Month: January 2009

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Death of the Apostrophe

Bravo to the Mayor of Birmingham, England, who recently decreed that apostrophes will be banned from local signs.  This follows too many Birmingham City Council debates about the proper and improper application of our most confused punctuation practice: the apostrophe to denote possession.  No longer will council members and sign painters  debate the need for the flying comma before or after the “s.”   Naturally the nation’s language purists are up in arms.

In an article posted on MSNBC a popular British grammarian is cited. In her best-selling book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy “Two Weeks Notice,” insisting it should be “Two Weeks’ Notice.” “Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended,” she wrote.

When grammar commentators argue on the basis of the tradition or elegance of some rule or usage, we know it has outlived its usefulness.  I don’t hear one complaint that omitting the apostrophe will cause confusion, because we already know that an ”  ‘s” sounds just like an “s” when we converse. Never have I been asked when I spoke the word “its” or ” it’s” whether I referred to the one with an apostrophe or the one without. Why? Because the meaning is conveyed by the context. We depend on the meaning of the sentence to settle any ambiguity.

Those who insist on conserving punctuation practices and quaint prohibitions like the split infinitive are usually those who have more or less mastered the rule in question. They realize that if the rule no longer applies, then some arcane knowledge they have mastered will be useless. And the power they felt by applying that rule confidently will be dissipated. In other words, they will have fewer reasons to be smug.

Most European languages have flourished without an apostrophe. The “s” functions very comfortably as plural and possessive. The native speaker of English is disconcerted at first, finding no redundant apostrophes to complicate a foreign language, but soon it becomes a pleasure to read without the tiny obstruction between letters.

I’ll concede one ulterior motive to the extermination of the possessive apostrophe, and that is the burden of circling it in my students’ writing.  It is astonishing how many otherwise brilliant writers may be genuinely confused by the distinction between simple plurals and possessives. And this is the final reason why the apostrophe as possessive should be unemployed. Many intelligent people find them extraneous to their education. Rather than argue that point, I have joined the selectively literate masses, who find no significance in a tiny mark that has often been confused with a speck of dust or an imperfection in the paper.

If a speck can be a punctuation mark, then imagine the importance of the merest ink smudge or a ragged margin?  I’d rather take a little cosmetic license and ignore them all.

The entire article from MSNBC is posted at

http://neologophilia.pbwiki.com/Literacy-in-the-News

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The Science of Writing

Miles Myers  (Changing Our Minds) suggests that composition was characterized as science to allow it to compete with the dominant way of thinking in the middle of the twentieth century. Citing David Olson, he proposes,

“This model of the essay was, in fact, a model of the process of empirical science: start with a topic sentence or hypothesis, eliminate the first person, relate this hypothesis to prior knowledge in a novel way, present the implications of this topic sentence or hypothesis, present the tests or evidence supporting these implications, and then present the conclusion, possibly with an alternative hypothesis (Olson, 1994).

Having come of age in the 1960’s I remember the importance of Sputnik, the Soviet challenge to our Space Program, and the National Defense Act, full of incentives for the education of mathematicians and scientists. The entire decade was devoted to the space race and the building of the nuclear arsenal. Because education was conceived as “national defense,” the elevation of science and math was hardly challenged. It was a national priority not unlike the current cry for preserving domestic employment and stemming the flow of money overseas.

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously i my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

Perhaps the elevation of language was a compensation for being a short kid with glasses. I know it impressed some people. In retrospect, however, I also see it reflecting the reverence we had for science and math, the intellectual icons of the ’60’s. We wrote with a de-personalized and authoritative style that we imagined scientists would sanction.  We wrote mostly to analyze literature and we employed the hypothesis- evidence-conclusion paradigm, because that was how theories were proven. If I used metaphors or irony or satire, it was purely my own idea, and they were diversions from the argument.  I enjoyed those diversions, but I knew the real money was in structure and logic. The college admissions questions represented all that was success and profit. They called forth my deepest proclamations and bombast. That was who I was in the college admissions race.

Composition still carries this flag of the scientific paradigm, and probably that flag deserves some respect. However, all I believe about ownership, voice, content-before-form–all this waves a different banner.  No, it’s not even a banner, it’s fireworks, theme songs, and “moves” that some call dancing.  I have made a career out of exocising the methodical ghosts in students’ writing and feel good about the unpredictable voices that rose up in their stead.  The “science of writing” has become my dragon, and I go out to slay it every day.

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RU Literate?

Literacy Debate: Online RU Really Reading?

Online reading is really reading, but is it the most challenging reading we do? How do we prepare for a world that requires us to read contracts, policy briefs, legal briefs, descriptions of medicines and side effects, or even the Innaugural address of the President? Does internet reading prepare us for texts that threaten our lives or our livelihood?

“What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the NEA. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

It’s that “sustained, focused, linear attention” that bothers me, because it is so unlike how you read online.  You don’t observe readers lingering on a page when they read online. You see navigation back and forth between sites and searching that carries you across many different sites in a matter of seconds.  If that becomes the model of reading for the next generation, will they have to hire specialists to read the longer texts for them? Will they forget to check the credibility of the sources they read?  Will they ever evaluate the quality of the writing? Will we lose these abilities if we spend most of our reading time in front of a computer?

As an English teacher, I worry about this. But I also think that Mr. Gioia’s definition of reading as “sustained, focused, linear attention” is a little narrow. That might apply to academic reading, but not so much to the many other purposes for reading.

And since when do reading tests assess “sustained, focused, linear attention?  It seems to me the passages on reading tests are not much longer than the reading we do on the internet.  Reading tests have seldom assessed the kind of reading we need to do or enjoy doing.  How can those scores indicate anything about sustained attention?

So I reject the evidence of declining reading, but I continue to worry if the new reading has lost something that the old reading reinforced.  We are really reading online, but are we reading in ways that support disciplined and critical literacy?