Education's war crimes against the English language
The woke revolt against spelling is a sideshow to academia's real injuries to writing
The old saw has it that death and taxes are the only certainties in life. But equally fated is that each generation will bicker about language, as the old argue that the yoot have let the country go to the dogs. Or perhaps to the doggos.
The most recent fuel to this endless pyre comes from the University of Hull, reported this week as having stopped marking for accurate spelling, grammar and punctuation unless it’s mandated by external bodies. This being 2021, the move is a rebuttal to academia’s alleged dominance by a “homogenous North European, white, male, elite mode of expression”.
As a homogenous white North European male elitist, I’m naturally fantastic at spelling. I don’t like to brag, but I recently spotted an errant use of ‘compliment’, when ‘complement’ was intended. People actually pay me money to point such things out, despite the existence of computer spell checking.
My expensive South London lifestyle depends on graduates continuing to make such mistakes, so I can only thank Hull and its peers for their efforts. Were they as committed to their students’ employment prospects as to mine, coffee shops might be facing a severe barista shortage.
As you can see, the cheap jokes and culture war opinions write themselves. “Are grads being mollycoddled?” the Telegraph will ask. “Do our existing language practices discriminate against vulnerable groups?” queries the Guardian. “Is it bigoted to say that diverse communities can’t spell?” a leftwing contrarian writes. Across the Internet, hundreds of keyboards are being rattled.
In this vein Oliver Kamm, resident grump at the Times, made a characteristically tetchy pitch that we should relax our spelling standards a bit. The hack has been arguing for some time against the evils of a prescriptive approach to language, saying that every variation is valid and special in its own way.
I’ve long felt there was something ironic in Kamm’s dogmatic opposition to prescriptivism. Anything goes, it seems, except having standards. Yet as a committed Englishman who likes mocking the Academie Francaise’s impotent attempts to corral the French language, I must admit I mostly agree with him.
English spelling, as the Economist wrote only last week, is maddening. Among the most irksome examples are ‘effect’ and ‘affect’. While an effect is the result of a cause, a given cause will affect things. And although pretentious people are affected in their manner, changes are effected when someone makes them happen.
There is no point in these distinctions, and context indicates what was meant regardless of spelling. The compliment/complement rule is similarly pointless, serving only to create work for proofreaders like me. We could do with accepting multiple spellings, as Kamm advocates, or choose one spelling for many meanings and stick to it.
However, quibbling over spelling and its intersectional implications misses a more important point. Written communication is an important part of working life. In my experience most people suck at it.
Spelling mistakes, punctuation gaffs and grammar cock-ups may make you look stupid, but they rarely obscure the meaning of a sentence. What does obscure meaning is waffling, ambiguous sentence construction, and assuming too much knowledge. These are the things that annoy editors and readers.
Given the amount of written work in education, you’d think kids would get good at avoiding such problems. But academia is infamous for bad writing. The flattering view is that mad professors just struggle to communicate their brilliance to outsiders; the likelier explanation is that when somebody is obliged to read your work you don’t need to write it in a compelling way.
Such habits inevitably follow uni grads into working life. Those who failed academically or don’t like reading often write crudely, but at least their meaning isn’t obscured in a thicket of a thousands syllables.
Most of us will never be celebrated literary stylists, just as few drivers compete in Formula 1. But as we expect every driver to adhere to the rules of the road, people should learn to write clearly and effectively. When teachers are done decolonising the curriculum, perhaps they might focus on that instead.
Sour daddy. Given the recent anniversary of Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership and the sustained attacks on centrist dads, the Right Dishonourable decided it was time for a review of ageing Blairites’ influence in politics. You can listen to our conversation here, joined by Adam Radford, a host on the Centrist Dads Podcast.
Summer out of the city. Heart-warming stories about the suffering of commercial landlords have raised millions of spirits throughout the pandemic. As the fuddy-duddies try to drag people back into the office, Margaret Taylor writes for Wired about the prospects of the soulless hellhole Canary Wharf.
Rear-view mirror. On a less timely note, I’ve been enjoying The Rest Is History, a podcast by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. While the show’s blurb is serious, the reality is an often hilarious chat between friends on the most entertaining aspects of history.
As is the curse when writing about poor writing, the above newsletter will contain at least one howler. As such I’ve inserted one mistake so I can pretend any others are deliberate. Answers in the comments, prizes to be confirmed.
Jimmy