More Rebellion Against Overzealous Grammarians (But Not By Me)

Grammar serfs, unite! All you have to lose are your copies of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves!

Or is it Eats Shoots and Leaves? I guess it depends upon whether you are talking about a panda in his natural habitat or one that walks into a bar with a gun. (If you don't get it, I respectfully suggest the book, however it's punctuated).

Disclaimer: Actually, I did read the above mentioned book and I did enjoy laughing as I did so. I am not a complete grammar 'Philistine.' And I am a Yekke myself--oh, not literally, no ancestors of mine come from Germany--but my Yekkeism has to do with shoes!
We all have our...erm...foiables.
So if you are weak of heart, or get high-blood pressure at the mere thought of differences in usages, why then, just surf on by.

I had to laugh at the Grammar priggishness that is home grown right here in New Mexico. Who'd have thunk it? On Wednesday I opened our local and independent Albuquerque Journal Newspaper to read this headline:

"1 in 4 Teenage Girls Have Sexually Transmitted Diseases."

Being that I was rather shocked by the information, (Oy), I did not prepare myself for the letters to the editor and e-mails to the editor the next day. Not about how very serious this problem is for a multitude of reasons, mind you. No, the messages to the editor were about the grammar in the headline. And it provoked this response:

TO OUR READERS

"Wednesday's headline...touched a nerve among offended grammarians who said it was just plain wrong. Many grammarians agree, taking the position that the verb in such constructions should be the singular "has" to agree with the subject "one."

However, other grammarians say such phrases as "one in (a larger number)" should take a plural verb in keeping with "notional agreement" of subject and verb, because the phrase carries the notion of a larger number rather than an individual.

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says:
'This appears to be a case where actual usage (emphasis added) is more often governed by notional agreement than by grammatical agreement; the writers who use the construction realize that it represents a statistical proportion and thus stands for a multitude of individuals.'

...Who's right? It's debatable...."

Steve Williams, News Editor
(The Albuquerque Journal, Thursday, March 13, 2008, page 2).


Did you notice the emphasis I added?
Actual usage.
In this case, as in the one I wrote about a few days ago, actual usage appears to trump the picky rules. I have been accused of having "difficulties with people" because I pointed this out right on my blog. It's probably true. But if I do, so does Steve Williams, News Editor of the local Newspaper.

Viva la compagnie!

And have a great weekend, everyone: grammar serfs and grammar yekkies alike!

The Attack of the Grammar Yekke

I received a comment on my last blog entry, Yikes! It's Adar II! from a grammar Yekke* (who uses the handle Muffin) that annoyed me.
The entry itself was quite long, and I realize that the nature of the discussion was probably not of interest to a lot of people, although I wanted to post it for reasons of my own. However, there were many ideas in the piece that could well be discussed and argued that would have been interesting and enlightening. However, this comment was a priggish little poem about a specific English usage that must have offended the commentor.

*Yekke: What the Israeli Sabra calls the German Jew. They are so concerned with 'properness' that they wear a jacket even when it's 100 degrees in the shade. You know the type.


I suppose that sooner or later it was bound to happen. What I wonder is this: Do these people go trolling the blogosphere looking for what they consider to be "incorrect usage" with their copies of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves in hand? What is really interesting about this particular objection is that the usage in question is correct or not depending upon whether the writer is using standard American expression or the Queen's English.

I wrote a reply to the comment, but did not end up posting it in those comments. I thought rather to blog it as a separate entry, because I think it would be useful for all of the grammar prigs out there to think about.

The comment was about the correct use of "who" and "whom," and since the commentor did not actually quote the offending phrase, I am making an assumption--always a dangerous proposition--about what that phrase might be.

The piece I posted was actually the written format of a talk I gave in an informal setting. At several places in the talk, I used the phrase, "Who do they think they're kidding?!" I am guessing that this bothered the Grammar Yekke so much that she was unable to actually digest the content and the meaning of the talk. At least, I choose to believe this more charitable interpretation above other less charitable ones.

Here is my response:

Dear Muffin,

Perhaps you are from England, in which case, you can ignore everything I write below, and go on believing that you are correct. I am assuming that you object to my use of the word "who" in the question "Who do they think they're kidding?" For standard American usage in the 21st century, the writer may choose to use either "who" or "whom" even though in English usage, "whom" is considered to be correct.

In the case to which you refer, I made my choices based primarily on the 'voice' I wanted to convey to my listeners--that's right, listeners--because my purpose for this piece was first that it be spoken in an informal setting. In this setting I wanted to project a colloquial and unaffected voice, as well as draw my listeners in to the rhythm of that phrase interspersed with the other content of the piece. Additionally, I knew my audience and thus was aware that the phrase would likely bring to their minds a line from a Simon and Garfunkel song. Yeah, we are that old!

And, yes, I am aware that 'yeah' is another one of those improper colloquialisms.

When considering how to phrase a piece of writing, I generally consider both the purpose of the writing and the audience for whom it is intended.

Digression: You should note here that I do know the correct usage of the word "whom." You should further note that the usage for the word "whom" is a remnant of the 'objective' or 'predicate' case, and I also know that cases are no longer normative in modern English. Rather, we use word order to convey the meaning that used to be expressed with cases. Cases are important in Latin and in Russian, and probably other languages, too.

Beyond the issue of voice, you may have noticed that the piece of writing to which you had this objection was also not very elegant in phrasing and had quite a few parenthetical statements. These would all sound better than they look, because eye contact, spoken phrasing, and tone of voice were used to convey meanings. Of course, when relying on the written word alone to communicate meaning, it is a good idea to minimize parenthetical statements, and to clean up the phrasing, so to make the writing more elegant. But, as I said, this was a talk and much meaning was communicated in other ways.

And now, I would like to go beyond your objection to my usage in order to provide you with some food for thought, if you choose to take a bite.

Language is arbitrary. This means that words, phrases, colloquialisms, and rules of grammar are in constant flux as people use language in everyday life to communicate with each other. As language is carried by people through space and time it evolves in order to remain useful to the people who are doing the communicating. Language in use is thus called 'living.' If it was not, it would not be very useful. One can only worship at the altar of perfect and unchanging usage for languages that are 'dead.' For example, the French Academy of Language has a bone to pick with Anglicisms and Americanisms coming into usage in French. One such is the Americanism "le weekend." But if the Academy is honest with itself, its members would have to say that they have not been terribly successful at getting rid of "le weekend'. "Le weekend" simply conveys a precise meaning that would require a more convoluted phrase to convey in "proper French." So ordinary French people continue to use it because they want to quickly convey meaning, and they really don't give a damn about keeping French frozen to some arbitrary level of 'purity' approved by the French 'language police.'
For American English it is even more so. That is because the language is so very polyglot, as Americans have adopted words and phrases from many different languages--and has even invented neologisms to convey meanings important to us in the here and now. Think about the following words: bayou, moccasin, patio, chaps, byte, blog. The first is Cajun (French-Canadian-Indian), the second is Indian, the third and fourth are from Spanish, and Spanish Indian, and the last two are computer-neologisms.

Finally, a confession and a warning.

First, the confession. I am a reasonable typist, but not a great one. When typing fast, I miss letters and sometimes mispell words due to "typos" (another neologism from the American Century. For shame! I am sure that Shakespeare never used that word). I am not a great proof-reader, especially when I am reading on a computer. I know this about myself: I am much more interested in the ideas I am trying to convey, and although I do strive to convey them clearly, I am not fussy about the use of perfect grammar. I will generally bow to local acceptable use and I do not get priggish about the fact that this often differs from the Queen's English. This is why I got a "pro" (another neologism--shame on me!) to type and edit my thesis. I will do the same for my dissertation.

Now the warning: Muffin, if the way I write bothers you so much that you cannot pay attention to the content, you might want to consider taking this blog off of your list. I would hate to raise your blood pressure on a daily basis. But if you are trolling for errors to demonstrate how superior you are with respect to grammar, then please, please do not come back here. I am simply not interested.

As the ubiquitous "they" say: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wears you out and annoys the pig!"

And for those whose blogs I read regularly, I may notice spelling errors and such, but I do not get huffy about them. It would be, to use an old colloquialism, "the pot calling the kettle black."

Writing for Visual Thinkers

I have been thinking about writing lately.
The issue of clear, organized and thoughtful writing is an issue for me in two areas of my life, my doctoral studies and my role as a homeschooling mother of a child with Aspergers Syndrome.

At the university, the effect of poor writing has become apparent to me as I struggle to understand a series of weekly papers that are required as part of my Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology course. Each week, we read one or two papers that document current research in areas related to the physiology that is covered in lecture. For example, just recently we have been discussing reflex feedback that affects propioception. Differences in how the nervous system deals with reflexes become important when an animal has to couple voluntary motor responses with reflex responses to stimuli. Writing neatly when the pen is jarred would be one example. And our nervous systems deal with these problems in amazing ways, using the neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters to increase and decrease reflexive responses based on the perception of where body parts are within a cycle of movement.

But speaking of writing, what I am noticing is how uniformly poorly written many of the published papers are. And these are papers by respected scientists in good journals. The last paper we read was so dense with jargon, and so poorly structured that it was particularly easy to miss the point, although once I got it (after three readings), it was interesting and important.

As I was contemplating the relatively uniformly low standards for clarity of prose in scientific writing, I was also thinking about where we are with N.'s writing skills. He is getting better at sequencing, especially after practicing by re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic. But when detail becomes dense, sequencing is still a problem. N. tends to become overwhelmed by the details and has difficulty figuring out how to elaborate with them in a sensible and understandable order.

In considering these two different examples of problems with writing, I had a niggling sense that they were somehow related, however, I was unable to put it all together for several days. Finally on Thursday, two conversations I had created the "Aha!" moment I was looking for, and I was able to develop my hypothesis about what was happening. In the first conversation with my professor of Neurophysiology and another student, we noted that the diagrams in the paper were explanatory, but the captions were quite dense and almost unreadable. And we noted that they were misplaced with the text so that the reader had to page back and forth to find the paragraphs where they were discussed. I noted at the time that neuroscientists really like cartoon depictions of processes and maybe this would better help readers access the material. Later that evening, my daughter came home with a stack of posterboard and colored pencils. When I asked if she had presentation, she said that she didn't, but that she needed to draw out the biochemical pathways as they worked in cells in order to really understand them.

MLC then said something curious: "You know, Mom," she said, "My professor is a little weird. When he is explaining a process, he leans his head back so that his nose is in the air and closes his eyes. Strange. It seems like he is kind of stuck up."
"Hmmm," I replied. "It sounds like he has to close his eyes and visualize the process in order to explain it well. He's not stuck up. He's just a little autistic. And look how you have to make a cartoon of the processes as they occur in the cell to really get at what is going on."
"You're right," she said. "Scientists love powerpoints where they can make cartoons. The more animation, the better."

Eureka! There's the connection. Many scientists are visual thinkers. We love pictures, diagrams and graphs. Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, we think of them as replacing words, and we make them do that whenever possible. The same is true for people with ASD. Temple Grandin's book, Thinking in Pictures, rings true for a reason. Many people on the spectrum, and their relatives with the broader autistic phenotype, think primarily in images. According to respected experts in the field of remedial reading, the same is true for those dyslexia.

For the majority of the population in literate countries, sequencing writing comes naturally because they are thinking in words. But for those who think primarily in pictures, sequencing is a problem for translation into verbal and written expression. Think about it: When you call up a picture in your mind, all the detail is apparent at once. The memory used for the storage and recall in visual thinking, the opticoder (a.k.a. the visual sketchpad) can hold a great deal of information--it appears to be almost infinite--and it can be connected and manipulated with lightning speed. Thus, those who think in pictures do not think sequentially, they think by making connections across categories. This is associative thinking--complete, detail-rich, and very fast. It is also considered to be a learning disability in our auditory-sequential dominated educational system.

Now consider what it would take to put ideas gained from visual thinking into words using either verbal or written language. The information must be sequenced and chunked in order to use auditory working memory, which is very limited in scope--holding about 7 bits of information at once. This seems very tedious and extremely limiting to the visual thinker, who is used to manipulating many more bits of information at once. And then there is the problem of where to start. For example, if I close my eyes, I can see the entire room in which I am sitting, with every detail down to the dust motes dancing in the sunlight from the window. There is a tremendous amount of detailed information in the three dimensional picture in my mind's eye. But if I am asked to describe it, I must immediately begin to make decisions. What is important to say? What is safe to leave out? Where should I begin? At the door? Where I am sitting? The middle of the room? In what order should I describe it? Big stuff first, then the small things? Or should it be according to the space the stuff is in? Colors first? How can I choose? Oh, forget it! The choices become overwhelming.

You get the picture. This is why scientific writing tends to be so dense and jargon-laden. To a visual thinker every detail is important, because one never knows how associations will be made. It is hard, very hard, for the visual thinker to eliminate trees in order to discuss the forest. In the auditory-sequential world, generalizations are understood as shorthand, but in the visual world they are seen as incomplete at best, and at worst, they are lies.

And to add insult to injury, the auditory-sequential world cannot understand what the problem is and tends to diagnose the visual-associative thinkers as stupid and lazy. They can't help it--many of them cannot think in pictures at all. They cannot even imagine what the problem is. In fact, for many philosophers of language, human thought must happen in words and language or it is not considered to be thought at all. The visual thinkers would say that such people have limited perspective. If they can find the words.

To make matters even worse, visual-associative thinking is so fast that on the extremes, such thinkers do not develop the alternative pathway. In order to successfully communicate in society, we must choose which pathway to use to process incoming and outgoing information. Sometimes, we use the visual pathways and sometimes we resort verbal pathways. So, in order to help extreme visual thinkers learn to write clearly, we must first help them develop the alternative pathway and then teach them to use it efficiently.

With N., it really helped to start with his strengths in visual-associative thinking and use those to scaffold to auditory-sequential. We started with sequencing pictures, and since he has all of the stereotypies and special interests of a child with AS, we started with the Titanic, since he was watching the movie over and over again. He made some gains, and then moved on to other interests. But where to go from here?

I think the answer for N. and for the scientists with the dense, jargon-laden papers is the same. It is to tranlate ideas from the pictures in the mind to auditory sequential chunks without sequencing every picture. In other words, I think the next step is to give each picture in the sequence a label, and then fade the use of the pictures. Now auditory-sequential thinkers would probably suggest doing this in one fell swoop, by introducing outlines. To them, outlines with all the fancy lettering, numbering and indentations make perfect sense. But to the visual-associative thinker, this may be too big of a leap. For example, N. tends to start to obsess on the exact spacing, on an exact pattern of lettering and numbering, and loses the point in a swamp of detail.

Fortunately, we do not have to re-invent the wheel here. For N., anything is worth doing if he can do it on the computer. And there are some great programs, such as Inspiration, that allow the use of graphic organizers that can then be turned into an outline with the touch of an icon. You can put pictures into your graphic organizer, or you can use text. Or both. And didn't MLC mention PowerPoint as the first love of geeky scientists? You can do the same thing with that program, in a different context.

Here, then, is a plan for what we want to accomplish in writing this year. In the past, N. would dictate and then I would help him organize his thinking. Now it is time for a little more independence. So this year, we can make some goals about learning the use of Inspiration or PowerPoint, or both, if N. chooses. Then I can help him move from his present level of using pictures to sequence a story with limited detail, to using pictures and text to sequence a story of similar detail, and then fade the pictures entirely, using only text to go from graphic organizers to outlines. Once that goal is successfully accomplished, we might want to move to stories with more complexity and do the same thing. Eventually, the goal is to be able to do this with extemely complex stories and processes.

Now I need to set up a time to talk about writing goals for this year, to see what N. wants to do, and how he wants to fit it in with his current focus--Kamana Wilderness Awareness. And this is going to have to be done with some delicacy. Writing is a sore subject for N. He has been called stupid and lazy too many times and will not be pushed too far beyond his comfort zones. The success rate at each step is going to have to be about 80% or he will lose interest.

The way many teachers unthinkingly label kids who think differently creates a real problem. When teachers call their students stupid, lazy, brain-damaged, and trouble-makers simply because the teacher lacks the imagination to see that there are many variations in how people think, they create the resistance to learning that they then so actively punish. People don't like to fail over and over and be blamed for "not trying" to boot!

Variation is a given in human populations. It is not a crime. Uniformity in a population is a weakness that can lead to trouble. We know this now more than ever, as we unfold the mysteries of the human genome. What I don't understand is why our educational systems are becoming more and more fixated on uniformity even as our science discovers the usefulness of variation. Actually, come to think of it, I think I have a hypothesis for this question, too.

But that's another post!