Descriptive Grammar
As a student, I have always thought grammar to be a set way of speaking with rules and regulations that dictate the "correct" way to speak and write. I did not think that there could be many ways of speaking/writing, with their own grammar, that would all be correct. The most interesting ideas presented in Chapters 1 and 2 were the approach of descriptive grammar in language education and the issues of correctness. Just like accents from different regions, we all have ways of speaking that seem out of place when not in their relevant situation. Language shouldn't confine us but rather act as a method to be used any way we choose to convey our ideas and feelings to the fullest extent.
Out of curiosity, if you could change or add a rule to traditional or "school" grammar, what would it be?
For example, I would want to be able to say "willn't" instead of "won't" and make other such contractions out of different words.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:56 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
If I could add or change a rule in traditional grammar, I would eliminate all the exceptions to the rule. English is incredibly confusing, in part due to all the exceptions. It seems to me that every rule has at least one exception. With all those exceptions, how on earth are we supposed to all write with "correct" grammar and not "incorrect" grammar?
Britta...if you took out all the exceptions to the rule in the English language you'd be taking out about 95% of the language. In other words, you should just make a new language at that point. English is confusing. I think it's kind of the point of it all.
I'd make "may" and "can" interchangeable. In middle school I had a teacher that made us say every time we wanted to go to the bathroom "May I go to the bathroom?" If you said "Can I go to the bathroom?" she would reply, "I don't know can you?" It got really annoying after two years.
I personally would like to be able to use all the slang. For example, "gonna," "wanna," etc. Although I do believe it sounds less professional and I am a stickler about correct grammar, I think it would be a nice change in writing rather than sticking to the traditional ways.
So I know that this doesn't really fit the question, but I just hate a lot of spoken english. What totally drives me up the wall is when someone says "I'm going like 'what?'" What happened to the words thinking, feeling,or said? How did we get so lazy?
I love the idea of making contractions out of different words than the conventional list. (I just had to say that.)
As far as my own rule, I think I would want the ellipsis to be more versatile. I've found myself using it far too often in ways against the "rules" in online blogs and would love to be lazy and keep using it rather than consciously try to avoid those three little dots.
I agree with KJ. I too am an avid mis-user of the elipse and feel that in some areas, such as informal emails, the use of such a tool has alread changed. Can you imagine the mayham that could be created if we could do that in our essays?
Also I think we should do away with the "apostrophe 's.'" We have plenty of other occasions in the English language to use the context of a sentence to determine word meaning.
I think I would make portmanteaus more acceptable in formal language. Some portmanteaus have become mainstream - spork is a good example - but I would like to see more of them. It really is amazing what you can come up with when you combine two words. I think combining words makes language more fun and more descriptive at the same time, which I think is always a plus.
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