NAIWE’s Grammar Expert John E. McIntyre has not gone around the bend. Let me explain.
Usually someone talking about “correct” English imagines that one form of English, the dialect we identify as standard English or standard formal English, is the one, true English, all variants being inferior, wrong, and ignorant.
People who rattle on about “correct” English, often expressing a belief that the language is in decline and ignorance on the rise, want either to exert social prestige over you or to lure you into sharing their misguided sense of superiority. There will be mouthing of “dumbing down” and “the common herd.” Do not play their game.
In my own work as an editor, I have found it much more effective to talk about appropriate English. What form of English is the best match for the subject, the genre, the publication, the occasion, the writer, and the reader? (D’you remember the reader?) All the Englishes have a place at the table, and your task is to find the ones that best suit your purposes.
Standard formal English is the language of law, government, business, and academia. If you are writing in those areas, you will have to display a grasp of its conventions. Lapses in grammar and usage will undermine your credibility. (Mind you, not all the things that people think of as rules in standard English are genuine rules. For reference, my book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.)
To be more broadly successful in writing you will also need to master what linguists call code switching. You already know how it works in speech: You don’t talk to your grandmother the same way you talk to friends in a bar; you don’t talk to your supervisor quite the same way you talk to a subordinate or to your peers. You adjust vocabulary and syntax to match the occasion and the people.
Those of you who write fiction already understand this modulation as you give voice to your narrators and characters, like this one: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.” But the guardians of “correct” English at the Concord, Massachusetts, public library expelled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the time of its publication as “the veriest trash.”
Sufficiently adept writers discover the possibilities of code switching within a text, as you can see in a passage from H.L. Mencken’s opinion of the Warren Harding inaugural address: “He writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
But always keep in mind what Flannery O’Connor said about what one can do and cannot do in writing: “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”
Let me recommend to you two books to enlarge your sense of language and its possibilities. You will profit from reading Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language by David Shariatmadari and Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch.
John Early McIntyre was a professional editor for more than 40 years, 34 of them at The Baltimore Sun, from which he recently retired. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John taught editing at Loyola University Maryland for 25 years. A charter member of ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada. He is the author of two small but trenchant books, The Old Editor Says: Maxims on Writing and Editing, and Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.
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