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Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
First, thanks so much to all of you who read/took/RT’d/linked to/commented on the Dave Wallace grammar challenge. I wanted to pay a small, quiet tribute to someone who did a great lot for me, and I am floored by the response. I’m beginning to feel like a broken record in the comments sections, though, as they are increasingly hard to navigate, and many readers have taken similar but separate umbrage with the idea of teaching or testing Standard Written English in the first place. Wallace addresses this in the essay I linked to in the answers post, but as the comments keep rolling in, I want to summarize some of what he taught me about this issue.
So. The quiz was intended to help writing workshop students spot errors w/r/t the current conventions of Standard Written English (SWE). The point is NOT to teach students to lord little rules over their friends; the point is to be more careful writers. And why does knowing the current conventions of SWE help us become careful writers?
Probably the most important reason is to avoid ambiguity. We want to make our meaning clear. Putting modifiers far from what they modify creates extra work for the reader, so we learn to spot this trouble area. Professor Wallace distinguished between good, rich ambiguity (even in grammar–cf the brilliantly dangling modifiers of Barry Hannah) and bad, distracting ambiguity, where we cause our reader to wonder whether we’ve made a calculated nonstandard choice (which is fine as long as our readers can tell) or merely don’t know the current accepted standards are in usage in grammar. He wanted us to avoid the latter kind of ambiguity. READ MORE >
From now till December 15, sign up to play Secret Santa at HTMLGiant. It’s easy! On the sign-deadline, you will find out your recipient and her or his address, and by Christmas (it’s December 25, this year, I think), send them a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag. And you get one too! Sounds like it was a great success last year, and it’s sure to be this year, too.
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More details can be found on the post from last year, here. It’s really all pretty simple. Spend $10-$20. SIGN UP HERE TO PLAY! ****UPDATE: IMPORTANT NOTE: WHEN YOU SIGN UP, YOU WON”T AUTOMATICALLY BE ASKED FOR YOUR MAILING ADDRESS, WHICH ADDRESS IS ESSENTIAL IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE A GIFT. AFTER SIGNING UP, CLICK ON THE “YOU” TAB, THEN CLICK ON “UPDATE YOUR PROFILE,” AND THEN ENTER AND SAVE YOUR ADDRESS.****
The answers to the other night’s grammar challenge appear haphazardly throughout that post’s comments section, but it seems like people are still taking it, so I thought I’d hide the answers here under the fold for ease of checking.
Here is the essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” that Wallace published in Harper’s in 2001. Those of you who give knowing the rules a bad name by correcting other people’s spoken and casual English really need to read this. So do those of you who think fiction writers and poets don’t need to know the rules. Both groups are lazy. It’s lazy to learn some rule in elementary school and continue to lord it over people while failing to pay attention to shifts in usage. And it’s lazy to distract readers unnecessarily because you don’t realize that your misplaced adverb causes ambiguity. Every writer would do well to invest in a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage. I took quite the browbeating from Wallace before I bought mine for putting “over all” (should be one word) in a story. And yes, the shakedown took place in Footnote 7 in his letter of critique.
But Wallace would recommend another, older essay–the one that inspired his own subtitle, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Read that here.
Answers to worksheet, once you’re ready, are below. READ MORE >
Seemed like people enjoyed talking about the finer points of grammar and usage a month or so back, so I thought I’d provide a little morsel from a nonfiction workshop I took in college taught by someone who, among other accomplishments, was the most obsessively precise user of English I have ever and will ever encounter. I have, or, well, had, David Foster Wallace to thank for my own peevishness about mistakes in what he called S.W.E., or Standard Written English. So what follows is the complete text of a worksheet from his class. Whoever can come up with the most correct corrections will win something (currently taking prize suggestions/donations). I’ll post the answers once it seems as if nobody is trying anymore. Don’t worry if someone else posts their answers first; they may not be right! Not as easy as it may first look. All sentences have one crucial error in punctuation, usage, or grammar. Okay go! ANSWERS HERE when you’re ready. And HERE is an explanation of why he took the trouble to teach us these conventions.
183D
25 February 2004
IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION
1. He and I hardly see one another.
2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.
3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.
4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.
5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.
6. From whence had his new faith come?
7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.
8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.
9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.
10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.
Some handy villagers in England have created a tiny lending library inside an old red phone box. It is fortunate, I think, that libraries caught on several centuries ago, for I bet if libraries were first invented today, nobody would think it was a very clever idea. A place where you can borrow good things for free, sponsored by the government? Hell, naw!
ISO SYLLABUS SUGGESTIONS: In past semesters, I’ve mostly taught conventional short stories to my conservative, non-English major Intro Lit students, thinking they’d be turned off by raw/experimental/genre-bending stuff. But I just taught “Cat N’ Mouse” by Steven Millhauser, and they loved it the most. Also, in another class, my students dug James Tate, though they were totally down on Lyn Hejinian. So I’ve changed my thinking, and I’m looking for suggestions of stories and poets to teach that/who are less conventional but more approachable for students who normally see reading as a chore. Whatcha got?
When Picasso tried his hand at poetry, Gertrude Stein was livid! She said something like, “Things belong to people, and writing belongs to me.” Do you share this proprietary feeling about writing, or anything else you do or like? What belongs to you and not your friends/family? If you say the Simpsons or Bob Dylan you’re an a-one moron.
Cronyism, the practice of promoting some people and excluding others purely on the basis on personal relationships, is bad and to be avoided. The word brings to mind corrupt politicians who award high-ranking posts or lucrative contracts to their old pals when they have no business or training to do the work.
But things work differently in the realm of publishing. When someone publishes a story or poem or even a book by his or her friend, colleague, student, or lover, there’s a good chance that it isn’t an instance of rank favoritism. Many times, the reason the two people are acquainted with the person in the first place has quite a lot to do with their writing.
People become friends through all sorts of avenues, but I would put it to you that most writer-friendships develop because of some overlap in the two people’s aesthetic values and writing styles. What are the chances, really, of meeting another writer at the gym or at some bar? Most people are not, after all, writer-people. So the chances are slim, compared to meeting one at a reading, in an MFA program, or through another writer. If you both picked that reading or that grad school to attend, you probably have something in common already. If you choose to become friends, that’s probably a sign of something even deeper in common, writer-wise. READ MORE >
From “Blind and Dumb Criticism” in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers:
Why do critics thus periodically claim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty; no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary; and no one more soldier-like than a third pleading for poetic ineffability….
The reality behind this seasonally professed lack of culture is the old obscurantist myth according to which ideas are obnoxious if they are not controlled by ‘common sense’ and ‘feeling’: Knowledge is Evil, they both grew on the same tree….
In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position.
The robbery charges against a 19-year-old were dropped because he had posted “Where are my pancakes?” as his Facebook status from his father’s computer at the time of the crime. One expert thinks the charges were dropped too hastily: “Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers,” he said. “They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.” So sinister!