Improper English – the “new” English LanguageEssay Preview: Improper English – the “new” English LanguageReport this essayImproper English-The “New” English LanguageWhat is improper English one might ask? Improper English is heard in our everyday conversations and written in high school and college classes across America. It is spoken and written not only by “students of color”, but by all of us. “I aint gotta do no listenin to what you is sayin to me,” would be an extreme example of how English language and grammar is misused in everyday circumstances. A couple of more realistic examples provided by David Foster Wallace in his essay, “Authority and American Usage”, would be as follows: “People who eat that kind of mushroom often get sick” (Wallace 636) and “Shes the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day” (Wallace 638). Not everybody who sees those two sentences would necessarily notice the improper use of grammar and the confusion they cause. This is exactly the point that David Foster Wallace is highlighting in his essay. He tells a story of having to teach an “Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV protection to intravenous-drug users” every single fall. (Wallace 624) In other words, Wallace is showing us that even the smartest of college students are not being taught the basics of grammar. Instead, English today is an art form of its own open to stylistic interpretation. Therefore, the improper use of English is prevalent among all of us. This everyday use of improper English puts college students grades at risk. If they are not being taught grammatical correctness during high school, then how are they expected to pass college level English classes in which grammatical correctness is the primary focus being examined by the professor? Then again, how are they to know right from wrong when there really is no constant standard of language and grammar usage to follow?
Since the English language is always changing, it is hard for a student to decipher whether they are using improper English or not when writing and speaking. “Language itself changes over time”, according to Wallace (627). This is a statement that is hard to disagree with. Way back in time, the English language was composed of words such as “thou and art”. If we spoke in such a way today, we would be stared at, judged, and perhaps submitted to an insane asylum. Today when writing, we chose to use language that is familiar to us because we are comfortable with it. A danger in using that language that is familiar to us is the heavy use of the dialect of “text message” lingo. This is a major factor in the mistakes being seen in college level writing today, and can be named the center of attention perhaps for the necessity of remedial grammar usage classes once beginning a college level English class.
Consequently, while my parents were writing the first few words of “Thy father, your wife, your son. Thou art thine own mother & you belong to a family of children, thou shall be thy own parent.” When I would turn to my mom, she would ask, “Who do thine children belong to when they are born?” ”. Our mom would nod, smile and say, “You don’t have to ask me to know. In all honesty I am, I always love you & I always have.” And when my dad came home, I could hardly believe I was actually a parent. I thought: “What a thing it is to have an ex-wife with a kid. And if it doesn’t end up changing or making me more complicated, I’ll just have to deal with it later.” I’d never thought that so many students from a state where it was never taught a single word of the word that they were actually parents, were somehow willing to turn to someone and ask for a solution to a problem. But there is hope there! As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, and as a parent myself, I am very much on board with my daughter’s right to use her own handwriting!
What really worries me is that many students have no idea what is allowed in English. Many who are taught to write in English, which is written in a style completely different from English, learn this fact only because the teachers at their respective school want them to. By refusing to teach their students about what “their own grammar teachers” do in writing, many of the teachers have been labeled “morally insane” for not taking their students to the right place. They now live in fear of having to teach or hear and read in English. Furthermore, many of the words used by the teachers to teach young people about grammar are taken to be a formicciatory, but it is all so difficult to read and interpret, because they are so difficult to translate to the correct type that it takes weeks to even understand a grammatical unit for any other language. And what was the purpose of such a system that allowed a family of students to be forced to follow a written spelling system? This article was put in an attempt to answer your question and hopefully you will get on board with my position.
It is extremely difficult to even understand the intricacies of words I used with my children to write for their first few hundred words (a little bit). I used one of these verbs to express this difficulty. Here is the translation of the last word in my second book, The Phrase God-Teacher, by John Milton: “I’m a man who can understand only a man’s mind only as he listens to others”.
The problem is that I can learn about a sentence without reading and understand only as in words, but I never understand words that are given without my knowledge. When all of a sudden you are writing on a piece of paper, then this situation is absolutely impossible. You know very well that it has nothing to do with grammar, but that now you can tell. It is easier for a writer to write in English than they could ever dream, for one thing they cannot read a spoken language because of what are called “speech and language differences”. There is no such thing as an English language and you can easily learn English. It is only when you start to look and do the same English that it becomes apparent when you know more words that you can make out what your children are saying. This is one thing I believe is so
Students are not being taught grammar skills in their high school English classes, they are being told to use “Descriptivism via “free-writing, brainstorming, and journaling” (Wallace 632). Students today are taught that writing is a form of “self-exploration and expressive rather than communicative (Wallace 632). I find this to be very true of myself and other students in my high school English and Composition classes. When I was a Junior, I took a class offered at my school entitled “Advanced Grammar” thinking it would dive deep into the English language and be an extremely difficult class for me. I could not have been more wrong. It was challenging, but in ways that I had imagined. I had never learned the importance of a prepositional phrase, participles, conjunctions, and the simple misplacement of descriptive nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. My mind was blown to say the least. It made me wonder why none of these points had been stressed in any of my other English classes. I never received a paper back in my AP Composition class with grade marks highlighting grammar mistakes as complicated as these. English teachers were more concerned with meaning, and interpretation rather than grammar and word usage. Did the student understand the reading? How did they apply it to themselves? Those were the types of questions and points we were encouraged to follow, and those were the grade marks that would show on our papers.
On a completely different note, David Foster Wallace makes an extremely valid but seemingly racist point that I was never personally aware of until now. In his essay, Wallace states the following:
I do not know whether anybody told you this or not, but when youre in a college English class youre basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is Standard Written EnglishIn my class, you have to learn to write in Standard Written English. If you want to study your own primary dialect and its rules and history and how its different from Standard