Re: Strictly Standard English

On Jul 10, 3:53 pm, Christine <chris.edit...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 10, 7:35 am, "CDB" <bellema...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Something of a vexed question, Socrates, as I'm sure you know. In
the context of my boyish aside to the ESL poster, it means "English
usage that will earn a student the good opinion of a competent
instructor".
(snip)
When it comes to helping
non-English-speaking learners, though, it is unhelpful and unkind to
give them advice that will damage their academic chances, their
ability to communicate, or, indeed, their belief in the essential
goodness of their fellow-humans.

I'd like to home in on the "good opinion of a competent instructor"
and "advice that will damage their academic chances" part. For most of
a lifetime I've edited academic prose, too much of which is plain
awful. Maybe that's because the desire to impress (or more kindly, to
appear to be one of the initiated) is greater than the desire to
inform.

What you say is true: if you are a student wanting to get through a
course, you need to please your teacher. If you want to get published,
you need to conform to the publisher's norms.

In either case, you Really Should ignore any advice from Purl Gurl.
It is almost invariably confusing, wrong or both.

Still, it's really not strictly necessary for Standard English to be
bloated or flaccid. So I think it would be a service to guide people
to rule-abiding usage that's lively and acute.

The primary purpose of language is to communicate precisely what you
want to communicate. Surely a component of this is register - if you
are talking to a Reception Class in primary school, Martin Amis-
quality prose will simply not work. No more can you address the most
profound ideas armed only with the tools of an inveterate txtspkr. To
play Schumann's "Traumerei" correctly (i.e. note perfect) requires
only a moderately advanced technique - to play it like Horowitz
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq7ncjhSqtk) requires not only
superlative pianism but a lifetime as well.

Will.

.

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