Don’t do like what I say, do what I does

L’Académie anglaise, c’est Daniel !

I know it’s a minority opinion, but I’ve always thought that the Academie Francaise get a bad reputation for doing a necessary job very well. Christ knows what sort of language pedant I’d be if I had male and female nouns to work with …

No bloody way. Also no compromise on less/fewer and no accomodation with the barbarian hordes of “different than”. Oddly enough, I don’t have much of a problem with “hopefully”, which gives some people real pain.

The writer who most obviously writes like he (ideally) talks is Stephen King. It annoys the hell out of me but he *is* one of the best-seling authors of all time. This may be the only kind of prose style many readers can relate to.

Fyreflye,

I too often find King annoying in passages, yet I do keep turning to him when looking for an airport book. As he himself has said, what he does is not very good, but he’s very good at doing it.

John,

as for prose being good if it is like the author’s speech: well, I suppose that depends on how the author speaks.

Orwell is an example of excellent conversational prose. But there is very good prose that is anything but conversational. Joyce is overrated IMHO, but for all that deserves his place in the pantheon; no real Austrian can talk like Thomas Bernhard wrote, but he is a fine writer nonetheless.

“Write as you speak”? Some of us have trouble chewing gum as we walk–writing as we speak seems WAY too complicated. I will have to settle for writing like I speak.

As someone who reads a lot of freshman composition essays, I think Kevin is pretty much right about advising students “*not* to write like they talk.” I’d put it in slightly different terms, but the sentiment seems right. It’s important for college writers to recognize the distinction between formal and informal audiences…

I found his critique of the five-paragraph form somewhat problematic as well. Certianly, it can produce the wrong kind of formulaic essay that many writing teachers so dislike, but certainly many longer texts use a variation of the “five section” form.

But the larger point pertains to what it means that Texas is teaching toward a statewide essay test. Georgia college students have to pass a similar test during their second semester of college, and the artificiality of the test situation is utterly absurd (as students and teachers alike recognize) and usually produces some really bad writing as students write toward these conventions.

I agree with Kevin, too, that misusing apostrophes is more confusing than not using them at all.

Good writing is about clarity, and the more clues there are to what is meant, the better. Spelling like “hell regret it” is almost as bad as the thing that went around a few weeks ago about wrdos bieng rcegnosbile so lgno as teh frtsi ltteer wsa in teh rgiht pcael.

We get along fine with conversation but there are other clues when we are speaking to someone (OK they’re not there in phone conversations, which can be harder for that reason). I talk with my hands. I’m sure Wittgenstein had something good to say on this, but I can’t think what right now.

Like some food taboo whose cause is pathogenic and real, but whose active elements lie beyond the scope of primitive sight, the sometimes arbitrary rules of grammar are, like any moral guidance, in service to a higher and less readily discernible goal-the survival of something we are, beyond mere order. The preservation of what we might yet be.
It’s the horseshoes and hand grenades argument. Accuracy up to a point, and then who cares? Close enough. It gets the job done.
Well yes, but no, not all clarity serves such an immediate purpose. Besides touch, language is the only bridge we have for the isolation of individuated living; the less accurate it is the more tenuous the bridge.
More than comfort’s at stake there. The apostrophe is the nail upon whose want the shoe was lost. Close enough’s rare miss’s as good as a mile.

“Should students be encouraged to write like they talk?”
“Well yeah, they should be encouraged to be able to, to develop the ability to write dialog as it’s spoken.
But prose? Expository prose? Nah.”

“Clarity” is an ideological apparatus designed to erase difference. Difficult thoughts require passive voice, many subordinate clauses, and generally tortuous syntax in order to make themselves fully understood.

I’d be happy if people’d quit letting spellchecking programs act as their proofreaders. I have to admit, though, that it can generate some pretty funny stuff.

I don’t get Kevin’s point.

Punctuation (and case) is a modern invention and literate folk got along fine without it. So…why don’t we do away with it entirely?

No thanks.

“As you speak” has another common meaning “while you’re speaking”. “Like you speak” disambiguates.

All this prescriptive stuff came along at the end of the Eighteenth Century and didn’t really take effect until perhaps the end of the nineteenth. You can find errors of spelling, punctuation, and grammar in Jane Austen. Before the nineteenth century, they weren’t writing to a different standard; the language wasn’t standardized yet.

A certain amount of standardization was probably a good thing, but the kind of intensity that people bring to this kind of discussion is silly.

737s and DOSs doesn’t work for me.

Not to mention that there’s a whole batch of prescriptivist lore that’s actually disavowed by the prescriptivist authorities. Not ending a sentence with a preposition is a pernicious example that even Folwer derides.

As a matter of principle I side with the descriptivists; in practice, though, I more often than not side with the prescriptivists. (Although, in fact, my command of grammar and punctuation is poor.) It’s a cultural thing, and I don’t think that’s necessarily bad.

I’m surprised that you have so much trouble with 737s and DOSs. The former, especially, reads quite easily to me. The latter, not so much. I’ve attempted to eradicate the plural apostrophe habit from my writing because it really doesn’t make any sense and I know of at least one prescriptivist authority that agrees.

In this and in the case of the end quote punctuation, though, obviously I am willing to go against the cultural norm if I feel justified[1]. Maybe I am a bit of a counter-culturalist.

[1] Also the comma list and rule where I think the comma ommision style is not only silly, it reduces clarity. Oh, yeah, I also dislike it when people use possessive s’ for singular nouns that happen to end in s. People will do this with my last name, and sometimes I will snidely remark that the last time I checked, I didn’t contain multitudes.

“As you speak” has another common meaning “while you’re speaking”. “Like you speak” disambiguates.

Not to a conscientious British English speaker, where ‘like’ simply does not have that grammatical force. One can ‘talk like a pirate’ (just) or be asked to ‘say something like you mean it’ but ‘like’ suggests imitation or adoption of a non-present state. ‘Like’ invokes simile, not identity. Etc. Fowler would agree, were he not seventy years dead.

‘Write in the way [or ‘in the manner’] that you speak’ truly disambiguates in the way you suggest.

“…if SOMEONE can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to THEM…”

Ugh. And you’re complaining about “write like you talk?”

Chun — “Difficult thoughts require passive voice, many subordinate clauses, and generally tortuous syntax in order to make themselves fully understood.”

Try harder to use the active voice and stripped out the crap. It works.

I’m a few days late on this thread, but I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of purely visual cues. I find it noticeably harder to read books that enclose diagolue in dashes rather than quotation marks. Cry the Beloved Country was a real struggle in high school. I’ve finally adapted with the help of Roddy Doyle (anyone can get through the Commitments, it’s 100 pages long; but now I’ve worked myself up to his longer & more serious books.) But it still bugs me.