Herb, et.al.,
   Unfortunately the debate comes to down to whether or not we are willing
to enforce "standards" and not down to what sorts of standard we are
aiming at. When standards are slipping at the local country club, that
might mean they are letting in Jewish or African-American or Latino
members. I hope most of us would see that as progress.
   One reason grammar lost standing with writing teachers is that it did
come to be associated with imposition of fairly arbitrary standards,
many of them class based.  >
   Paul rather valiantly turns our attention toward "critical thinking",
with details from his main interest, drama. When students have
knowledge about language (or lack that knowledge), we can use that as a
resource (or feel frustrated at being unable to use it)in so many
contexts.
   I have a good friend who trains writers for small town newspapers that
she publishes (very high turnover), and she tells me her biggest
problem is that writers don't know how to think of a reader when they
write. That is certainly a critical standard for a newspaper, and I
would venture to say that knowledge of language is very useful for
that.
   My father, bless his soul, a lover of words his whole life, often
"corrected" my language without much respect for how dangerous it was
to talk that way in a blue collar world.
   It seems to me that the movement toward informality in writing is a
very welcome change. I don't have so many students asking me if it's OK
to use "I" in a paper or if it's OK to use contractions. When someone
says "firstly", it seems to me like they are trying to write a foreign
language. I would rather have my students relax and then ask them to be
clear and thoughtful and interesting and so on, which require an
enormous attention to language and an enormous committment to the
project.
   That doesn't mean that some of our standards--punctuation in
particular--aren't highly functional.
   For many writing teachers, attention to superficial standards is what
they associate with grammar, and we all suffer because of that. It
doesn't help to have the word "standards" used in such a narrow way.

Craig



Peter,
>
>
>
> Thanks for drawing attention to that.  Calling it "slippage" obviously
> implies a judgment on choices speakers make, and you're right that what
> we're seeing IS simply normal language change.
>
>
>
> The interesting question you raise, though, is "why the role of English
> teachers seems to always be to slow down this process and defend the
> traditional conventions."  I'm in a university English department that,
> in addition to the usual literature, composition, and creative writing
> areas, also has a significant group of linguists, eight of us.  We have
> succeeded in adding as a requirement for all English undergraduates a
> course on language and society in which we deal with issues of language
> change, language policy, dialect, standard, social judgments about
> language use, etc.  We argued successfully for this course in part
> because it is precisely university English departments that tend to
> perpetuate the most conservative judgments about what's "good" English.
> I've described the course occasionally as a form of intellectual
> vaccination against widely held nonsense, and I work with my students to
> see how much of what most people believe about language isn't so.
>
>
>
> Of course, if English teachers were all in agreement as to what the
> standards of Standard English were, we might have a stationary target,
> but there have been a number of published studies showing that what a
> composition teacher considers good or bad grammar varies widely.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> In a message dated 8/16/06 2:40:06 PM, [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
>
>
>
> I wonder if this "slippage" might be a part of a broader populism that
> we are seeing in politics, education, the arts, etc.
>
>
>
> But Herb, how do you know that what you're seeing as "slippage" isn't
> just the natural evolution of the language?
>
> In fact, I am wondering why the role of English teachers seems to always
> be to slow down this process and defend the traditional conventions.
>
> Take, for instance, the ubiquitous singular "they" as in "everyone
> should bring their books."  Why do we automatically insist that "they"
> is plural and therefore the correct sentence should be "everyone should
> bring his or her books."  Wouldn't it be surprising, for once, if
> English teachers decided that the evolution of "their" from simply
> plural to both singular and plural (as occured with "you") is a positive
> development and encouraged it.
>
> But the larger question for me is how anyone decides when a rule has
> changed.  If we can't trust the NY Times or Tom Clancy, whom can we
> trust.
>
> The American Heritage Dictionary employs a "usage panel" and actually
> reports the percentage that found a certain usage objectionable.  But
> that is only for usage issues.  Does anyone do this for grammar and
> punctuation?  Would ATEG be interested in taking on this task?  Right
> after our Scope and Sequence is adopted nationally, of course.
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
>
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