I am writing here not of the restoration of ‘good English’; of, for example, eliminating convolute expressions such as ‘a number of’ (which calls for a singular verb but almost all use with a plural) in favour of the much simpler ‘several’; of not using ‘decimate’ where ‘destroy’, perhaps ‘devastate’, is called for or ‘hopefully’ where ‘I hope’ is ; &c. ad nauseam: no, that is a lost campaign, another war.
What I should like to bring to the attention of ‘journalists’ and bloggers — indeed anyone that writes for a general readership (and many that write for specialized ones) — is the need of their work to conform to acceptable standards; not only so as to avoid actual errors but for two more important reasons: to prevent them from seeming foolish and to ensure that their writing be worthwhile (sc. understood by the reader). What is required is not what I should call good English; merely English good enough to get its author through a modern school examination: a G.C.S.E., an A-level or a bachelor’s degree.
(You’ve heard of the student that wrote his scripts in alphabet soup and was awarded a Batchelor’s degree.)
A few days ago I wanted to ‘re-tweet’ a Twitter message that ought, I thought, to reach certain eyes. The meat of it was a link to the author’s own site so, as that would be the substance of my re-tweet, I read what he’d written there. O misericorde ! The text — the standard of English — was just so bad that I could not in all conscience trouble my select camp of ‘followers’ with it.
That I chose not to re-tweet his message is neither here nor there; what he had to say, however, will not get through even to those that read it. They’ll give up. The odd literal will be forgiven but, when a reader encounters a stream of gross errors of both grammar and logic (as in so much modern writing he will), he gives up: loses interest, especially on the Internet, where the ‘attention span’ is known to be quite small. (Still with me ? Good.)
Reading such work — and it applies almost equally to the printed word — leads me to the conclusion not only that it has not been copy-edited (whereof more in a minute) but also that the writer himself has not even bothered to read it through before issuing it. Does this mean — as it certainly implies — that the writer holds his readers in contempt; that he actually cares not a jot what they think of his work ? Likely not. Logically not: why would one even write something, if indifferent to the opinions of one’s readers ?
What to do ? I’d like to suggest that everyone have his writing copy-edited before publishing. Unfortunately that element of the process fell by the wayside with the emergence of desk-top publishing. Two steps that can be taken, however, with almost no cost in time or money are these:
- The writer must read his work through, ensuring above all that it makes sense; that the text flows logically and nothing has been omitted. I’d be dishonest not to acknowledge how, in one’s own work, it can be hard to spot mistakes in general and the transposition of medial letters in particular. (In that linked article, by the way, Matt Davis uses the term ‘external’ to mean terminal; ‘internal’ stands for medial but is readily understood.)
- Some-one else — any-one — should read the work, looking for errors (perhaps obviously) but, more to the point, to see whether he understands it.
I have read this through, even using an HTML test page; does that make it without sin? No. (It has not been formally copy-edited.)
Here endeth the lesson. More of a plea really.
ΠΞ (Pericles ; his mark)
{ 57 comments }
I am the worst sinner! I am always making typos because I read what i think I have written and what is in my head, not what is on the page. having someone proof read is always invaluable
Erm..see?
Read whatever you wrote backwards, you’ll catch loads of errors because you remove the context and what your brain is expecting to read. Weirdly it works for Grammar as well as spelling.
I used this in my Spanish and Italian translation courses, is brilliant.
It doesn’t stop one capitalising “Grammar” for absolutely no reason however! Ah well…
Or, writing ‘…. is brilliant.’ instead of ‘…..it’s brilliant.’
TheCapitalisation comes from being AProgrammer because for MyLanguage it is normal to Type VariableNames in CamelCase as it is known.
e.g.
for MyCounterFromOneToTen := 1 to 10 do…
I often put capitals in middle of words
the other one is a MISTAKE (and I read it BackWards too!)
I know.. I know..
Syntax error: missing “the” near “in middle”
Syntax error; bad punctuation: exclamation mark inside bracket near “BackWards too”
i have always thought that case-sensitive os’s or programming languages like c or php are a bad idea. they lead-to coders typing everything in lowercase so as to avoid creating problems, which makes the code harder to read. they cause numerous headaches for publishers, who create errors if they correct what they see as bad capitalization. furthermore, since speech is not case-sensitive, they make it impossible to communicate the code verbally unless it’s laboriously spelled-out, letter by case-sensitive letter.
-and if languages are to be case-sensitive, why not font-sensitive or italic-sensitive? that would be daft, yes. but so is case-sensitivity.
then again, the use of a full-stop to distinguish between fully-qualified and relative hostnames must be one of the most braindead arrangements in it terminology. if the name appears at the end a sentence how the blazes can you tell if it means ‘www ‘ or ‘www.mydomain.com’ ? (which would actually mean ‘www.mydomain.com.mydomain.com.’ since the concluding . is missing.)
Pericles – a great post. You’ve highlighted issues that I also feel very strongly about. The poor standard of grammar and punctuation is ubiquitous – and not only in the blogosphere: local and national newspapers are also guilty of language mutilation. Particularly commonplace errors are the use of the apostrophe (e.g. its/it’s) and basic spelling errors. I realise that one can become overly pedantic and tedious about the issue, but nevertheless, to my eyes such errors are a sign of market trader amateurishness – and rightly or wrongly they can effectively erode the credibility of the writer as well as what is written.
Couldn’t agree more. The worst thing about grammatical errors and the use of incorrect words is that it destroys the reading flow. You are forever re-reading sentences in order to deduce what the writer meant to say. As opposed to spelling errors where your brain just reads past them unscrambling as it goes.
@Timdog – When I wrote technical manuals in Wordstar, before the advent of the spill chocker, I used to read everything backwards too – it’s a good method.
As the current holder of the Miss Spell 2011 title I can only say that it is through blogging that I have finally acquired a modicum of decorum in the spelling department.
Knowing that there are thousands of you ‘out there’ just waiting for me to misplace an aberrant apostrophe, has made me pay far more attention to the necessity of following the rules than I ever used to.
I’m actually grateful for all the corrections, I have learnt a lot.
Now, would someone like to explain colons and semi-colons to me?
On a technical writing course I attended some years ago, the English professor running it advised us that as a rule-of-thumb, commas may be used to break up long sentences in the same way as pauses for breath in speech. Semicolons are used for flow; they juxtapose two or more sentences whose ideas are relatively unrelated; colons on the other hand are used to link sentences and clauses with related or consequential ideas. And the result: readable English!
Believe me, Anna – your English is delightful to read!
To help ‘envisage’ the flow you can use a semicolon to be where the word ‘and’ or ‘but’ might be when joining two sentences; the colon – apart from the admirable use of setting off a list or a statement to end a sentence by both Pericles and Caedmon’s Cat – can also be used to replace ‘because’ i.e. “I wear red trousers because I like them” can become “I wear red trousers: I like them.”
Quite right! I hadn’t thought of that..
Thank you, I couldn’t agree more.
Even fairly reputable bloggers make howlingly-awful mistakes which undermine – for me, anyway – their entire arguments. Many times I have read some post which has me nodding sagely and saying to myself yes, he’s on to something, this is a good point – and then comes a greengrocer’s apostrophe, a really gross split infinitive, or a sentence that has been half-edited and left for dead so that it makes no sense at all. The effect on me is that I end up thinking “this guy is obviously an ignoramus, or possibly just plain careless, I don’t care for his argument after all”; which is probably unfair, but the effect is there.
More haste less effect, people!
I sometimes felt, whilst reading reports, that some engineers considered it their calling to boldly split infinitives that had never been split before.
“To boldly go” as kids we heard.
It stirred some thoughts in budding nerd.
Not thoughts of grammar fault alerts,
But female trekkers in short skirts.
I ‘boldly go’ each passing day
To decorate my litter tray;
With colon’s contents duly spent,
I thence depart in great content.
Excellent. We’ll get a few more hooked on the limerick habit as well…
And with kitty-diarrhea – semicolons are used for flow?
There is a significant failing in modern education, and it can only be addressed by a return to the old-fashoined values of correcting mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary, together with a lot more essay-writing.
In my walk of life, confusion caused a poor piece of writing can have serious consequences; sometimes commercial (loss of time or money), sometimes potentially endangering life or limb. I was never formally taught how to convey information – which might often be complex and nuanced – accurately and concisely, but it was something that older engineers tended to take great pride in. An ability to do so whilst under pressure of time is an essential skill for us.
One example of excellence in this field were the older British Standards. A great deal of care must have been taken to ensure that these were clear, concise and precise. Sadly, in updating these to harmonise better with our European and International colleagues, some clarity has been lost.
Unfortunately, one thing that we engineers lose (or perhaps never develop in the first place) is the ability to write with style. None of us, I suspect, would claim to be paragons of virtue in the spelling and grammatical stakes, either.
I could not agree more. Way back in the dim and distant past at university we had a segment of our lectures that dealt with writing reports and how to say what you needed to say clearly and concisely, in fact that built on what we were taught in school.
Being a qualified teacher as well as an engineer, my comment on modern education is that it leaves everything to be desired. There is no way it can improve until we get teachers that know how to write and spell and how do we get them from the students that the system is producing today?
One endeavours to ensure that one’s English is always correct, but even I sometimes make mistakes. Such mistakes in legal documents can, of course, have horrenous consequences.
They are not mistakes, Prime Minister. They are features.
‘Horrenous’ features, it would seem…
Decimate, of course, means “remove one in ten”, not reduce to one tenth.
It’s subtle differences, like uninterested vs. disinterested, that modern usage is blurring.
I agree with the ‘correct’ interpretation of decimate, but I’ve also seen that definition listed as obsolete, with the more common usage being to destroy a great number.
Although I have little formal education in English grammar, I am irritated by TV journalists’ failure to understand the meanings of simple words such as ‘after’, and their frequent misleading placement of words or phrases. An example might be “A mother and child were killed after being hit by a lorry standing in a bus queue.” Q1 – OK then, after being hit by the lorry, who or what actually killed them? Q2 – Why was the lorry standing in a bus queue anyway? Of course I’m just being pedantic and literal, but the careless and sloppy approach of those who supposedly use the English language professionally still grates. Don’t they have editors and proofreaders to weed out such errors?
Would you employ a brickie who couldn’t stick bricks together? No. Similarly, if someone is incapable of converting thoughts in their head to comprehensible English, because thay have not been taught the basic building blocks of their native language, would you employ them?
Immense damage has been done by removing formal grammar from the curriculum. And Latin, whose less irregular grammar than ours can provide a firm basis in understanding how languages hang together. I’m a grammar, spelling and punctuation fascist, but one who recognises that as time flies by, my grammar is not what it was. Spelling and punctuation not so bad, but I need to sit down with a grammar primer and get my teeth into some pluperfect subjunctives I think. And one who, having huge great clumsy fingers, produces typo after typo.
One thing I have observed doing my regular stints fighting the good fight on CiF, is that the Left gets less and less educated by the year. I have started providing a service in which for the more impenetrable posts, I translate them into English for everyone’s benefit.
Doesn’t always go down to well, for some odd reason.
thay! Aaaghhhh. Typo, honest, guv guv guv
TimOfEngland evokes an idea I often have when reading modern material : that I’m acting as its unpaid copy-editor. Sometimes I feel I ought to send the publisher a bill.
Engineer reminds me of a belief I’ve long held : that engineers make the best <insert the trade/profession of your choice>.
ivan points out the apparently insuperable barrier to improvement : the fact that the teachers and lecturers of to-day themselves are the product of an educational system failing those it claims to serve.
Another important point he raises is the desirability of expressing oneself concisely. How often one hears or reads material in which an idea is expressed comprehensibly but then repeated re-phrased ; why ? Why, moreover, does everything have to be doubled ? Peace and tranquillity, for example : what fine distinction makes such an expression necessary ? Why must adjectives be qualified by ‘very, very’ (a phrase rarely far from the lips of some politicians) ?
Ed P mentions the precision of language. This is something at which engineers are usually good because precision is part of their work. Although some speakers and writers presumably know no better, even amongst those that likely do the attitude abroad seems to be ‘O well, close enough for government work ; they’ll know what I mean’.
PT’s little solécisme noir — about some-one’s being killed after a supposedly fatal event — is one that ticks me off no end. I really don’t think his attitude pedantic : he’s reading or listening to a report and expects it simply to reflect what happened.
That Jeremy Poynton’s efforts to correct work on ‘CiF’ is resented does not surprise me : typically the left — at least a large part of it — would think him élitist.
For the problem we have been discussing to be addressed, we need to direct funding away from unnecessary tertiary education toward thorough, old fashioned primary education. Were this to happen, enough would still go to college by virtue of having, on entry to secondary school, a proper grasp of the basics, enabling them to take advantage of it.
Cannot go without saying how much I enjoyed the poetry and other humour.
(Sorry : not very concise, eh ? The least I could do, however, after your contributions to the debate. Thank you.)
ΠΞ
This is a fascinating, and very pertinant article, although I’m afraid I am going to take exception to your example of “a number of”. I’m by no means an expert but I don’t think it does automatically call for a singular verb. Indeed I think “are” is correct and sounds more correct in many contexts because although “a number of” appears singular it actually means a plurality of animals, you wouldn’t say. But more importantly I think English is far more subtle and complex than having such a rigid rule.
I would suggest that the use of “is” or “are” is available to the writer as a device to provide further meaning. It helps define whether the main subject is the entirety of cows or whether you are concentrating on a specific sub group, you can match the “is” or “are” to either “a number of” (singular) or “cows” (plural).
For clarity I’ll put it in a phrase “there is a number of cows”.
If “a number of” is being used as ‘vague-speak’ for “herd” or “group” it is replacing a singular nown, so “is” would be correct. The phrase would simply mean “there is a group of cows”.
But while “number” is a nown” the phrase “a number of” is not actually a nown, it’s a phrase. It can mean, and be substituted, by the word “some”, in which case it’s matched to “cows” (plural).
So the phrase may mean “there are some cows”.
That’s the subtelty because while both can devolve to “a number of” choosing “is” or “are” re-establishes the difference.
To illustrate further I’ll add some more to the sentence.
There is a number of cows with yellow ear tags.
or
There are a number of cows with yellow ear tags.
Take your pick, I prefer the second because I’m talking about cow’s tags not the actual number.
Discuss
…are these known nowns or unknown nowns?
It’s pertinent… not pertinant!
Bad typing combined with poor grammar often implies I do not spoke good England innit.
Sorry, a spurious “you wouldn’t say” jumped in there.
I also checked on dictionary.com under ‘number’. example sentence was :-
“A number of people were hurt in the accident.”
In that particular colon, woodsy42, I was not addressing the use of collective nouns ; only the use of unnecessarily involved expressions. Nevertheless — now you’ve raised it — the rule applies generally, not just to ‘a number of’. Certainly that phrase itself is not a noun but within it ‘a number’ is the subject of the verb ; that is why a singular verb is required. Likewise a group, a team, a crowd and so on.
ΠΞ
“anyone that writes”………”who” for people; “that” for things
“many that write”……………ditto
“those that read it”………….ditto
“not only so as to “………….”so” & “as” superfluous and clumsy
“everyone have his writing copy-edited”…….should be singular “has” or could have been written in subjunctive ie everyone should have…..
10/10 for the balls to write your piece:- must try harder
No, your Worship : ‘that’ is definitive ; ‘who’ and ‘which’ descriptive.
I agree : ‘so as’ could have been omitted.
In ‘I suggest that everyone have his writing copy-edited’ the verb have is in the subjunctive. Not only is ‘should’ unnecessary : it would alter the meaning. Wanting to say that, I’d drop the ‘I suggest that’ and say simply ‘Everyone should have …’.
ΠΞ
Anna mentions in a comment above that she has improved since blogging but I think in general standards have dropped; I believe keyboards and speed are to blame: the brain reads the word and the mind ‘hears’ it. The problems arise when a word is pronounced with the same sound and examples are – in my opinion – becoming not only more common but also more ‘tragic’: beyond mere typos. A few examples, the more common ones first:
there/their/they’re
your/you’re/yore
to/too/two
know/no
waist/waste (yes, believe me!)
…and so on.
ARGH!
I just realised. My reply didn’t just have a spurious bit, it’s completely garbled! I had added to the phrase to make a sentence, “there is a number of cows” then carefully worked from there. But despite careful reading, having lunch, then re-reading, at which time I am sure it was correct, before clicking the submit button some chunks are totally missing and some bits appear to be displaced. If that happens betweenthe tex being sent and landing then minor grammatical oddities are fairly irrelevant.
“merely English good enough to get its author through a modern school examination: a G.C.S.E., an A-level or a bachelor’s degree.”
Given my opinion of the standard of modern exams, I could really have a good time with that statement.
As for the difference between a colon and a semicolon, consider Ronald Reagan before and after his bowel operation.
This is not an excuse as I am perhaps the worst blogger in the world for poor punctuation and stragulated grammar.
English is a language that has never ossified, my endeavours with Anglo-Saxon have taught me that. Certainly American English and English are parting ways in both meaning and spelling.
I read somewhere this morning that a public official was hauled in over here use of the word faggot. The served based in the US ‘threw a fit’ when the word was used in an email. The meaning of the word faggot being slightly different here, meaning a bundle of sticks or a meal made from offal.
The Academie Francaise may be trying to ossify French, but the english language is constantly developing.
Anyway as I said, no excuse for my failings.
Pericles, are you Greek? I ask because you spell ‘specialized’ with a ‘z’. Only a Greek or an American would do that. If not, what does your ‘Ξ’ stand for?
Heavens, no ! I chose the handle — rather than the name of my real hero, ‘Aristides’ — in the hope that, there being so many references to Pericles on the Internet, I should be able to lose myself in anonymity. (Pseudonymity ?)
Your reference to American English raises an interesting point : where a difference is found between (cultured) American English and the British variety, the American is usually correct.
The suffix ‘-ize’, as clearly you know, is derived direct from the Greek ; why, some time in the 20th. century, the British decided to follow the German orthography (‘-isieren’) and substitute an ‘s’ I have no idea.
Ξ ; ΞΑΝΘΙΠΠΟΥ, the patronymic of Pericles.
ΠΞ
You remind me, incidentally, that I was there three years ago, driving in to Athens (from Patras) on a lovely Friday afternoon. By noon Saturday the place was at a stand-still : heaviest snowfall in forty years or so. Spent much of Sunday buying winter clothing ! Walking on Pentelic marble in snow and ice is not fun.
ΠΞ
Perhaps serious Bloggers should purchase a special keyboard?
One that signals “Are you sure, are you really sure, you want to publish that Post”?
Would that I had such a keyboard, would that I had…….
In writing this article I had rather hoped to avoid sterile arguments about grammar (v. the first paragraph). Sterile ? Well, yes : partly because, thanks to decades of ‘progressive’ education, the whole subject of grammar is almost, for most to whom English is mother tongue, a book with seven seals ; partly because the observance of accidence and syntax is seen by many as nothing but élitism and discussion of the subject turns in to a thinly disguised class war.
(I happen to think élitism no bad thing ; that our society — and in this term I compass the World — has suffered hugely from a belief that standards ought to come from the bottom rather than the top. We have, unfortunately, come through the Age of Enlightenment only to find ourselves in the Age of Incompetence : an age in which the ability to do things properly (except in such things as soccer and darts) is regarded with contempt. I like the way Lincoln put it : “You cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor.”)
The article was aimed simply at begging those that intend to publish work (in any form) preferably to have it copy-edited but, if they did nothing else, at least to read it through before releasing it — as much as anything else because of desperation at finding material that I’d like to quote (by virtue of the underlying thoughts) but cannot owing to the standard of its presentation.
ΠΞ
Guilty as charged M’Lud. Unfortunately I don’t feel I could ask anyone to copy-edit my writings as it would be too much of a responsibility for them. Friendships are too valuable.
I do agree there is problem in education today when I hear young people calling the ground the floor etc. As for pronunciation…
I would agree with everything, with one small caveat: the use of ‘hopefully’. The use of ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘I hope’ is so common as to be entrenched, and it has precedents. We are quite happy to say ‘frankly’ when we mean ‘I wish to be frank’.
‘Hopefully, we will arrive in time’ and
‘Frankly, I am not interested’
seem to me to be exactly parallel, and if one is incorrect, then both are. Other examples might be ‘surely’, incredibly’, and so on.
I was a teacher of English for 18 years, and an examiner at O/GCSE level. When I gave it up in 1995, I was still teaching grammar and correcting mistakes (in a helpful way, I hope/hopefully), but I was one of a dying breed.
I’d explain it so : ‘in a helpful way, hopefully’ means that you presented your corrections in a helpful — as against a dictatorial — way and hoped your efforts would be effective ; ‘in a helpful way, I hope’, on the other paw, that you hope your corrections were seen as helpful (rather than dictatorial). These subtle distinctions are key to the precision of which several here have written.
I cannot understand such fill-words as ‘frankly’ and ‘to be honest’. When I hear them — as so often and perhaps not surprisingly from a politician or another having to explain the inexplicable — it makes me wonder about the truth in what the speaker has already said.
ΠΞ
A most excellent article and good comments too.
I wish I could write like what you lot do
er… what’s wrong with ‘hopefully’?
Am I the only one who yearns to rehabilitate the subjunctive?
[‘Hopefully’ : I responded to Richard B’s similar comment.]
The subjunctive is interesting. Those whose aim in life is to ‘simplify’ language (sc. to eradicate the rules of grammar rather than to apply them) always try to eliminate it ; it always comes back. The subjunctive was not devised by some musty old professor just to keep teachers and examiners in jobs : it’s needed by ordinary people to express particular ideas … a mood, if you like.
ΠΞ
I too try my best to use correct grammar and to avoid spelling mistakes but sometimes they creep in. It would seem that typing ‘thsi’ rather than ‘this’ is a new favourite of mine. One trouble for me is that I write on three or four PCs across different operating systems and browsers so the spell checking is not always as it should be. It upsets me when I spot a spelling mistake in an old article but should I ‘stealth’ correct it or not?
Is that not the advantage of having your work in the form of an electronic file ? Minor corrections can be made … with annotation where they concern data and their analysis. Had you published it on paper, it would be set in … well, ink if not stone ; it is not inherently dishonest to correct earlier work.
If, on the other hand, you do it as the C.R.U. at East Anglia and all their chums in the a.g.w industry do — so as to falsify the data and the implications thereof — it’s a different matter.
ΠΞ