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The Grumpy Grammarian

This month we have four short items.

►  It may be unreasonable to expect that sports announcers have a command of correct English usage and grammar, but I still think it's pathetic how seriously they mangle the language.  Fortunately, I'm not a huge sports fan, so I don't have to listen to much of their mangled syntax and misuse of words.  I do, however, watch the professional football playoffs and the Super Bowl, and each year I am again reminded of how wretched these characters are at using the language.

I can almost tolerate the constant sports clichès ("They came to play!") because it must be hard to fill in all the gaps in the action with fresh material.  Nevertheless, their other abuses can drive me nuts.  Does any sports announcer, for example, know the phrase "to wait for"?  According to them, we are always "waiting on" something, as in, "We're waiting on a decision from the field."  Around our house, the only way we can live with this kind of abuse is to make a game of spotting and commenting on all the gaffes.  It helps to pass the time as we're "waiting on" the action to resume.

►  Apparently newspapers and news magazines are coming to rely more on spell-check than on copy editors and proofreaders.  I'm spotting many more wrong words than I used to.  For instance, a front-page synopsis in The New York Times recently declared, "Hillary Clinton's dark side emerges and threatens to undue the good she is trying to achieve.”  A good copy editor would have caught that in a flash; spell-check, of course, wouldn't.  Undue happens to be the wrong word here, but it is spelled correctly (as in, "undue haste").

Of course, as students place blind faith in spell-check, their errors with confusion of common and very simple words become more frequent – then and than, there and their, and others.  I've had college students call the place where they're going to school collage, and I recently had one student consistently type propose as purpose – "I purpose that . . . ."  Another wrote about how people don't have "proper manors anymore."  Sometimes, they know better, but they don't realize that spell-check can't read for sense.  In fact, on a True/False question at the beginning of the semester, about half of my students label this statement as True:  "Spell-check will detect any wrong words in what you have written."

Just as professional journalists seem to be doing, students don't proofread their own work.  They may have decided it isn't worth the time, that such truly glaring mistakes don't matter.  Why should they care?  After all, people who are paid to write sometimes make similar blunders.  Who notices, except some stodgy, old, anal-retentive English teachers?

►  Along similar lines, I have come to believe that self-editing is one of the most important skills that a writer can have.  It is not easy to acquire because it means temporarily detaching oneself from one's own words, and we all look upon our writing as extensions of ourselves.  Even on the simplest level of correcting our obvious mistakes, we are our own worst proofreaders.  We know what we meant to write, and we may "see" it there even if it isn't – mentally supplying omitted words, reading the words we expect even though we have written something else, and so on.

On a more sophisticated level, faults in style are even harder to self-edit.  It's not easy to spot and correct one's own wordiness.  Because we know what we intend to say, we may not recognize our own lack of clarity.  What appears to be a perfectly intelligible sentence to us may demand several readings to be understood.  Without realizing it, we may be asking readers to read our minds; we know what we are thinking, but that's not really what we wrote.

To self-edit successfully, we must put ourselves in the reader's place.  We are more likely to create this detachment if we let what we have written "cool off" – put it aside for a while, preferably at least overnight, and return to it with a fresh perspective.  Such an approach can be an eye-opener in more ways than one.  What we thought was positively brilliant when we wrote it may, in this new light, appear muddled and awkward.

Such experiences may deflate our egos, but they will help us to become better writers.  Few of us like criticism, but critical self-analysis is preferable to having our readers utterly confused or – the fate that every writer should want to avoid – having readers decide that what we wrote is not worth reading at all.

►  I am utterly baffled by a new trend in student writing – the omission of the apostrophe in contractions.  Students regularly write dont and doesnt for don't and doesn't, cant for can't, and (of course) the ubiquitous its for it's.  The abominations seem to have no limit, with Im for I'm, were for we're, and thats for that's.

I suspect that some of this is more negative fallout from texting and instant messaging, those twin "towers of babble" (yes, babble, not Babel) wherein all conventions of punctuation and capitalization are disregarded.  However, lapses in education may have much to do with it as well.  When I ask my students how contractions are formed (such as how do not becomes don't), they don't know.  Really!

Long, long ago, most of my English teachers prohibited the use of any contractions in formal or semiformal writing.  That approach may seem severe in our age of increased informality, but it was justified in that contractions were frowned upon (back then) in business communications.  Nonetheless, if my students continue to write contractions incorrectly, I may prohibit them from using contractions altogether.