Humanity's future depends upon good grammar

The Bad Grammar award has been charged with sneering misanthropy, but as a judge I say that our children's lives are at stake 

If you tolerate this, then your children won't be next … a Tesco sign. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

So far in my four decades, I have lived a life blissfully free of controversy. No paparazzi have ever staked out my front door and, with the odd (in both senses of the word) outraged commenter aside, I have never, to my knowledge, sparked loathing and fury in anyone I either know or don't. So it was with an ease prompted in equal measures by naivete and common sense that when Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler Academy emailed me several months ago to ask whether I would like to be a judge for this year's Bad Grammar award, I agreed with not the slightest bit of hesitancy.

Well! Who knew that an interest in how the English language works was tantamount to announcing oneself as a frothing-mouthed raving loony? Are sentence structures the new poll tax? I could only assume so from the frankly hilarious rage that greeted the announcement of our shortlist this week. I feared I had failed in my capacity as a judge already when my presence on the panel did not prevent the prize from being raged against on the website I write for, when one especially outraged chap wrote that I and my fellow judges, Jeremy Paxman and Rowley Leigh, were "peddling sneering, condescending, dismissive, misanthropic, elitist, made-up twaddle"? He suggested that our rackety prize was some kind of undefined Gove-ian conspiracy and, perhaps mistaking our prize for actual legislation, that we were "language police". I could spend longer dismantling this particular blog but, first, life's too short and, second, seeing as the gentleman's main objection seemed to be that the prize was inspired by a book (that I had heretofore never encountered) called Gwynne's Grammar, and he himself has written a competing grammar book, I'm not convinced there's really any need.

Even lovely Michael Rosen seemed to feel the bile rising at the prospect of these awards, calling them "nasty" and insisting that bad grammar is "no big deal. We all make mistakes. In most circumstances it's no big deal. We get what the person meant from the context."

Indeed we do. This, it seems, lies at the heart of this issue: should grammar be prescriptive or descriptive? In other words, should we all adhere to a set of hard rules from the 16th century or should we just blunder along, let language take its course and assume we know what each other means? Obviously, the answer lies between those two extremes. But I am going to speak up here in defence of good grammar and, contrary to the suggestion of one columnist, my defence is in no way endorsed or inspired by Michael Gove.

One doesn't need to be Thomas Gradgrind to be interested in the rules underlying the English language, or to believe that good communication and understanding depend on clarity. Grammar is not just about learning sentence construction: it's about speaking clearly and plainly and cutting through obfustication. But even aside from that, and most importantly of all, good grammar will help you get laid.

I learned grammar at my school in the US and I am eternally grateful I did because, when I moved to London in the early 90s at the age of 11, I learned that grammar was not, weirdly, on the syllabus. As a result, I found learning foreign languages, such as French and Italian, far easier than some of my new English friends did because I understood the subjunctive tense and verb conjugations. Only one other girl in my year had also had grammar lessons and she, too, found learning foreign languages a comparative doddle. When we were about 16, a bunch of my friends, including my grammatically-correct friend, all went off on a German exchange and my friend, with her superior grammar skills, pulled not one, not two, but THREE German boys. I'm telling you, Munich has yet to recover from her visit, and grammar lessons were never so popular as when the German exchange trip returned to London.

As for my second piece of evidence for the defence, as anyone who has ever dabbled in internet dating knows, there is no bigger turn-off – none – than a spelling or grammar mistake in a prospective suitor's biography or correspondence. Yes, everyone makes mistakes and language mutates and blah blah blah, but in the pitiless world of internet dating, it is simple human instinct to rule someone out on such grounds. I've had friends cancel dates due to a simple rogue apostrophe. So consider that, grammar descriptivists. The perpetuation of the human race depends on good grammar.

So when the award rolled around on Thursday night, we all felt the heavy weight of the human species on our shoulders. Our shortlist was pleasingly outraging and the Idler Academy was veritably packed out with passionate fellow grammarians. There were some delightful entries (I particularly like the cafe chain Apostrophe misusing an apostrophe, although that is, strictly speaking, more a punctuation mistake than a grammatical one) and some downright depressing ones. Rowley Leigh voted for Tristram Hunt's incomprehensible speech, but Jeremy Paxman and I both voted forTesco, so it took the prize. Tesco, it may be remembered, was nominated for using "less" not "fewer" in reference to numbers on loo-roll packaging – "Same Luxury. Less Lorries" – and for describing its orange juice as "most tastiest". I suspect this will come as a disappointment to those who predicted that our Gove-ian prize would go to Hunt (he was runner-up) but that's the problem with dismissing basic grammar rules: you don't always talk sense.

Anachronistic and iniquitous, grammar schools are a blot on the British education system

Owen Jones in The Independent

The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, could not have been more damning. Grammar schools are “stuffed full of middle-class kids,” he says. Though they “might do well with 10 per cent of the school population,” he argues, “everyone else does really badly.” Refreshing: we normally only hear from those who want to bring back secondary moderns. It’s time to push back, and call for the remaining 164 grammar schools to finally be scrapped.

There’s a good reason why the pro-secondary modern brigade are so loud, with the exception of the two-person campaigning machine of Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar. According to the Sutton Trust, most top journalists are privately educated – for the general population it’s just 7 per cent – so our media is hardly fertile ground to champion the benefits of comprehensive education. “Aha!”, the secondary modernists respond. “That in itself illustrates the failure of the comps!” It actually says more about the fact that if you have parents rich enough to send you to a fee-paying school, they’ll be rich enough to pay you through the media’s proliferating unpaid internships, as well as the costly post-graduate journalism courses that are becoming all but compulsory to so many wanting to enter the media world. Here is a wider debate about Britain’s rigged society that the secondary modern lobbyists are not interested in.

The debate is also skewed because so few of those written off by secondary moderns made it into the political or media elite. So let us stick to the facts. Grammar schools have never worked. Back in the late 1950s, the government commissioned the Crowther Report into the state of Britain’s education system. They found that boys from semi-skilled or skilled family backgrounds were “much under-represented in the composition of selective schools”, but “over-represented” in the secondary moderns. Most of the “sons of professional people” went to grammars, but only a minority of manual workers’ children did so. As a 2011 British Journal of Sociology study put it, “any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance of secondary moderns”.

What about the minority of working-class children who did make it to grammars? Generally speaking, they did badly. According to a 1954 government report, out of 16,000 grammar school pupils from semi-skilled or unskilled families, around 9,000 failed to get three passes at O-level. Just one in 20 were awarded two A-levels. And there’s a reason for this: it is broader social inequalities that fuel educational inequalities, not school structures.

Peter Hitchens is a passionate defender of selection, arguing that political parties have been “captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago”. One of his key arguments is that “the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s”. This in itself is an odd conflation, given most of the students at direct grant grammar schools were fee-paying. Back in 1964, 37 per cent of all Oxbridge students were state-educated; last year, 63.3 per cent of Cambridge hailed from a state school. As ever, the numbers of working-class students at Oxford and Cambridge – and other top universities, some of whom are even less socially representative – is unacceptably low. That’s why they should be forced to automatically enrol the brightest working-class students, recognising the fact we start from different places.

Where selection remains today, it continues to be largely the preserve of the privileged. Just 3 per cent of grammar school pupils are on free school meals, compared to 17.5 per cent at other schools. They are a whopping four times more likely to admit privately educated children than those on free school meals. Hitchens claims that’s because, with so few selective areas, pushy middle-class types are bound to dominate. But grammar schools’ unrepresentative make-up is consistent with how they have always been, and hardly explains why, as one study recently found, “poor children do dramatically worse in selective areas”, with poor children far less likely to do well at GCSEs in areas like Kent than non-selective areas. In selective areas, the privileged often pay for private tuition to get their kids to pass the grammar school test, which is exactly what they would do everywhere if selection was rolled out nationally again.

And then there’s Northern Ireland, also stuck in the selective age, again championed by Hitchens as a success. That’s odd, because according to the recent Pisa international rankings on maths, reading and science, the Six Counties do worse than both Scotland and England.

The real issue is social inequality. By the age of five, children from the poorest backgrounds have a vocabulary up to 18 months behind those from the richest backgrounds; no wonder selection a few years later purges so many. That’s why we need far more resources at an earlier age, with more investment in Sure Start and nurseries. Diet, housing, the stresses of poverty: here are far bigger factors, and the reason middle-class pupils tend to do well wherever they are sent. So let’s focus on inequality and good schools for all, and finally rid ourselves of the bewildering anachronism of selection.

7 important grammar rules

Semicolons should be used rarely, if at all. And beware dangling modifiers!

By Ben Yagoda | March 14, 2013

 

These rules were not meant to be broken.

ThinkStock/iStockphoto

I

recently wrote an article for TheWeek.com about bogus grammar "rules" that aren't worth your time. However, there are still plenty of legitimate rules that you should be aware of. Not following them doesn't make you a bad person or even (necessarily) a bad writer. I'm sure that all of them were broken at one point or another by Henry James, Henry Adams, or some other major author named Henry. Moreover, grammar is one of the least pressing problems when it comes to the poor state of writing today. In my new book, How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them, things like wordiness, poor word choice, awkwardness, and bad spelling — which have nothing to do with grammar — take up the bulk of my attention.

Nevertheless, anyone who wants to write in a public setting has to be aware of grammar. (And I'm concerned with writing here; talking is a whole different ballgame.) If you make these errors, you're likely to be judged harshly by an editor you want to publish your work; an executive who, you hope, will be impressed enough by your cover letter to hire you; or a reader you want to be persuaded by your argument. In each case, there's a pretty easy workaround, so better safe than sorry. 

1. The subjunctive
This one is pretty simple. When you're writing about a non-true situation — usually following the word if or the verb wish — the verb to be is rendered as were.

So:

* If I was were a rich man.

* I wish I was were an Oscar Mayer wiener.

* If Hillary Clinton was were president, things would be a whole lot different.

If you are using if for other purposes (hypothetical situations, questions), you don't use the subjunctive.

* The reporter asked him if he were was happy.

* If an intruder were was here last night, he would have left footprints, so let's look at the ground outside.

2. Bad parallelism 
This issue comes up most often in lists, for example: My friend made salsa, guacamole, and brought chips. If you start out by having made cover the first two items, it has to cover subsequent ones as well. To fix, you usually have to do just a little rewriting. Thus, My friend made salsa and guacamole and brought chips to go with them.

3. Verb problems
There are a few persistent troublemakers you should be aware of. 

* I'm tired, so I need to go lay lie down.

* The fish laid lay on the counter, fileted and ready to broil.

* Honey, I shrunk shrank the kids.

* In a fit of pique, he sunk sank the toy boat.

* He seen saw it coming.

(The last three are examples of verbs where people sometimes switch the past and participle forms. Thus, it would be correct to write: I have shrunk the kids; He had sunk the boat; and He had seen it coming.)

4. Pronoun problemsLet's take a look at three little words. Not "I love you," but me, myself and I. Grammatically, they can be called object, reflexive, and subject. As long as they're by themselves, object and subject don't give anyone problems. That is, no one who's an adult native English speaker would say Me walked to the bus stop or He gave the book to I. For some reason, though, things can get tricky when a pronoun is paired with a noun. We all know people who say things like Me and Fred had lunch together yesterday, instead of Fred and I... Heck, most of us have said it ourselves; for some reason, it comes trippingly off the tongue. We also (most of us) know not to use it in a piece of writing meant to be published. Word to the wise: Don't use it in a job interview, either.

There's a similar attraction to using the subject instead of object. Even Bill Clinton did this back in 1992 when he asked voters to give Al Gore and I [instead of me] a chance to bring America back. Or you might say, Thanks for inviting my wife and I, or between you and I… Some linguists and grammarians have mounted vigorous and interesting defenses of this usage. However, it's still generally considered wrong and should be avoided. 

A word that's recently become quite popular is myself — maybe because it seems like a compromise between I and me. But sentences like Myself and my friends went to the mall or They gave special awards to Bill and myself don't wash. Change the first to My friends and I… and the second to Bill and me.

5. The 'dangling' conversation
In a class, I once assigned students to "review" a consumer product. One student chose a bra sold by Victoria's Secret. She wrote:

Sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performed well…. Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you. 

The two sentences are both guilty of dangling modifiers because (excuse me if I'm stating the obvious), the bra did not sit in a class or dance at the bar, and "your breasts" are not slightly pricey.

Danglers are inexplicably attractive, and even good writers commit this error a lot... in their first drafts. Here's a strategy for smoking these bad boys out in revision. First, recognize sentences that have this structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB. Then change the order to: SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. If the result makes sense, you're good to go. If not, you have a dangler. So in the first sentence above, the rejiggered sentence would be:

The bra, sitting in a class or dancing at a bar, performed well.

Nuh-uh. The solution here, as it often is, is just to add a couple of words: Whether you're sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performs well.

6. The semicolon
I sometimes say that when you feel like using a semicolon, lay lie down till the urge goes away. But if you just can't resist, remember that there are really only two proper uses for this piece of punctuation. One is to separate two complete clauses (a construction with a subject and verb that could stand on its own as a sentence). I knocked on the door; no one answered. The second is to separate list items that themselves contain punctuation. Thus, The band played Boise, Idaho; Schenectady, New York; and Columbus, Ohio.

Do not use a semicolon in place of a colon, for example, There is only one piece of punctuation that gives Yagoda nightmares; the semicolon.

7. WordsAs I noted in my previous article, the meaning of words inevitably and perennially change. And you can get in trouble when you use a meaning that has not yet been widely accepted. Sometimes it's fairly easy to figure out where a word stands in this process. It's become more common to use nonplussed to mean not bothered, or unfazed, but that is more or less the opposite of the traditional meaning, and it's still too early to use it that way when you're writing for publication. (As is spelling unfazed as unphased.) On the other hand, no one thinks anymore that astonish means "turn to stone," and it would be ridiculous to object to anyone who does so. But there are a lot of words and expressions in the middle. Here's one man's list of a few meanings that aren't quite ready for prime time:

* Don't use begs the question. Instead use raises the question.

* Don't use phenomena or criteria as singular. Instead use phenomenon or criterion.

* Don't use cliché as an adjective. Instead use clichéd.

* Don't use comprised of. Instead use composed of/made up of.

* Don't use less for count nouns such people or miles. Instead use fewer.

* Don't use penultimate (unless you mean second to last). Instead use ultimate.

* Don't use lead as past tense of to lead. Instead use led.

I hesitate to state what should be obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be stated. So here goes: Do not use it's, you're or who's when you mean its, your or whose. Or vice versa!