Employers can help win the war on bad grammar

FT.com 

September 18, 2013 6:14 pm

By Michael Skapinker

Those who do not understand a language’s structure do not know the rules they break

While the British summer sun was shining more brightly than it had in years, a stormy email arrived about English grammar.

“The whole downward process could well be becoming virtually irreversible,” my correspondent said. “My experience is very much that the teachers, anyway in England (and I expect it is even worse in the US), now are incapable of teaching grammar and the proper writing of English, having themselves never been taught it.”

Commenting on a column I wrote asking why parents were not more worried about their children's poor writing, he said: “I am not really surprised . . . So many of them – probably virtually all of them – will not have been taught grammar and writing, possibly at all but anyway properly, when they were at school, and therefore will have little or no idea of the importance and benefits of it.”

My emailer was NM Gwynne, author of a popular book called Gwynne’s Grammar. A former businessman, Mr Gwynne is now a teacher of everything from Latin to starting your own business, but is particularly in demand to teach English grammar to pupils aged “from two years old to over 70”.

“I am, as far as I know,” he told me in a second email, “just about the only practising teacher left in the world who himself was taught in the traditional way that teaching used to be done during the entire recorded history of education (getting on for 3,000 years).”

Some of you may be starting to feel that Mr. Gwynne is the sort of fellow traveller who, were you to fall into conversation with him on a train, would prompt thoughts of how, at the next stop, you might move to another carriage.

That, in my view, would be a mistake. I don’t agree with everything in Gwynne’s Grammar. His assertion that “happiness depends at least partly on good grammar” is not just overwrought but wrong. Many people with poor grammar appear to be far happier than – judging by his emails – Mr. Gwynne is. Indeed, that is largely the problem: the saying “ignorance is bliss” exists for a reason.’

I am not sure that his dig at US teachers is justified either. Americans complain about collapsing standards, but many remain grammatical sticklers long after Brits have given up – for example in their retention of the present subjunctive (“It’s important that he learn some grammar”), largely lost in the UK.

I also think Gwynne’s Grammar overdoes the prescriptiveness. He is partly right to say we should fight against language change – I am not ready to concede that "literally" can mean "figuratively".  But I doubt anyone today, even under Mr. Gwynne’s stern gaze, would slip beneath the water crying “I shall drown”, which he insists is correct.

Trying to get people to write “per caput” rather than “per capita” is surely also a waste of time.

Language does change. So do notions of grammatical correctness. The problem is not that people do not keep to the traditional rules. The problem is that, because they do not understand the structure of the language, they do not know what rules they are breaking.

It is hard to write well when you know so little of the language. It is like trying to drive while being unsure what the brake pedal and indicator light are. A few manage intuitively; many more crash.

That is why I suggest you read Gwynne’s Grammar. Its explanations of the parts of speech are very good.

You should certainly read it if you are a teacher. There is a poem you can get your class to recite that begins: “A noun names person, place or thing – A man, a town, a thought, a swing/An adjective describes a noun – Small shoes, bright eyes, new gloves, green gown.”

But I think Mr. Gwynne, and all grammar pessimists, should cheer up. Many problems regarded as insoluble eventually solve themselves. Crime in the developed world has dropped to its lowest level in decades.

There are two reasons to be optimistic about grammar and writing. First, people are desperate to learn more. The success of Mr. Gwynne’s book and others like it shows that.

Second (Mr. Gwynne would insist on “secondly”, but “second” is Financial Times style), there is an easy way to effect an improvement. Companies complain about their recruits’ poor writing. The CBI, the UK employers’ organisation, issues regular press releases on the subject.

Employers need to make a writing test a prerequisite for jobs they advertise. At the top of the employment market, where anguish over deficient writing is intense, investment banks, management consultancies and public relations agencies should make all potential interns pass the test.

Parents and teachers would get the message. I do not think it matters that they have not learnt grammar themselves. There are plenty of good books on the subject.