Bad Faery

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Warning: long meandering post!

Urgh! So my next OU course, Exploring the English Language, starts in a month and I’m trying to brush up on my slipshod grammar. It’s proving a somewhat painful process. I wish that I had been taught all this at school but unfortunately I grew up in a period when teaching grammar was out of vogue.

It’s not that I think that I have an especially poor grasp of grammar, like most native speakers, I have an intuitive sense of what sounds right. It’s more that I feel that I lack the terminology to describe language appropriately and I’m sure that having a better grasp of it will help me in my upcoming TMAs which, after all, are all about understanding language.

From asking around I’ve learned that I’m not alone in feeling at a disadvantage when it comes to basic grammar. A lot of my contemporaries feel the same way, and for many people it really does seem to depend on what school you happened to go to as to whether grammar was taught or not. It’s amazing how many people I meet in the Arts, most of them university educated, some to MA level, who feel this lack of confidence in something as elementary as grammar. They say that they feel they get their grammar correct by instinct and not because they necessarily understand why it’s correct. It allows that little margin for error to creep in.

Sometimes that margin for error can become very pronounced. I can remember coming across a publicity flyer for a prominent opera company a few years ago and in every instance of its use, the contracted form of it’s was used in place of the correct possessive its. Once, you could dismiss as an innocent typo but multiple times? Then it’s obvious that the writer of the text didn’t realise their mistake.

Granted the it’s/its issue is one that a lot of people get wrong but when you are marketing something to as discerning an audience as your average opera-goer it’s hardly an acceptable standard of English to be aiming for. After all, a publicity flyer is usually the first point of contact for most potential audience members and as they say, first impressions count. And if a company can’t manage to produce a short piece of text about their show without it being riddled with mistakes, it would make you wonder how they are going to fare with a full scale opera production.

More recently I came across a press release which had evidently been written by someone who wasn’t quite sure where to put their commas and had over compensated by putting them almost everywhere! Sentences were needlessly chopped into little pieces making the whole thing very unpleasant to read. When you consider that your average features editor at a national paper receives hundreds of press releases a week, I can imagine something as shoddily written as that press release being quickly ignored.

Which all makes me wonder about the mistakes I might be making unwittingly? Which accounts in part for why I am undertaking my OU studies. And not, dear Lynn, to become a teacher. I’m not the sort to be taken seriously as an authority figure ;)

Comments:

Wishing you a very Happy New Year BF and GF. May you succeed in all your new years endeavors in academia and in art. Enjoy all those new words and books and do hope we see you here more as well. Happy to have found you here.
Have a good happy healthy new year.
Lynn

Posted by Lynn on 12/31 at 05:47 PM

Thank you so much for the lovely words. Have a great new year!

Posted by Bad Faery on 12/31 at 07:55 PM

Well if you come across any gems of grammatical wisdom please feel free to share, epsecially concerning the use of commas!!  Good, luck, with, your, studies!  :-)

Posted by Elizabeth on 01/02 at 10:24 PM

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