🚀 go-pugleaf

Peter Wilson? *The* Peter Wilson, Deep Cove neighbor and the only writer on
either local paper who can make my wife laugh? If so, we're honored. If
another Peter Wilson, we're honored anyway.

Peter's points are well taken. One of the most maddening problems in teaching
writing is that students do remember trivial and obsolete rules (you don't
hafta putta comma before the "and"; you're not supposed to start a sentence
with "and"), but almost nothing else.

Some people, including a lot of journalists, know their grammar "by ear," and
generally do okay that way. But a gap is growing between the spoken language
and the written; if we try to write as we speak, we end up writing *like* we
speak. Standard written English is a dialect, and a dialect is a version of a
language that we understand even if we don't always choose to use it
ourselves (I understand Jamaican English pretty well, but would embarrass
myself if I tried to speak it--much as I would love to!). You can write
"demotic" English, in which it's fine to say "Me and Dave read the Province
every morning," but you'll alienate and annoy many of your readers...and
drawing that kind of attention undercuts the whole purpose of most writing.

So why don't we let freedom break out and allow everyone to write as they
please? Because we'd end up with a host of conflicting dialects and endless
confusion. I still recall being baffled by a New Zealand friend who uttered
the enigmatic phrase, "Eric's lendload." Turned out he meant "our
ex-landlord." Had my friend chosen to spell the phrase as he pronounced it,
it might as well have been a different language.


--
Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
Internet: ckilian@first.etc.bc.ca