On Writing

In my many years as a university professor, I have worked with generation after generation of students who are at the very beginning of their adult life. Some of these students have even followed me into a life in academia where one’s career depends on the ability to write well, and a person is often judged by his or her ability to produce a vast ocean of text which is subsequently published. However, as I have grown older over the years, my students have remained a consistent 18 to 22 years old and hence provide a snapshot of the college aged at any given time. What these snapshots show is an incredible change in the linguistic perceptions of young people and their resulting capability in writing the language.

I am not claiming to know anything about what schools teach nowadays nor I am interested in the kind of alarmist discussion that appears periodically in the mass media to warn of the dire consequences attendant on decreasing standards and increasing lack of quality in teaching. Instead, as a writer, I simply reflect on what I have observed among my students and what they seem to understand about the craft of using language that they claim to wish to learn.

I went to school a long time ago, and the kinds of things we were expected to understand and master were undoubtedly different from what they do today. In the area of literature, for example, it was necessary to know what exactly literary forms like a sonnet, a limerick, or a rhymed couplet were and how to recognize them; to be able to tell the difference between free verse and blank verse and understand their usage; to recognize and scan poetic rhythm and meter and name the patterns; to understand the difference between prose and poetry; and use a whole range of literary terms that often seemed very remote from or daily experience. The application of standard spelling, standard grammar, and correct meaning of words was assumed, and variation in these elements was taken badly indeed by those in charge. The aim of this was to ensure that all the students, most of whom would not proceed much beyond the 10th grade, were capable of reading and appreciating the enormous body of English literature and would use this ability to educate themselves throughout life by reading for enjoyment. Whether they did or not, I do not know, but I do know that even the least promising of us could construct a complete sentence and was capable of transcribing grammatically and with correct spelling any idea he or she needed to convey. It was not that we were any smarter on average than school students today, but we were required to have a high level of linguistic awareness and working knowledge of a certain body of information. If we did not, we failed.

This information was specific. English has a very long history, much of which is recorded in writing. As a result, we know, rather than hypothesize, what our language was like hundreds of years ago and how it has changed. We also have a very long history of standardization. With some 60,000 words, none of us can know all of the vocabulary English has to offer; these words are varied in origin and highly specific in meaning and usage. This is why we, as English speakers, are prone to confusion and also why we have to practice spelling. The speakers of many other languages do not have to worry about such things; their system is regular and they can learn it once and be done. We have a vast body of literature that encompasses numerous forms, each with its own rules, and we have a highly developed terminology and practice for the analysis of that literature. In short, we have more to read and more to learn than other people, but this is what has made English the language the world wants to speak. As students those many years ago, we were expected to know our own linguistic heritage, even if that heritage was adopted, as it was for many of us, and own families had only recently become English speakers.

My students today, however, have almost no linguistic awareness and very little understanding of how their language works nor of the vast literature it has to offer. This is a very serious problem; it impedes their study of foreign languages, prevents them from writing well, and, most important, makes it impossible for them to truly grasp what they do manage to read because they miss so many nuances and connotations that are implicit in word choice, sentence structure, and use of idiom. Perhaps like some of you, Dear Readers, they are bored by rules and history and feel their time is too precious to be spent learning things they believe can be looked up. They never do look anything up, however, and yet long to break with the tradition they refuse to study.

Almost every day, one of these young people asks me why I insist that they write in complete sentences with punctuation, with the words spelled correctly and in meanings that can be found in the dictionary, or why they are not free in my class to reject the conventions of writing that have served numerous past authors so ably. I tell them the reason is so that readers will understand what they are trying to say and react accordingly. When, they cry, will they be allowed to break free from convention and do what they want? They are apparently boiling over with creativity and want to make their mark on the language without doing the work of learning it first. The answer to this is the same reason George and Ira Gershwin were able to create a hit song famous for incorrect grammar. Once you understand the rules you wish to break and have shown that you are conversant with the great bulk of English literature, then you may do as you like. In other words, while “It Ain’t Necessarily So” applied to the Gershwins, it is so for you and me, at least until we can show we have the knowledge to do otherwise.