Language Use and Grammar

Dennis Baron,

University of Illinois

My task, as I see it, is to stir up some debate on issues of linguistic correctness. I’d like to go beyond what’s already been discussed on this list, so I’ll skip preliminaries and ask participants to examine the following wildly-exaggerated claims—let’s call them Baron’s Laws of English—in order to generate more reflective practice in dealing with student writing.

• Standard English doesn’t exist. At least not in the singular, and the existence of the plural, standard Englishes, may be seriously in doubt as well. We share no common core of what counts as acceptable not to mention grammatical in writing. Even our own personal hit lists of words and expressions that should never be used (you know, hopefully, ain’t, the dreaded passive voice) dissolves into a messiness of items we reject some of the time, but never, despite our protestations to the contrary, all of the time. Students learn early on that one teacher marks something wrong which another doesn’t even notice. Some of this inconsistency has to do with the fact that English teachers are expected to be experts in grammar, gatekeepers of language, adjudicators of correctness, without ever studying such subjects. But even teachers who have studied linguistics reject its relativism when it comes to judging student writing. Long before descriptive grammar ever made its way into the curriculum, centuries of debate over what constitutes acceptability suggest there never was a golden age, or a common core of books that everybody read, and there never was a list of the laws of English usage that everyone agreed on. With luck, there never will be. Nonetheless, writing teachers tend to operate as if such a decalogue exists.

• There is no universal reader. Readers disagree not just on what’s acceptable, grammatically, but on what they like and don’t like. Ever go to a movie with someone and you hated it but they were having a great time? You wanted to leave but they had the car keys? How many rejection slips did J. K. Rowling rack up before Harry Potter scored? Even Dr. Seuss’s first book was shopped to more than a score of presses before Theodore Geisel struck pay dirt. Of course readers and viewers disagree on what’s good. The problem comes when we apply the same principle of subjectivity to how teachers read. Teachers too disagree on what texts are successful, both student-generated ones like essays and term papers, and those written by the pros. Students have always known this, as well: they have to adjust for each new teacher’s individual expectations, likes, and dislikes. But many teachers want to think there’s an objective standard they can all agree on, and any hint that teacher-readers bring subjectivity to their evaluations of student essays is heresy. Plus it opens them up for grade complaints. Why does subjectivity have such a bad rap, when objective evaluation of texts doesn’t exist? Even the folks in math and physics have come around to the view that it’s all a matter of interpretation. And here’s the clincher: if we could all agree on what texts mean, we wouldn’t need all those lawyers (not to mention all those literary critics).

• Observing the niceties of grammar and style doesn’t make for successful writing. An essay can fail to violate grammatical propriety and at the same time fall flat. When someone in the Engineering college complains to me that his (it’s invariably a his in our engineering college) students can’t write, I ask him to give examples. He usually trots out a list of surface errors. But fix all those and you may still have a weak essay, so my guess is that spelling and usage get blamed just because they’re more visible than things like rhetorical structure, specificity of example, or observing the requirements of the genre. And of course professional writers whose reputation precedes them get away with all sorts of linguistic improprieties with nary a raised eyebrow. Why, some of them can even plagiarize with impunity and put it all down to faulty note-taking (or does that only go for historians?).

• English faculty have no special insight into how writers work. Before you remind me of all the special insight generated by English faculty on everything from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones, let me give a specific example. At an English department meeting about eight years ago we discussed a new campus-wide writing-across-the-curriculum requirement. One of our most radical, left-wing, multi-culti pomo profs got up and cheered the new requirement because, as he told it, his students, English majors all, couldn’t write. When I asked him to explain what he meant, he said, “They can’t spell. They can’t punctuate. And they don’t know MLA style.” If that’s the level of expertise that cutting-edge Eng lit faculty bring to writing assessment, then who can blame the engineer who can’t articulate what’s wrong with a student’s senior project? As Pogo might have put it, were he writing for his English teacher, “We have met the enemy, and we all know what we have to put up with in our very own departments.”

Can the subaltern write? Given these truths universally acknowledged, I ask, like Lenin, “What is to be done?” We see that textbooks have adopted some of the progressive ideas of writing studies scholarship: modes have given way to process (rarely the plural, processes, though writers readily change their process to fit the task), and even to the social construction of text. But the usage section of every writing textbook might just as well have been written by Bishop Lowth, the eighteenth-century grammarian. Even Henry Fowler, of Fowler’s English Usage fame, was more liberal in what he found acceptable than much that passes for usage instruction today.

So just as we embrace new writing and reading technologies, applauding the increased access to authorship that the Internet affords, we lament the linguistic decline that accompanies email and instant messaging. No matter how postmodern we get, shifting our gaze to writers as gendered subjects and racialized bodies, I see no impending revolution in how we judge the language of student writing. Many readers may think this a good thing, arguing, “If standard English doesn’t exist, then we will have to invent it.” After all, standard English is what the gentle reader expects of every text. But this suggests that an unexamined notion of literacy, comprising such traditional linguistic judgment, threatens to replace race, ethnicity, class, or gender as a social barrier. I wonder whether it’s time to broaden our notions of what counts as acceptable student prose at least to match what we accept from people who write for a living. After all, at a time when we encourage the subaltern to speak, we continue to require that the subaltern write only in standard English.

Any questions?

Resources and materials for further discussion:

• The question of what is standard English is a vexed one. For some recent discussion, see http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg02285.html . See also, Dennis Baron, Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary (Urbana: NCTE, 1989). Baron’s other laws of English can be found in Guide to Home Language Repair (Urbana: NCTE: 1994).
• In 1974, the year that the National Council of Teachers of English published “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” NCTE at its annual business passed a resolution arguing against a usage test as part of the SAT: http://www.ncte.org/resolutions/sat741974.html
• For my own take on the writing processes, see “What Writers Do,” http://www.english.uiuc.edu/baron/essays/writers.htm
• “What Writers Do” was written partly in response to a query from a high school English department chair trying to negotiate the difficult balance between preparing her students for what she thought they would encounter in college writing classes, and preparing those same students for state-mandated standardized achievment tests. Here’s what I wrote in response to her letter: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/baron/essays/letter.htm
• The only English usage book I recommend if you really want to think about usage issues: Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1989).
• For an essay “interrogating” our insistence on standard English in the classroom see http://www.english.uiuc.edu/baron/essays/standard%20english.htm