Book Review: Punctuation..?

7 November 2012

Punctuation..? by User Design (Thomas Bohm) is a short handbook on how to use the most common punctuation marks, plus some of the not-so-common ones. Illustrated with simple, yet intriguing line drawings, the book covers British stylistic practice, not North American, and is aimed at the novice writer who is looking to improve their use of common punctuation marks.

While the book covers the basics, it is no substitute for a good style manual, and is better suited as light refresher rather than a reference. It omits some of the subtle uses of the various marks it covers, and at times it presents the information somewhat inaccurately, although it would not be fair to say that it gets anything “wrong.” For example, the book states that the possessive singular is formed with just < 's >, but does not address the question of singular words that end in the letter < s >, which can use either the < 's > or simply the apostrophe¬—it’s a question of style which you use. The book also fails to distinguish between the uses the em dash and the en dash, stating that the difference is a regional one between the North America and Britain, while in actuality the two marks are used in different contexts on both sides of the ocean. The em dash is used to separate a related thought from the main clause—and to do so with emphasis. The en dash is used to link numbers in a continuing series, e. g., 1066–1492.

Perhaps the book’s biggest failing is in the most commonly used mark, the comma. The book fails to address the issue of the serial (or Oxford) comma, the most commonly raised question regarding comma use. It also states that the comma is used to separate clauses “when there is a change in the subject.” But more accurately it should be said to be used to separate independent clauses joined by a conjunction. This often entails a change in subject, but not always. And its description of the use of the semicolon is correct, but not particularly helpful in describing where one might want to use it.

On the positive side, the book presents one of the clearest and most succinct descriptions of how to use quotation marks (British style, of course) that I have seen. And the inclusion of some more obscure or non-English punctuation marks, like the European Guillemet and the Latin interpunct, is a nice touch.

All in all, Punctuation..? is a nice little book for the non-professional who just wants to brush up on her style and avoid the most common errors in punctuation.

The Need for Cursive Writing?

4 November 2012

This article is a few months old, but I just saw it, and it got my hackles up. I’m not sure what’s scarier, that this is even a debate or the level of argument that is being put forth by these educators. 

The first thing I want to ask Ms. Avery, who advocates teaching cursive, to prove her statements of “fact.” Her first point is demonstrably wrong:

If students can’t write cursive, they can’t read cursive. And if they can’t read cursive, how can they read historical documents, like the Declaration of Independence?

She has it backward. You can’t write in a hand if you can’t read it, not the other way around. I can’t write cursive. I gave it up after graduating high school and haven’t looked back; it’s been thirty years since I’ve written in cursive and my penmanship has atrophied to nothing. Yet I can read cursive without difficulty. I can also read Anglo-Saxon Miniscule, Anglicana, and Elizabethan Secretary hand, yet I never been able to write a lick in any of of these hands. Being able to read a hand and being able to quickly and legibly write in it are two entirely different skills.

Ms. Avery says that cursive is “intrinsically human.” Really? If it were indeed intrinsically human, it wouldn’t need to be taught. We would know how to do it from birth. Cursive writing is a technology, just like keyboarding or texting, except that it is an obsolescent one.

Ms. Avery claims that cursive is faster than block printing Are there studies to back this up? I can print legible block letters pretty darn quickly.

She claims that practicing penmanship develops fine motor skills. Is this so, and does it do it better than other activities? Are there articles that demonstrate this in peer-reviewed physiological journals? I don’t know the answers, but I suspect they’re no, but I don’t know that for sure.

Because students are continually distracted by technology, they spend fewer hours reading, which translates to inadequate “internalizing of language.”

Again, is there evidence for this? If this is true, why is it that the students who text the most tend to score highest on tests of language ability? And what does “fewer hours of reading” have to do with penmanship? If students need more reading, stop wasting their time with outmoded skills and let them use the time to read.

Many of them tell me that they couldn’t begin to understand their poem until they copied it by hand.

I would bet that teaching close reading skills would achieve Ms. Avery’s goal just as well, if not better, than a rote copying exercise. (Frankly, making students copy out poetry by hand reeks of mindless busy work that has no place in a classroom. I can’t think of any bigger waste of time that an English teacher could engage in.) Besides, why can’t they print the poem? That would achieve the same “internalizing” of the poem as writing it in cursive.

Penmanship is an art form.

Communication through handwriting will always be a necessity.

These two statements are contradictory. Art forms are, by definition, unnecessary. That is the point of art; we don’t need it. We create art because it elevates us; it takes us beyond what we simply need to do to survive and prosper. The appeal of a handwritten note comes from the fact that it is not necessary. Back in the days before typewriters when it was necessary, penmanship wasn’t considered charming or an art; it was merely a necessary skill.

In contrast, Mr. Ellis’s argument opposing the teaching of cursive is coherent and logical, although like Ms. Avery he fails to back up his statements with evidence other than personal anecdotes. As is said often, the plural of anecdote is not data. I would hope that professional educators writing advocacy pieces would rely on peer-reviewed studies, but that seems to be too much to hope for.

In an ideal world, I would enthusiastically support the teaching of penmanship, just as I firmly support the teaching of calligraphy, painting, sculpture, music composition, and similar skills. But the question is that given limited resources, should schools be mandating the instruction of outmoded technological skills in English class? Do we still take time out of math class to teach students how use a slide rule? Why should be doing the equivalent for instruction in language and literature?

Odd Toppled Trees

29 October 2012

While here in Toronto the advent of Hurricane Sandy isn’t the cause of evacuations and frenzied preparations that it is for my relatives and friends back on the Jersey Shore, but that doesn’t mean we won’t feel its effects. But one sentence from the Canadian Weather Office’s warning for the city jumped out at me:

Sporadic power outages are quite likely across the warned regions due to falling limbs and the odd toppled tree taking out hydro lines.

“The odd toppled tree” is distinctly unbureaucratic in tone; I like it. It’s not the kind of thing you expect to see in an official announcement about severe weather. “Quite likely” is also nicely informal. The “hydro,” of course, is pure Canadian, a clipping of hydroelectric. Had this been a warning in the States it would have read “power lines.”

Whenever normal, human speech works its way into official bureaucrat-speak, it’s a good thing.

Did Chaucer Coin "Twitter"?

26 October 2012

Um, no. Or at least, probably not.

But that’s what The Atlantic Wire claimed yesterday in another conflating of coinage with earliest recorded usage. The Atlantic’s blog post was inspired by this tweet from the editors of the OED which says “Chaucer provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb.”

In his Boece, a translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, written sometime in the late 1370s or early 1380s (the OED says c. 1374, but that’s probably a few years too early; the Middle English Dictionary puts it at c. 1380), Chaucer writes:

And the janglynge brid [...] twytereth desyrynge the wode with hir swete voys. (3.m2.21–31)

(The chattering bird [...] twitters, longing for the woods with its sweet voice.)

Chaucer wasn’t the only writer around that time to be using twitter. John Trevisa in his translation of Higden’s Polychronicon writes:

Þe osul twytereþ mery songes [...] Þe ny3tyngale in his note Twytereþ [...] Wiþ full swete song. (1.237)

(The blackbird twitters merry songs [...] The nightingale in his notes twitters [...] With full sweet song.)

So, the editors of the OED are correct in saying that Chaucer is the earliest known writer to use the the verb to twitter, but others were using it shortly after he was, and it seems likely that Chaucer was using a trendy, new verb that that was floating about London at the time, and not the coiner as The Atlantic Wire inferred from the evidence. It’s a small, but important distinction.

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Sources: The Oxford English Dictionary Online; The Middle English Dictionary; and The Riverside Chaucer, Larry Benson, ed., Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Sex-Neutral Terms

17 October 2012

This post on the Economist’s “Johnson” blog on language addresses sex-neutral terms and how they’ve been patchily applied in English. While the general thrust of the article is correct, the application of sex-neutral terms, like most things having to do with language, is inconsistent, at points the article starts to go off the rails, conflating issues that have nothing to do with being sex neutral.

“Hostess" is harmless but “mistress” is tainted.

This one is perhaps the most egregious slip in the post. Yes mistress is a tainted word, but it’s not tainted because it is sex-neutral; it’s tainted because of its other senses of adulterous lover and dominatrix.

The lowest enlisted ranks in America’s navy are “seamen"—regardless of the sex of the sailors in question.

True, the lowest ranks are officially dubbed seamen, a word that not only isn’t sex-neutral, but which causes pre-teen boys to giggle, but the more commonly used generic word is the sex-neutral sailor. Although the Johnson blogger is quite correct in that there is no good sex-neutral term for the air force equivalent of airmen.

Female Hollywood types are “actresses”, uncontroversially, but many women of the serious New York stage call themselves “actors”.

Yes, actress can still be used uncontroversially, but the use of actor to refer to women is gaining ground. It’s not just “women of the serious New York stage who call themselves ‘actors.’” It may be that in a decade or so, actress may be a skunked term as well. Although perhaps not, because unlike these other professions sex does make a difference in the roles that actors play. The profession itself isn’t sex neutral. (Like dominatrix, where the outdated -trix suffix lives on because the whole point of the fetish is that the woman is in charge.)

I also note that the sex neutrality can go the other way. The -ster suffix, once used to refer to woman doing a job normally performed by a man, in current use the suffix has lost its sex specificity entirely, although it retains some of its diminutive quality.