or a bunch of someones or somethings are making them happen, and that's what I'm supposed to be uncovering. Staying in the passive keeps me from thinking about and remembering that. But, that's really for the rewrite, not the draft.

I continue to hate double letters.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm finding all these people who, like me, think about language much more as spoken than as written, which can make spelling and homophones pretty damn tricky. Never mind all that "let's take Latin grammar and apply it to English" business that has nothing to do with how the language is actually spoken. Irritating!

Well, welcome!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

First, thanks for coming by!

I agree that the original post on TAPPED was poorly written. My question was more, what did the fact that the writer had gone to Tufts have to do with it, particularly as the commenters on that post seemed to agree that writing should be learned at some unspecified point before high school? While you and Patrick may well not be scanning the globe in search of comma splices, the tone of the comments on that blog definitely didn't encourage this writer, who went to a seriously crappy rural elementary and secondary school followed by an Ivy League college, to wade in and express much of anything. (Sheesh, I didn't even get the memo that the Strunk & White should be put out with yesterday's trash as soon as one is graduated from college.)

What makes me uncomfortable is the linking of good writing with a good college with privilege, when none of them have anything to do with each other. It all feels very NOCD. If the point was that TAPPED is being lazy in both their hiring and their editing, then that point was not made until well down in the comments; the point that I saw was, woe to you, fuzzy writer, if your critic discovers that you went to a good college.

As for the grammar police, as long as people make posts pointing fun at a misused apostrophe on a road sign (and if you can still tell what they mean, what does it matter, really?) then the rest of us are going to feel insecure every time we use a possessive. Which brings us back to Cotter's Axiom of Inverse Applicability (http://jlh.livejournal.com/271444.html): The only people who listen to advice are those who don't need it.