If writing was a university, there would be one entire wing of the university devoted entirely to the proper study of grammar and syntax. People would expound on things like etymology (“did you know that the word hospitality takes its origin from the word hostile?”) and try to stump each other with proper usage issues (“is this drug effective or efficacious in this patient population?”) and indoctrinate lots of junior writers into the painful rigors of grammar.
Then there would be another wing of the university where people explored the ways in which humans communicated through language. They would notice that American English speakers sometimes used double negatives; that the word ain’t, though shunned, has failed to go away; and that new contractions and terms and grammatical misfits not only pervade our language but seem to thrive.
American English is a vibrant language because this second wing of the writing university is so generous and accepting. English tends to welcome new words without much regard to their pedigree or the constraints of proper grammar and usage, providing that the word is useful. It’s a very pragmatic language, English.
For example, texting talk has pervaded the language and even non-texters like myself know things like MBFF and actually use handy abbreviations like LOL. Foreign language words are absorbed readily into English, providing they are useful and that Americans can mispronounce them.
So that brings us back to the two wings of the writing university. Sometimes it seems that they exist almost in parallel, never intersecting. If you write for the academic world or in such esoteric fields as astrophysics or even modern medicine, you need to know the folks over at the grammar department.
But if you write for consumers, the Internet, the media or other things that actually get read, you can’t spend too much time with the grammar nazis or you sound woefully out of touch.
As commercial writers, it is important to know how to operate in both camps. It’s also important to know that the camps do not mix, at least not happily.
And it’s especially important to realize that the populist department of the writing university is most definitely alive, well, and something with which writers should get comfortable.
