The keynote speaker for this year’s Annual Idaho Writers Rendezvous was Ron Powers, an acclaimed author and historian who has written extensively about Mark Twain. Besides assuring the audience that the iconic American author would have applauded the rise of today’s “literary proletariat” through indie publishing (yay!), Powers explained that Twain signaled the cultural breaking away of America from British and European literary tradition by writing about common people using vernacular—i.e. Twain didn’t just tell us what the characters are saying, he let us “hear” them in their own unique dialect, thus drawing us much deeper into the story. Way cool, right?
Mark Twain – photo by A.F. Bradley
But Twain, though self-educated, worked as a typesetter and a reporter (among other jobs) before hitting it big as a writer. He knew how to write “properly” before he twisted the language on its ear.
I’m worried that growing numbers of writers—even college educated ones— can’t say the same.
Evidence? My husband teaches at a local college and has on occasion lamented the sorry state of his students’ writing abilities. Run-on sentences, incoherent paragraphs, too much slang—not to mention lousy grammar—often seem to be the norm. “Some of these students are seniors who’ll soon be applying for jobs,” he says. “Many of them can’t even put three sentences together coherently.”
The question is, will they have to, really? Perhaps every generation has said this, but come on, doesn’t it seem as though our writing standards are slipping? I’d venture to guess that today’s average college grad (and that includes English majors!) possesses the same grammar and writing skills (or worse) that a mere high school grad did forty years ago. Why the slide? I’d say you can look to lowered expectations in school as well as technology—including, but not limited to, social media.
Remember sentence diagramming? If you do, you’re of a “certain age.” It was a total pain in the patootie, but it sure did teach the various functions of words within our language. According to author and diagramming proponent Marye Hefty, it was phased out of the education system back in the Sixties.
What about all those tedious spelling rules? There’s no need to learn them when you have Spell Check on your computer, right? (of course, that program won’t care if you are writing sentences like “Betty is my ant” or “He could hear the church bell peeling.”) I won’t even go into how texting and tweeting have decimated spelling and grammar! When my husband’s students complain about the lower grades they receive, they are in essence saying, “Why does it matter? Why should I aspire to write really well?”
The answer is because when used properly, the English language (and any language, for that matter) is a beautiful, wondrous thing. It can convey the most nuanced information about matters both profound and mundane or, to coin a phrase, from the “ridiculous to the sublime.” (You see, my use of quotations marks told you that that is a special phrase and not one I just made up.).
As exhilarating as both writers and readers find the new world order in publishing, one aspect should give us all pause: the traditional “grammar guardians” are less in evidence. Because of the explosion of indie-published books, many titles are out there whose authors aren’t as respectful of the English language as they ought to be. They either don’t know the rules or don’t care about them; either way it’s sad to see.
If Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, were an indie author today, you might, at first glance, think he didn’t know how to write proper English, either. But in truth he knew very well how to write it; he deliberately shook it up to bring us closer to the characters he created. As writers working in an era whose literary standards may indeed be slipping, we should still know all know the rules before we break them.
