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

by Daniel on December 5, 2003

Kevin Drum has a piece of advice for composition students:

“ignore anyone who tells you to write like you talk”

I certainly agree with him that if someone can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them any more. If someone were to instruct you to “write as you speak”, then there might be some point in having a pedagogical debate, but that’s presumably another matter.

Update: Kevin also suggests that “The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused”. Its not the daftest claim I’ve seen this week, but I think hell regret making it.

{ 37 comments }

1

Jeremy Osner 12.05.03 at 1:30 pm

My first inclination was to agree with Kevin about th’ apostrophes, but reading his comments thread I found myself swayed by the argument that they constitute a helpful visual clue that lets you read more quickly. What I found bizarre was one commenter’s claim that there is no distinction in spoken English between a period and a semicolon.

2

des 12.05.03 at 2:10 pm

L’Académie anglaise, c’est Daniel !

3

Zizka 12.05.03 at 3:16 pm

The big problem people bitch about with apostrophes is putting in an unnecessary one into its or into a plural. Making apostrophes optional (when in doubt, leave it out) would probably reduce the unnecessary use. I don’t think many people would write “hell” for “he’ll”, but “it” and “it’s” might just as well be free variants.

I still use the apostrophe in plurals sometimes, especially for acronyms and code numbers: e.g., “DOS’s” and “737’s”. Show me a better way.

The Chinese use apostrophes in their official transliteration, e.g. Yen’an vs. Ye’nan.

4

dsquared 12.05.03 at 3:18 pm

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 …

5

alkali 12.05.03 at 3:24 pm

The fight for the like/as distinction is lost, and was arguably never worth winning.

6

dsquared 12.05.03 at 3:34 pm

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.

7

Keith M Ellis 12.05.03 at 3:39 pm

“I still use the apostrophe in plurals sometimes, especially for acronyms and code numbers: e.g., ‘DOS’s’ and ‘737’s’. Show me a better way.”—Zizka

DOSs and 737s? It works for me. S&W recommends it.

Drum is nuts on the apostrophe matter.

On the “write like you talk” matter, I’m ambivalent. For both very poor and good writers, it’s not bad advice. For poor writers, it’s good advice because they’ll never learn to write coherently until they find their “voice”. Starting with their literal voice can help. Good writers can write naturalistic yet well-written prose if they allow their literal voice to color it.

But adequate writers should avoid writing like they talk. For them, it’s likely to lead to ungrammatical constructions they won’t know how to fix and/or decrease coherency rather than increasing it.

8

fyreflye 12.05.03 at 3:45 pm

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.

9

John Isbell 12.05.03 at 4:15 pm

Mrowr. Tell it like it is, I say. Give me descriptive grammar and la clarte francaise.
There is an awful genre of prose produced by people trying not to write as they speak. An impediment to that product is worth having.

10

Mrs Tilton 12.05.03 at 4:37 pm

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.

11

Kevin Drum 12.05.03 at 4:37 pm

We get by just fine with homonyms when speaking and we get by fine with multiple meanings for the same word when reading. Eliminating apostrophes wouldn’t be any more confusing. We’re just accustomed to them, that’s all.

Which, I realize, you could say about an awful lot of things…..

12

rea 12.05.03 at 4:46 pm

“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.

13

Mrs Tilton 12.05.03 at 4:57 pm

For that matter, Kevin, we get by just fine without apostrophes when speaking, too. They are a purely visual convention. Still, they do a service, and there is no point eliminating unless doing so would produce a clear benefit (and I don’t see that it would). Certainly a mass amnesty for those who cannot keep sorted the two very different words it’s and its is no such benefit.

14

chuck 12.05.03 at 5:16 pm

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.

15

Mike 12.05.03 at 5:26 pm

I get the like/as pedantry. but why aren’t ‘talk’ and ‘speak’ interchangeable in this context?

The odd thing is that his advice on apostrophes is justified by the principle that it’s always ok to write as you speak, which thus puts him in the class of people he elsewhere tells us to ignore. The only way to avoid paradox is to ignore his advice, but not because he tells us to ignore his advice.

16

Backword Dave 12.05.03 at 5:39 pm

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.

17

Andrew Edwards 12.05.03 at 5:39 pm

I actually often do give the advice to ‘write like you talk’ to very poor writers with certain specific problems.

Some poor writers have a problem of insufficiently elegant or thoughtful prose. E.g. “I like books. Books are interesting. They help you learn things.” Those people will be harmed, Kevin’s right, by ‘writing like they talk’. It’ll just generate the same bad prose, but with worse grammar.

However some poor writers have trouble because they get far too stiff when they write. They’ve over-absorbed the lesson that written prose is more formal than spoken prose, and write without any attention to whether their text ‘sounds right’. E.g. “I enjoy books, as they make me contemplate new things that I would never have contemplated if they hadn’t been things that people gave to me for contemplation.” People who write like that actually do need to be told to speak aloud the sentences they write.

18

msg 12.05.03 at 5:41 pm

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.”

19

debbi 12.05.03 at 6:08 pm

I’d be happy if people placed quotation marks correctly in relation to periods and commas. ;)

20

chun the unavoidable 12.05.03 at 6:17 pm

“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.

21

Walt Pohl 12.05.03 at 7:08 pm

Daniel: in the history of the United States, 100% of the people have the advice to write as you speak have said “write like you talk”. So Kevin was just giving a direct quote. (He probably has declared war on quotation marks, and just hasn’t told us yet.)

22

nolo 12.05.03 at 9:38 pm

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.

23

Keith M Ellis 12.05.03 at 10:00 pm

Debbi, are you aware that US and European conventions differ on this matter (quotes and end punctuation)?

The US convention of inside-the-quote is a typsetting artifact that no longer is relevant. I prefer the European convention because it’s far more sensible.

24

Keith M Ellis 12.05.03 at 10:08 pm

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.

25

Kieran Healy 12.05.03 at 10:23 pm

Bear in mind that quotation marks, apostrophes, commas and all the rest are not elements of grammar (like nouns and verbs) but diacritical marks — ie, typographical conventions designed to make reading easier. The question is whether their benefits outweigh the pain of learning about and using them, not whether we should write as we speak.

It seems to me that, while not as useful as inter-word spaces (instead of dots, or nothing) and paragraphs (instead of continuous text), apostrophes are still well worth the effort.

26

Zizka 12.06.03 at 1:36 am

“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.

27

Brian Weatherson 12.06.03 at 9:10 am

I agree with Zizka that ‘like’ is preferable to ‘as’ here because it disambiguates. So there shouldn’t be a rule against it, and quite happily in most dialects of English there isn’t.

I’m not sure what Debbi means by the ‘correct’ placement of quotation marks with respect to periods and commas, but it’s reasonably important for various purposes that there be no rules here at all. This is an old point of Geoff Pullum’s, but it is worth repeating. Consider (1), which is true, but which would be rejected by many proof-readers.

(1) An example of a string containing four symbols is “King”.

Now rewrite it the ‘proper’ way

(2) An example of a string containing four symbols is “King.”

But that’s false, because “King.” contains five symbols. We could have a convention that when it is at the end of a sentence the quote name “King.” names “King”, but then how would we refer to the string “King.” at the end of a sentence? It’s all to the best to maximise typographical freedom and let the conventions for quotation names be as simple and powerful as possible.

28

Keith M Ellis 12.06.03 at 9:23 am

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.

29

Jeffrey Kramer 12.06.03 at 9:47 am

“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.”

Ooh, I’ve got one!

Summarizing the plot of /Casablanca/, and apparently unfortunate on his first guess, a student recounted how Rick’s was under the surveillance of the dreaded German secret police agency, the Gazpacho.

30

ahem 12.06.03 at 12:15 pm

“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.

31

Brian Weatherson 12.06.03 at 3:06 pm

But this is all the more reason that ‘like you speak’ is better than ‘as you speak’. No one says that writing should be _identical_ to speech. For one thing it includes letters while speech does not. The advice (be it good or bad) is that there should be a striking similarity between what you write and what you say.

And I think you mean ‘meaning’, or perhaps ‘illocutionary force’ rather than ‘grammatical force’.

32

Vinteuil 12.06.03 at 5:40 pm

“…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?”

33

Brian Weatherson 12.06.03 at 9:12 pm

It’s not true that ‘them’ in English can only be used as a plural pronoun, so Daniel is not breaking any rules there. There’s some evidence that it is improper to use ‘they’ do denote someone if you know their gender, but even that can be questioned, as it is here.

If one wants to be a real stickler about it, there’s some evidence that ‘they’ and its cognates were originally singular pronouns, and their use as plural pronouns is a recent corruption of the language. See here for more details.

34

pj 12.06.03 at 10:07 pm

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.

35

John Isbell 12.06.03 at 10:20 pm

“That even Fowler derides”? I take exception! Fowler is most decidedly a puncturer of inane and worthless pomposities. I would list it among his greatest pleasures.
This has no bearing on his being dry, as with Ambrose Bierce.

36

Katherine 12.07.03 at 6:29 pm

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.

37

TomD 12.07.03 at 8:18 pm

Well see about that wont we – as were wont to do.

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