Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Corduroy and commas

Mr. David, my English teacher, wore corduroy suits and wire-rimmed glasses. His conversation was seasoned with words like “Dostoyevsky,” and he cared about what he said to us even when we didn’t. He also cared about capital letters, synonyms and the passive voice. These things I remember less fondly, but they come with the territory.

At least, they’re supposed to.

Not surprisingly, very few English majors become teachers because they’re on fire about subject-verb agreement. We long instead to instill in our students a love of literature and a yearning to express themselves with words.

Inconveniently, most of the adolescents staring back at us, like most human beings, don’t share our infatuation with words. Even for most serious students, English class is for learning to communicate while they hopefully encounter a few stimulating ideas.

Many experts disagree. Eavesdrop on an English teachers conference, and you’ll conclude that our primary ambition is to produce a generation of Wordsworths. All we seem to talk about is voice and tone, reflection and self-expression. We’ll move heaven and every earthly rule of composition to avoid stifling anybody’s creativity. Spelling and punctuation are treated with disdain, and our assessment rubrics make clear that grammar and the mechanics of writing finish dead last.

I’m all for self-expression and the power of words, and I’ve never been accused of having lost my passion for either. I pace and pound on my lectern the same way I did when my eyes and legs were younger, and I still glow when the light goes on in a student’s eyes. But all students aren’t “young writers.” More of my students will grow up to read their Facebook page or local newspaper than will read Lord Byron. Most won’t be penning lyric poetry. They’ll be writing memos and filling out accident reports and voting. That’s what I need to equip them to do.

CNN routinely misspells words like veteran, and nobody knows where apostrophes go anymore. I’m not talking about the average guy texting on his smartphone. I’m also not talking about occasional proofreading lapses. I’m talking about language professionals — journalists and congressmen, secretaries and sign makers — who don’t know how English works.

Sometimes, I’m talking about me.

College professors routinely complain that freshman composition students are “unable to produce papers relatively free of language errors.” At the same time, high school English teachers increasingly skip or skimp on explicit lessons in grammar, usage and the basic mechanics of writing.

This neglect isn’t accidental. The National Council of Teachers of English has opposed the teaching of grammar since the 1970s, at one point even advising that teachers “should not fret over grammar mistakes when evaluating papers.” While NCTE partisans have been forced by reality to retreat from their most extreme positions, they still frown on systematic instruction in language rules and fundamentals as “teaching in isolation.”

Ken Goodman, the father of the catastrophic whole language movement, condemned teaching spelling and punctuation, which he found “virtually impossible to teach anyway,” a telling confession coming from a man who made a career telling people how to teach English. Many like-minded language arts consultants and policymakers still regard spelling as a “waste of time in the classroom” and a concern for the mechanics of writing as a “drain.” After all, argues one consultant, “even accomplished professional writers have an editor.”

It may come as a shock to the pipe-dreamers who run our schools, but most of the students in my seventh-grade class aren’t going to wind up with editors.

Instruction based on the “Writing Process” contributes to the problem. This method, endorsed by the English establishment, purports to break writing down into the steps “real writers” follow. Unfortunately, most students aren’t real writers. Also, real writers don’t always follow the official steps.

For example, the process prescribes that students, many of whom can’t write well, meet for editing “conferences” with other students, many of whom also can’t write well. Process boosters encourage students to ignore spelling and punctuation in their draft “sloppy copies.” In theory, they’ll make corrections later. Unfortunately, later often never comes, and even when it does, middle and high school students frequently haven’t been taught to recognize and fix their mistakes.

Also, when you call an assignment a sloppy copy, that’s often what you get.

English is an adventure. It cries “Havoc,” over Caesar’s corpse, and it wanders the moors with Heathcliff and King Lear. It’s D’Arcy and Elizabeth, Cal East of Eden, and Hamlet mad north-north-west. It’s Fitzgerald in Paris and Thoreau at Walden Pond. It’s Coleridge and Whitman, Wilde and O’Neill, star-crossed lovers and Sons and Lovers.

But English is first a code, a code we have to share in common if it’s to make sense to anybody. That code has to rest on uniform spelling, punctuation and grammar standards. Otherwise, the code breaks down, and our written language remains a foreign language, a befuddling collection of indecipherable marks on a page.

I want to inspire my students. But my duty is to teach them the code. Otherwise, they’ll be in the dark forever.

In 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English recommended that teachers ignore writing errors in the name of “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” This view prevails in many quarters today. The trouble is, when you have your own language, you’re the only one you can talk to.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.