"Nearly any student of language learns early on that the substance of encoded speech, writing, is as mutable as the utterances it attempts to pin down and enunciate in ink or pixels. Mutability is no problem for most of us as the pace is generational. We adjust to changes in language because they occur slowly enough to become vernacular. We "Google" it because we need to learn more about where we need to "Fedex" it after we "Xerox" it; and those are just branded examples from corporate newspeak. Gamers have their own lexicon, goths another, and sports fans yet another more specialized form of speech.
Speech unifies and divides us. I am included because of my terminology as surely as my use of words excludes someone else whose experience is different. Nothing has changed here in a few hundred years, excepting the widespread literacy that has brought the written word to numbers approximating the number who speak it. With that, the creep of change has accelerated.
That backs into the real subject of this column, and that is the frightening lack of understanding of how to write a cogent English sentence. If you are 50 or older, you will likely remember your papers returned with red pencil marking things like "sentence frag," "lacks parallelism," "confusing objective and subjective cases," and so on. These seem not to be issues among teachers today.
At my company, we are enjoying the fruits of the labor of our 28th and 29th interns from a prominent liberal arts college. Like the 27 who went before them, these otherwise thoughtful and bright college seniors cannot begin to write a simple press release or business letter without prose that reads like a "What Not To Do" page from Strunk & White. When called to their attention, they shrug it off with a smile, as though fragmented or run-on sentences and confused cases really don't much matter in the scheme of things, even though they profess interest in the law, education, communications or other exalted professions.
But it is no wonder when countless alumni from the same and similar institutions don't have a clue about the language they daily speak either. An important client with an Ivy League education regularly fractures the language in his instructions to the agency. "Use the footage from Fred's and I's video," one note said.
Communications from my son's middle school are as riddled with grammatical errors as were my own redlined papers in the 6th grade. "We will begin the process of developing ways to help keep our schools a safe place for all students," one paragraph in the school newsletter began. The principal regularly includes a misspelling, grammatical error or sentence fragment in a letter that has no more than four paragraphs of content. The examples we set for young people about the value of correct written communication are poor ones indeed, yet we continue to say we value writing as a skill, to the extent that a writing portfolio is one of the most important documents KERA demands of Kentucky students.
I'm afraid that the solution is multi-generational. We didn't get here quickly, and we won't be sending out talented writers in great numbers for another 30 years or so. It begins with higher standards. Parents need to expect more of teachers, and colleges and universities must begin to put teeth into everything involving language, from Freshman Composition to term papers required in any subject. With higher standards should come higher pay. We can't continue to pay teachers at the lowest level in professional society and expect them to abandon other walks of life out of some altruism to make the world a better place.
Language will continue to change as it always has. Yet correct use of this mutable movable feast will enable it to clearly communicate, to educate, to persuade and to inform. A measure is a measure, a rest is a rest, a chord is a chord, be it rock and roll, grunge, country or classical music. The rules support the expression and give it fertile ground in which to grow. By allowing the rules to become as mutable as the speech they support, we lose the context, the harness that puts words to their job of pulling thoughts from abstract to palpable.
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