Week 1 - Principles and words

WHAT IS GRAMMAR AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Let’s start with grammar, one of the key concepts underlying this MOOC. What does the word ‘grammar’ mean to you? ‘Glamour’ is probably not the first word that you think of when you hear the word ‘grammar’, but one of the grammar experts whom we interviewed for this MOOC, Professor Fred D’Agostino, talks about the ‘glamour of grammar’.

He explains how both words are derived from the word for ‘learning’, as in ‘grammar’ schools. Grammar and glamour are essentially the same word, derived from the Greek, ‘grammatikos’, meaning ‘of letters’, which covered the whole of arts and letters. In the Middle Ages, ‘grammar’ generally meant ‘learning’, which, in the popular imagination, included a knowledge of magic.

So, grammar has origins that are glamorous and magical. The narrowing of grammar to mean ‘the rules of language’ came late in the 17th century to the study of English, and in the 19th century the words went their separate ways. If you’d like to listen to Professor D’Agostino, you will find the video clip in our course resources.

It’s quite usual for people to speak and write correctly without knowing the explicit rules of grammar. So, when you’re studying grammar, you’re studying what you may already know. You all have an intuitive command of grammar because you’ve been using it since you started to talk, but you also need a conscious command of the rules so that you can apply them to your writing. Grammar is the underlying system of rules of a language. When you study what the language can and can’t do, you’re studying grammar. Categorising and labelling the words in a sentence using the parts of speech as traditional grammarians do isn’t always reliable, however.

In this MOOC we’ll introduce you to the traditional parts of speech, what contemporary linguists call ‘word classes’, and concentrate on helping you to understand the function of each word in a sentence, that is, its role and how it relates to the other words.

Another term that you need to be familiar with is syntax. It’s the arrangement and inter-relations among words in a sentence, the structure of the sentence.

No one starts at zero. You already have a good intuitive sense of grammar, but you need to be able to pinpoint what makes a piece of writing work or not work. You’ll benefit greatly from a grounding in grammar. A knowledge of grammar will provide you with a wonderful toolkit that will give you greater confidence and greater power over your writing.

The novelist Philip Pullman, in an article in The Guardian says that ‘Taking care of the tools means developing the faculty of sensing when we’re not sure about a point of grammar. We don’t have to know infallibly that we might have got it wrong, because then we can look it up and get it to work properly. Sometimes we’re told that this sort of thing doesn’t matter very much. If only a few readers recognise and object to unattached participles, for example, and most readers don’t notice and sort of get the sense anyway, why bother?’ I discovered a very good answer to that, and it goes like this: if people don’t notice when we get it wrong, they won’t mind if we get it right. And if we do get it right, we’ll please the few who know and care about these things, so everyone will be happy.

The following experts have been very outspoken about the value of knowing grammar rules: The Journalist Dot Wordworth says ‘It’s cruel not to teach grammar to children’ Harry Mount says ‘If you don’t know grammar, you can’t write English!’ He goes on to say: ‘Know your grammar and you can produce every kind of fantastic verbal construction and - this is the crucial bit - be understood.

The jazz musician Charles Mingus talking about jazz says: ‘Ya gotta know all the rules and structures inside out before you start to break the - and make truly great music’. You need to understand the rules of grammar so that you know when it’s OK to break them. Writing teacher Richard Weaver says: ‘Using a language may be compared to riding a horse: much of one’s success depends upon an understanding of what it can and will do’. Knowing grammar can make you into a truly great writer.

The basis of grammatical awareness is sentence sense and this comes with reading. Poor writers cannot or do not read their own writing accurately or perceptively. They lack a reader’s perspective.

You need to read widely. Read! Read! Read! Just like the grammar goblin. Wide reading, particularly of authors who write very well, will help you to absorb a great deal about grammatical, syntactical, and punctuation patterns and the craft of writing. The better we understand English, the greater our pleasure in reading it. If you’re already confident about your writing, reading syntactically challenging writing can be helpful, too. Find a piece of writing that you admire and try to analyse why it works for you. Understanding grammar and syntax will help you to do this. Do you agree with Dot Wordsworth’s comment that “It’s cruel not to teach grammar to children”?

Writing Standard English.

My name’s Fred D’Agostino. I’m Professor of Humanities at The University of Queensland and I’d like to talk today about the glamour of grammar. Glamour originally means a kind of enchantment or spell that makes everything appear beautiful. And grammar is the art of letters and grammar can be glamorous because it creates a spell through the use of words that enables us to understand each other and ourselves. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that grammar is not just about rigid rules, although there are rules, and sometimes they need to be given due weight in our expression.

Grammar is about style.

It’s about having a voice and being able to express what it is that you need to express in order to communicate your ideas and your goals and aspirations. The word ‘style’ reminds me of the most famous grammar book, at least in my world, growing up in the United States in the 1950s. Everybody was exposed to a book called ‘The Elements of Style’, by Strunk and White. E.B. White was a a writer for The New Yorker and you may have read his children’s book, ‘Charlotte’s Web’. He had been taught by William Strunk when he was an undergraduate student and they put together a kind of manual for writers that is still published after, what, seventy years? I think it must be about seventy years in print. There’s a new fourth addition and their emphasis on the word ‘style’ really is the tip-off, that grammar is about being stylish, it’s not about being constipated. I think a lot of people think, well I can’t say what I want to say because I’m bound by these rigid rules of grammar. That’s an unhelpful attitude towards grammar. I hope that you’ll have that dispelled in your studies in this course. I want to read a little bit from Strunk and White because this is a very pithy expression of their fundamental principles.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.” Hemingway expressed it differently and with fewer words. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

I’d like to give some examples of good writing that follows the dicta of Stunk and White and of Hemingway, but they’re very different, as you’ll hear. The first is from Henry James, a writer who is notorious for the length and complexity of some of his sentences, but I think you will see, and I hope that I can do justice to it as I read it, that he too uses no unnecessary word and says exactly what he means. “It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories.” One sentence. Short words. Short clauses. A very clear picture, I think, emerges of the scene that’s being described, but, a complicated structure reflecting a complicated train of thought. A complicated scene of reminiscence, or, of experience. I might go to the other end of the spectrum and give an example from an American songwriter of the 1950s, Hank Williams, not to be confused with Hank Williams II, or Hank Williams III. This is one of the the most famous song lyrics in the American Songbook. “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill He sounds too blue to fly The midnight train is whining low I’m so lonesome I could cry I’ve never seen a night so long When time goes crawling by The moon just went behind the clouds To hide its face and cry Did you ever see a robin weep When leaves begin to die? Like me, he’s lost the will to live I’m so lonesome I could cry The silence of a falling star Lights up a purple sky And as I wonder where you are I’m so lonesome I could cry One of the things that’s uncharacteristic about this particular lyric of Hank Williams is that it contains two-syllable words: ‘lonesome’, ‘whippoorwill’, That was actually… one, two, three… three syllables.

It’s very unusual in his lyrics for him to use anything other than monosyllables. He was singing at a time before television. He was singing at a time when his audience was deracinated, Southern and Midwestern depression-era farmers and they had very restricted vocabularies and wouldn’t have understood more complicated speech, even if he had been able himself to produce it, because he came from that stratum of society. And he spoke to them, and really timelessly, because of the simplicity of his prose, no word wasted, but, again, as in the Henry James, a very clear picture. In this case its partly an interior picture, a picture of someone’s feelings, but, set against the background of very familiar and common features of the landscape in rural America. Part of the received wisdom of American prose style is that it all begins with Hemingway, and that in the 1920s Hemingway introduced into American prose writing a kind of simplicity that contrasted very starkly with the labyrinthine sentence structure that we found in Henry James. The Hank Williams style really is, if you like, the refinement of the simplicity of Hemingway’s prose, but, I think you’ll hear in this excerpt from Hemingway’s most famous short story, ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’, some of that same concision of utterance. This is architecture, not interior decoration, even though he’s talking about a room. “”Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course, but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all. He smiled and stood before a bar with the shining steam pressure coffee machine.” We’re pretty lucky here at the beginning of the 21st century to have lived at a time when one of the great prose writers of… indeed, one of the great poets… of the English language has been active. I refer to Bob Dylan of Minnesota, Greenwich Village, and Hollywood California. Dylan was a student of Hank Williams and was a student of prose and poetry stylings. He was inspired by Allen Ginsberg, who was himself inspired by Walt Whitman. And there’s kind of a lineage in our prose and poetry stylists that you can trace and, that, should you become interested enough to aspire to being a prose or poetry stylist, that you will trace in your own work, in your own research, in your own activities. This is something, actually, that’s very evident in the hip-hop genre, as well. Hip-hop artists all have precursors, some of whom go back millennia, and of whom, they are self-consciously aware. You may not be when you listen to them, but they are. There is a tradition of glamorous grammar, glamorous grammaticality, and Bob Dylan is a piece of that tradition and has doffed his hat to Walt Whitman, to Allen Ginsberg to Hank Williams and to others. Here’s one of his most touching lyrics. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging They’re painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town. Here comes the blind Commissioner They’ve got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they’re restless They need somewhere to go As lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row”

This is a very unusual piece of verbiage. It’s not descriptive of an exterior scene, not entirely so, anyway. It’s not really about an interior flow of ideas or of emotions. Some of it’s imagined. Some of it’s fantasized. But it’s expressed in very real concrete imagery. This is something that we can do with words when we know how to use them. We can create a scene that is a fantasmagorical scene, as indeed ‘Desolation Row’ is meant to be, by using ordinary descriptive language but in unusual, and, in some cases, disturbing ways.

So, among the combination of the images, some of them make a lot of sense so, “The circus is in town”, we kind of all know what that means. We might not know what it means to say, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”, but, actually, there are such things, as horrible as that is to contemplate. So, in the United States there was a kind of a horrible tradition of lynch mob rule in the southern and southern midwestern states in the United States and there are literally postcards that were made portraying the hangings of African-American men from trees by the Ku Klux Klan. “The beauty parlor is filled with sailors”… well, that’s something that might happen nowadays. but it probably was an unusual scene even in Greenwich Village. So what we see here is the juxtaposition of two familiar ideas, or two familiar realities: sailors in town on shore leave and a beauty parlor. We put one into the other where they don’t normally belong and we create some kind of issue for the listener, to make sense of what it is that we’ve expressed.

WRITING AT THE WORD LEVEL

In this first week of the course, we want to introduce you to the concept of style at the word level with suggestions about how to use words well to enhance your writing. Good grammar and coherent sentence structure are the foundation of effective writing, but you also need to choose words well.

I’ve already talked about how crucial your writing quality will be to your success in your studies and in the workplace.

I’m now going to talk about how central your choice of words will be to your writing quality. How word-aware are you? How much do you appreciate how your handling of words can help you to produce clear, economical, precise, logical, and compelling writing. Words are your greatest tools. Read, read, read! Write, write, write! English is tricky. Sometimes a word that means something in one context means the opposite in another: a slim chance and a fat chance mean much the same, but a wise man and a wise guy have very different meanings.

English is constantly changing. New words (neologisms or coined words) such as cronuts and phablet enter the language and, once they become popular many are added to dictionaries. Think of the many added since the rise of the Internet. Take these for example. Avatar, hashtag, trolling, and meme. Then there’s what’s called the Cupertino error. This arose when automated spelling checkers substituted Cupertino, a city in California where Apple has its headquarters, for the word ‘cooperation’.

2013 was the year that ‘selfie’ was named ‘word of the year’, though it was coined in Australia about 20 years ago. The word ‘twerking’ isn’t new either. It was coined 20 years ago in New Orleans. Neither is ‘Oh My God’ (OMG), which was first used by Winston Churchill in 1917. ‘Unfriend’ apparently goes back to 1659.

Do you have any favourite words? A recent survey in London resulted in ‘serendipity’ and ‘Quidditch’ topping the poll of favourite words. What are some of your favourite words? I love ‘redolent’ and ‘resonate’. After this video, we’ll ask you to put one of your favourite words into our word cloud. You’ll be able see the favourite words of the people doing this MOOC.

Do you have any pet-peeve words and expressions? That is, ones that make you wince when you see or hear them.

‘One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the last moment’. The Modernism Centre. ‘Language is the palate from which we draw all the colours of our life’. Anthony Jackson, The Asia Society, NYC.

We need now to cover some important concepts related to word usage, such as voice, tone, and style. Voice is your relationship with your reader, what ‘comes through’ about you through your writing. How you present yourself to your readers. What sort of person does my reader think I am as they read my words? Voice is what makes a writer distinctive. How would you describe your voice in any writing that you have done? Is your voice breezy, reassuring, sincere, humble, opinionated, knowledgeable, funny, minimal, bemused, wry, poetic, dramatic, idiosyncratic? How did the purpose of your writing affect the voice that you were aiming for? Do you visualise your reader when you write? That’s a very helpful strategy.

Tone is the effect of your message on your reader.

Do you think that your readers feel informed, pleased, motivated, bored, patronised, intimidated, or irritated by your writing when they read your messages? Your writing style is the result of choices that you make at the word level, the sentence level, and beyond the sentence in paragraphs. We’ll concentrate on words this week and deal with sentences and paragraphs in later weeks. The poet Coleridge once said that the infallible test of a perfect style is ‘its untranslatableness into words of the same language without injury to its meaning’.

So, be sure to:

• Choose your words carefully

• Understand the difference between denotation (dictionary definition) and connotation (associations that a word conjures up)

• Acquire a rich and ample vocabulary, your repertoire of words

• Use figures of speech such as metaphors and similes— James Wood in How Fiction Works says that they create a ‘little explosion of fiction’.

• Be aware of the pro’s and con’s of using adjectives and adverbs, which we’ll cover in later weeks.

Although it’s not a good idea to use a foreign phrase that readers won’t necessarily know, there is a French expression that encapsulates what you should aim for: ‘le mot juste’, the intensely right word.

This table, which is also in your COURSE RESOURCES, is helpful in highlighting many ways in which you can create and maintain your credibility as a writer. There are many instances where you will need to decide whether to use one or two words. Add your own to these examples.

This must-have policy is one that you must have. This set-up is one that will set up a firm structure. There are many differences between North American and Australian/British spelling. Catalog/Catalogue, Center/centre, Color/Colour Defense/defence Organize/organise Mold/mould

You can find many extra examples to add to these. There are many differences in terms between North American and Australian/British terms. Faucet/tap Movie/film Candy/sweets Cookie/biscuit Elevator/lift Check/bill Find extra examples to add to these.

Those of you interested in correct spoken communication should try to avoid the mispronunciation that occurs in Australia in Strine (Australian) and Waynespeak. These are Australian variations on standard spoken English, but there are equivalents in other countries. Daily Writing Tips, a very helpful North American website that’s listed in your Course Resources for this week, has a list of 50 incorrect pronunciations that you should avoid. Watch out for Wayne words. Wayne words are Australian expressions not pronounced correctly.

Examples are: expresso instead of espresso, anythink instead of anything, dateth instead of date, deteriate instead of deteriorate, haitch instead of aitch and stastitic instead of statistic. And avoid Strine (Australian) expressions. Examples include: Marmon dead for your parents, semmitch for sandwich, nerve sprike tan for nervous breakdown, spin-ear mitch for spitting image and emma chisit for how much is it? As we’ve said a few times this week, English is tricky. You will notice all of these words end in ‘ough’, but are pronounced differently.

Enough, although, plough, through, hiccough.

One further undesirable habit in some speakers is that of using ‘fillers’; What if JFK had said in his inaugural address: ‘Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country, actually’? That’s the end of our session on words. You’ll find loads of extra information on words in the course resources.

Next week, we’ll move up a level to sentences, which will be covered by Amber and Catherine.