Apples of Gold, Pictures of Silver
So Kate asked recently why grammar matters. Rather than clog up her blog with longwinded comments, I'll put all my longwinded comments here to bore my own friends instead of hers.
Recently one of my composition students wrote on one of his assignments about how much he loved this instructor (who has somewhat of a lousy reputation as a teacher) because " __ doesn't grade us on our grammar. He just grades us on our ideas. If you have a good idea, you get a good grade."
The statement has a certain vague logic. But the problem is that lots of times, the ideas in my students' papers are incomprehensible, or at least less comprehensible, because of their awkwardness with the language. Sometimes I can still figure out what they're trying to say, but it takes a lot more work on my part as a reader, and that means that I'm that much less likely to get what they want to say exactly if I don't already know it. Their writing is that much less likely to teach me something new. If language is power, they are only as powerful as they are skilled with its tools.
Of course, they might argue that we read texts in class that require a lot of interpretation, and they might ask how those are different. I think I would say that the work pays off if the process of interpretation itself yields us something. But if we work to discover an idea that could have been communicated more simply, or if we're misled by a sentence because we've gotten the wrong grammatical cues, our time has been wasted.
Or (if they were persistent, and really inquisitive), they might ask why grammar matters when lots of readers don't notice or care about it. And then I'd have to say that the power of language for a society as a whole depends not on the precision of any given communication, but the available range of meanings that any writer can draw on and expect his or her audience to perceive. I think our language is getting dreadfully impoverished, which worries me a little. I've been shocked at the vocabulary that some of my students don't know, and their inability to make important, even obvious distinctions as a result. I read a statistic recently that said the average adolescent today has something like 50% of the vocabulary that his or her counterpart had a generation ago. I think about what a relief it is to find the word that expresses a feeling or an idea, and how convicting and inspiring it can be to hear the right one from someone else, and I want our language to be as rich and powerful and precise as it can be.
Recently one of my composition students wrote on one of his assignments about how much he loved this instructor (who has somewhat of a lousy reputation as a teacher) because " __ doesn't grade us on our grammar. He just grades us on our ideas. If you have a good idea, you get a good grade."
The statement has a certain vague logic. But the problem is that lots of times, the ideas in my students' papers are incomprehensible, or at least less comprehensible, because of their awkwardness with the language. Sometimes I can still figure out what they're trying to say, but it takes a lot more work on my part as a reader, and that means that I'm that much less likely to get what they want to say exactly if I don't already know it. Their writing is that much less likely to teach me something new. If language is power, they are only as powerful as they are skilled with its tools.
Of course, they might argue that we read texts in class that require a lot of interpretation, and they might ask how those are different. I think I would say that the work pays off if the process of interpretation itself yields us something. But if we work to discover an idea that could have been communicated more simply, or if we're misled by a sentence because we've gotten the wrong grammatical cues, our time has been wasted.
Or (if they were persistent, and really inquisitive), they might ask why grammar matters when lots of readers don't notice or care about it. And then I'd have to say that the power of language for a society as a whole depends not on the precision of any given communication, but the available range of meanings that any writer can draw on and expect his or her audience to perceive. I think our language is getting dreadfully impoverished, which worries me a little. I've been shocked at the vocabulary that some of my students don't know, and their inability to make important, even obvious distinctions as a result. I read a statistic recently that said the average adolescent today has something like 50% of the vocabulary that his or her counterpart had a generation ago. I think about what a relief it is to find the word that expresses a feeling or an idea, and how convicting and inspiring it can be to hear the right one from someone else, and I want our language to be as rich and powerful and precise as it can be.
posted by Tara | 11:29 PM
3 Comments:
hear, hear.
Another reason I worry -- text messaging and I.M.ing. People are intentionally finding ways to shorten or misspell words. Acronyms are the new black.
Erin, just the other day, I was thinking, "When someone says, 'heer, heer,' is it 'hear, hear' or is it 'here, here'?" Things like that always bug me because I feel like I should know them because someday somebody is going to ask me. Or, you know, I'll be in a situation where I absolutely must write the phrase publicly. Yeah.
Kate--U R rite bout that 1. 2 bad.
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