Here is an oddity: the field of composition was founded on the value of standard written English, and yet, in certain corners of the field, the least sexy thing you can do is to talk about the value of standard written English. You can praise the vernacular (which I certainly do); you can defend the dialects; you can pillory the standard with big words like “hegemony.” Just don’t say anything in support of it . . . for that matter, don’t talk about the standard, full stop.
Now, this is a curious position, and, as I said, it is only found in certain corners of the field; for all I know, it may be a minority position. However, I feel it’s a position worth addressing because this semester I’ve read dozens of essays that have been downright mean toward the English standard. Like an old friend, I feel I must stand up for my beleaguered buddy.
Don’t mistake my defense for an encomium. No writer is in love with standards–once he’s mastered them, that is. If I were King of the Colleges, I’d do away with term papers, book reports, and anything else that keeps students from writing substantive stuff. And I certainly don’t think that mastery of the standard should be a gatekeeping requirement; good writing simply is not a necessary skill for many of our students. Lastly, I don’t believe that standard written English is the end-all and be-all of the English language, the ultimate apex in linguistic evolution. However, the standard has its place, and an important place at that. We needn’t be in love with it to appreciate its benefit and defend it against the “frontal assaults” launched by Leftist scholars who, oh yes indeed, use words like “assault” when describing their strategies for dealing with standard written English.
So what is standard written English, aka “standard edited English”? Well, first of all, this standard form of English is not standard at all. It is its own code, its own dialect; it has its own conventions, its own style, its own patterns of syntactic frequency, all developed in relation to the dialect’s function: a vehicle for scholarship and information sharing among English-speaking intellectuals. It developed thanks in part to the Transactions of the Royal Society in the 17th century, the language and form of which, while in some ways different from the language and forms we use today, will be familiar to anyone who reads academic texts in the 21st century. The Transactions were a venue for the experimental and natural sciences, and so written English, born out of a scientific milieu, possesses ideals including clarity, precise description, linear order, cohesive structures founded on Aristotelian logic, a perfection of grammar not found in speech, and a concern for audience understanding.
Much has been written about standard English’s relation to the upper middle class, the petit bourgeois, the gentry, the evil elite of the English speaking world, and about the inherent dominance of this form of English in writing. It’s all true, of course; but it’s not as bad as it sounds. The patterns of written English developed from the dialect of the upper classes because only the upper classes were educated enough to read and write. When someone from a lower class wanted to educate himself, to learn to read and write, he had to learn this dialect because only it had a written form and a textual history . . . and, really, the “standard” was not so very different from his own spoken dialect. Learning the standard was not seen as an obstacle; if anything, it was a privilege, a mark of rising status. Did this mean the lower classes, when learning the written standard, ceased to speak their own dialects or to write in those dialects for informal purposes? Perhaps in some cases, but certainly not in all; otherwise, there would be no dialects in England save the received pronunciation.
Fast forward half a millennium, and the written standard has indeed changed from the language of Shakespeare, Locke, and the Royal Society, but the change has been slow and, to some extent, controlled because one of the whole points of a written standard is its stability across time and space. I may have a difficult time understanding a Cockney-speaking lad in Britain, but if the Cockney has learned the written standard, all he has to do is write what he wants to say and I can understand him perfectly.
Anti-standard folk sometimes make the point that English speakers of only two hundred years ago may be nearly incomprehensible to us moderns; ironically, the point is a great argument in favor of the written standard. The speech of our ancestors may be incomprehensible to us today, but their writing surely is not. We can read it perfectly well.
Edited Standard English is today a written dialect that few of us speak outside of formal environments. (Being from Southern California, I often pepper my speech with “like” and “totally”, but these words are not part of the written dialect I am using for this blog.) It is a bit of a stodgy dialect, but it serves its purpose of allowing people with diverse dialects and diverse varieties of English (not to mention people who have learned English only via a textbook) to communicate with one another. And because it transcends all the local varieties of English, and because it resists surface-level change while simultaneously growing its lexemic inventory, it is a great resource for communication, a veritable word-horde that no single local variety could provide. It is a grapholect, “a trans-dialectical language formed by a deep commitment to writing.” Scott Lyons defines grapholects as “official written languages and the products of centuries of knowledge accumulation. Although they may have started out as some group’s dialect, their lexicons are enormously larger than any dialect could possibly be. The grapholect called Standard English, for example, has some two million words accessible to it, while dialects typically (and necessarily) have a few thousand.” It is beside the point that the standard has been embroiled in issues of “proper linguistic etiquette” separating the rising middle class from the marginalized lower classes. The standard had nothing to do with it; maintaining class divisions is not its inherent purpose. It’s a curious thing to attack the standard for the sins of its users.
Some people ask, “Should we teach the standard?” God Almighty! A professor of writing who seriously ponders that question would do well to find different employment and spare us his casuistic appeals to words like “liberatory.” As Walter Ong puts it, “it is bad pedagogy to insist that because there is nothing ‘wrong’ with other dialects, it makes no difference whether or not speakers of another dialect learn the grapholect, which has resources of a totally different order of magnitude.” Whether we like it or not, this grapholect is and has been the official written code of the English-speaking world for half a millennium. It is irresponsible to eschew written English or to trivialize the production of texts that will give students practice with this powerful tool. In the words of the linguist Michael Halliday, “it would be a strange interpretation of social accountability to say that because you do not like these [standard] discourses you do not teach them to children and to migrants.” The reason behind teaching the grapholect is the same reason we learn “standards” in our foreign language classes: if we learn only the spoken dialect of a specific subgroup in Mexico or wherever, we will not be in the best position to read Cervantes or, for that matter, Spanish newspapers.
On the other hand, we should also remind ourselves that fluency in the grapholect (any grapholect) is no guarantee of success. We should teach it, but neither should we grant it more power than it actually wields.
Discussion
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