While this posting isn’t strictly about higher education issues, it is about being educated and using language deemed appropriate for the educated. Our president, for example, has been criticized of late for using the pronoun “I” in instances of objective case: “invited Michelle and I.”
Personally, I believe spoken language deserves a bit more slack than written language, so these little transgressions bother me not a bit even if I am an English teacher. Nevertheless, some of the strict grammarian types have compared that I-as-objective-case usage to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.
Well, even though I usually cut people some slack on spoken usage, I do have my own pet gripes; one of those for pronouns, for example, would be the use of “me” in comparatives between subjects as in “Joe is taller than me.” This is incorrect. The correct usage would be “Joe is taller than I [am].”
For the record, I do not pretend to be a grammar expert, and, for that matter, most English teachers I know are not. As my honest colleagues will generally acknowledge, the English as a Second Language (ESL) or foreign language (Spanish, German, French, etc.) instructors are much more expert on most of these questions than we.
Anyway, as a teacher of writing (as effective communication, composition, and rhetoric), my pet gripes instead involve written language, beginning with the fact that some people will be annoyed by the title of this article because they believe in a myth: Never start a sentence with “because.”
Sorry, folks, that’s a myth—one that, unfortunately, may have been unpleasantly and forcefully drilled into some from a young age.
Here’s another one: never start a sentence with a conjunction such as “and” or “but.” It may not be the best stylistic choice, but starting a sentence with one of these words is permissible.
What about the comma before an “and” in items in a series?
Which of these, for instance, is correct?
The journalists and their style guides (newspapers, magazines, etc.) are the only holdouts these days to the former, and organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) embrace the latter.
And the key word of the above is “holdouts.” Yes, change—ah, as has been said many times—is the only constant. As it has been for centuries, our language is in flux.
Until somewhat recently plurals of dates and acronyms, for example, were rendered with apostrophes. As to why this convention was started or endured as long as it did, I could not say, but gratefully, whether we were children of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s (All right! Yes, I want to make sure to get that point across.), we can embrace this change even as we drive our SUVs or play our DVDs.
Because change is inevitable, pronoun-antecedent agreement will probably be easing up with regard to a politician giving their speech. But will the most fanatical grammar guardians be able to let that pass?
In any case, maybe we all need to take a deep breath and get the latest facts before we decide to go around criticizing and correcting others—y’ know, sort of that “cast the first stone” thing. And I hope you enjoyed my errors!
papers through multiple revisions and completed all work, they basically need to write only a brief paragraph for their final in order to have enough points to earn an A. Of course, these are the types of students who write outstanding full-length final essays anyway.
