From: m35products (m35prod@optonline.net)
Date: Sun Dec 19 2004 - 08:03:09 PST
Why do we have conventions?
One can think of language by analogy with other human processes: when
driving a car, if the visible traffic signs and invisible conventions of the
highway code are well understood by everyone, vehicles can execute complex
manoeuvres at high speed with minimal risk of accidents. If one person fails
to spot one sign or fails to observe one invisible rule, a crash can result.
Similarly in dance, elegance and emotional impact depend on each performer
doing just what he or she is supposed to do at exactly the right time and
place. Where language is concerned, bruises or bodily death is the only
rarely the consequence of failure, but there are documented instances of how
language misunderstood in a courtroom has led the innocent to the scaffold.
More generally, the life and death of sense, and the chance of grace, are
companions in every utterance. If the writer makes skilful use of the agreed
conventions, complex sense can flow rapidly and smoothly between people; if
not, then chaos can result. As Robert Lowell once remarked, a comma can be
intelligent, or stupid.
Scholarly writing as a genre
Scholarly writing must make exact sense (even when being deliberately
ambiguous); it is highly articulate, a matter of joints. One thought hinges
on another, and a good hinge lets you hang a door, kick a ball or hammer a
nail. Articulate sentences help us make the world. No literary critic,
historian or philosopher would question this for a moment. It follows that
it is the task of all teachers and students to accept the challenge of being
as articulate as they possibly can and that even the apparently modest comma
has a crucial role to play in this process.
Grammar and Glamour
An amusement: the origin of the word 'glamour' is a Scottish variant on the
word 'grammar', grammar having been associated in days of yore with the
power to cast magic spells, just the sort of thing that learned persons were
expected to be able to do. It follows that grammar is literally glamorous!
Professionalism
The recent spread of word-processing has radically altered the production of
writing in all social contexts. Students, scholars and businessmen used to
write in manuscript; their typing was done by secretaries. Now everyone uses
keyboards and even businessmen type their own reports on laptops and send
them direct to the boardroom. It follows that students now have to be much
more exacting in their own use of English and their understanding of such
matters as layout and proper punctuation. Good writing was always essential
but it is now canonised and commodified as a 'transferable skill'.
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