Misteaks, Mis-Takes, m-Stakes, Unconventional Writing

by Jean Roberta

In some contexts, I can agree that there are really no mistakes, that every experience has the potential of making one wiser, and that the journey is more important than the destination.

If we’re discussing sentence construction, however, I doubt if I will ever agree that every word choice is beautiful in its own way.

There is a war on over this, and I can’t see how the two sides could possibly agree on a treaty.

Here is a passage from an essay written by one of my students in the final exam:

“When an individual reads this poem, they may be (in a sense), be interacting with Shakespeares lover. Even though the person may not physically be here, the poem is the root for their soul. Shakespeare indicated that this poem shows the amount of care and love he has put into a poem, which then gives him the first of many to indicate his eternal love for them.”

Does this explain Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”) to your satisfaction? If not, are you a philistine who refuses to see the beauty of creative composition? When I explain to students that their writing is unclear, ungrammatical, or both, I am often told that I am a born bureaucrat, a stickler for old rules that no longer apply in the twenty-first century.

When I ask students why they switched verb tenses in the middle of a paragraph, I don’t necessarily mean that they made a mistake. When a statement that “Character A walks into the room” is followed by “Years later, he had considered the consequences,” I would really like to know why present tense is followed by past perfect, especially if the description of events seems intended to be chronological.

In this case, I rarely get a logical explanation. Usually, I get a confused look, and a defensive claim that “I just write what I feel,” or a question: “What do you want me to write?”

These reactions could be excused as evidence of naivete in typical university undergraduates (generally aged 18-22), but those who write unclearly have an enormous amount of support.

There is the special-needs argument that students who have learning disabilities or psychological problems such as attention-deficit disorders shouldn’t be held to the same standards as students in the default (“normal”) category. A spokesperson from the university office for students with disabilities once addressed a meeting of the English Department by pleading for the “rights” of the disabled, including the right to get passing grades on written assignments, apparently without regard for their quality. “Is it really that important for students to use commas in the right places?” she asked. For a moment, there was a loud silence in the room.

Compared to global warming and the constant threat of another world war, I thought, the placement of commas is not that important. If I were in a life-threatening situation and needed to contact someone who could save me, I probably wouldn’t worry much about commas. It doesn’t follow that punctuation should be considered irrelevant to the needs of students in a university English class.

Then there is the anti-racist argument that if a person who learned (or is still learning) English as an adult writes unclearly, he/she should not be “punished” for this by getting a failing grade in a class, or by getting fired from a writing job. When I have complained about the writing of students from elsewhere, I’ve been asked, “How well can you write in their language(s)?”

My response is that when a bilingual friend of mine who learned French at her mother’s knee advised me to apply for a job at L’Eau Vive [“Fresh Water,” the local weekly French-language newspaper] on grounds that this would be a good job for a writer, I said, “Pas du tout.” I knew that my French is nowhere close to being “comme il faut” and that a hefty French-English dictionary couldn’t help me enough.

Then there is the Humpty-Dumpty argument. (In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice that when he uses a word, it means whatever he wants it to mean. He tells her that the issue is “who is to be master.”) Several months ago, one of my students contacted the Associate Dean of Arts to ask him to assign some other prof to reread her essay (on guess what? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18) because I had given her a disappointing grade on it.

Among other statements in the essay, the student claimed that Shakespeare was describing “irreverent beauty.” When I met with her, I explained to her that if you revere something, you respect it a lot. Therefore, if someone or something (?) is “irreverent,” this adjective essentially means disrespectful. I asked how the “beauty” described by Shakespeare was disrespectful – of what or whom? She couldn’t really answer my question, but she said the sentence sounded “right” to her.

Luckily, in this case, the Associate Dean was on my side, but there seems to be a Peasants’ Revolt going on outside the Ivory Tower, and its spokespeople have been firing shots since at least the 1960s. From time to time, a delegation of rebels breaks in to tell us we’re doing it wrong, and that we need to become aware of how unfair it is to discriminate between “good” and “bad” writing. Isn’t that a completely subjective value judgment? (No.) How dare we grade non-English-speaking writers “down?” (We dare this because language is ethnocentric by definition – not that adult language-learners can’t learn to write brilliantly in their second or third language.)

I’m sure the war won’t end in my lifetime. I just hope that no misplaced punctuation or misleading verbiage finds its way onto my tombstone.

Happy First Day of 2016! May the force (of clear expression) be with you!