What Happens When a Course Is Taught Entirely via YouTube?

I would prefer an alternative wording to #4. Take, for instance, the “anyone whom they have probable cause to believe has committed . . .” example. I wouldn’t say that the use of “whom” here is not a mistake because the rules for case assignment in English are arbitrary. Instead, I would say it isn’t a mistake because different varieties of English follow different rules for case assignment in embedded clauses. One dialect selects the nominative “who” because it is the subject of the finite clause (who . . . has committed any offense). Another dialect (at least in certain formal contexts) selects “whom” (probably because it appears in a “pre-nuclear” position before the subject of a relative clause (they have probable cause to believe has committed . . . ). It’s not that one variety follows an “arbitrary” rule and the other one does not. It is that the rules for case assignment differ in these two varieties.
 
The problem that I have with the wording in #4 is that it very easily leads one to believe that the prescriptivism vs. descriptivism debate can be understood as a permissive/not permissive dichotomy. A descriptivist would say that there is no reason to say that the rules for case assignment in one variety are inherently better or more grammatically than another. I think that is what you are getting at in your wording, but I’m not sure. 

So instead of #4, I would prefer something like, “An established variant of the standard language, although prescriptive grammarians consider it to be incorrect.” Then I would like something that says something like, “A non-standard variant, but acceptable in this context,” or something to that effect.

Okay, I take your point! But the software here doesn’t actually allow for filling out the form. Maybe you could assign numbers to your opinions on Tech, Opinion, and Arts?

The first sentence should score 0 (= capital crime, sentence to be carried out immediately).

Sorry, but “begs the question” for “raises the question” just gags me. Twenty years ago or so, people who hadn’t studied logic weren’t aware of the expression, or at least didn’t use it all the time. Now, it seems, every Tom, Dick, and Harriett with access to a keyboard is determined to use it and by God use it wrong. The sad thing is that it’s the old story of pretentiousness trying to impress, and the effect is like that of an eight-year-old experimenting with makeup.

It’s no better or worse than “go ballistic,” “quantum leap,” “uncertainty principle,” and that good old standby “relative,” all technical terms dragged onstage to lend a semblance of learning and generally used with near 180-degree inaccuracy.

I would add epicenter to your list of pretentious missuse of technical terms.

The choice I’m missing is something more like 2.4: “This sentence contains grammatical, vocab, or syntactical choices that disrupt my reading slightly. I wish the NYT employed more careful editors.” (Where’s John McIntyre when you need him?)

1,1,1,1,2,4,5,1,1
I obviously like #1 but would append the wording: not necessarily “egregious” but “significant”; not necessarily “blunders” but “problems.” And certainly not fired or even chastised. A quiet word should be sufficient. Kind of similar to what Carolyn Roosevelt is saying.

The use of “whom” here is absolutely grammatically correct as it functions as the object of the clause:  They have probably cause to believe (someone) has committed….  It is NOT arbitrary.  Most grammatical forms that are place/function dependent have absolute rules for application.  Although I agree it is a “1″, it is also a “2″.  More comments to come…

Crunchycon, just to clarify: Are you saying that “(someone)” is the object of the clause (if so, which clause?), and that therefore “whom” is correct? If that’s your reasoning, wouldn’t you assign that sentence a “5″? Or have I misunderstood you?

1 2 3 1 3 2 1 1

3, 3, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 3

I’m really not comfortable giving the 1s here, because I would like an option 6 that says something like, “This sentence contains poor grammatical, vocab, or syntactical choices that obscure the meaning.” For this reason only an editor should have taken note, not because the author has some sort of moral failing.

I would add that the “choices” in the sentences marked 3 are “poor” only to the extent that they do not match what I believe is the *register* of the NYT. Register may be arbitrary, but it has an effect on the real world. I think the safest course is to adapt to it consistently, much as you might automatically use your turn signal in the dead of night on an empty highway.

I give the following responses in my role as a disinterested reader:  3,3,2,3,4,4,3,5.  Having said that, I, as someone who works in a Writing Center, should point out that if I were working with a student who demonstrated most of these “errors” in his/her writing, I would recommend changes because elements within the academic readership tend to be hyper-vigilant about such things.  I would, in all likelihood, couch my explanation in terms of “audience expectation” rather than reference to rules.  

Wow… I’m astounded at the wide variation in reader assessments. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I write for a newspaper and am responsible for our style guide (along with another editor*). My scores (confining myself to the scoring system provided) are 2,5,1,1,3, 5,4,4.
*Everybody on staff has “editor” in his/her title.

Oh, absolutely. This is fodder for further posting. Stay tuned.

I’m saying that “whom”, i.e. “someone” is the object of the clause, “whom they have probable cause to believe has committed…”.  If you remove the clause and return it to complete sentence form, it becomes, “They have probable cause to believe (someone they’ve stopped or questioned)  has committed…”  The parenthetical, of course, is what becomes “whom” in the original sentence.  Since it is taken from the object position in the complete sentence from which the clause is formed, one should use “whom” instead of “who”, though in colloquial or informal speech, especially among students today, in general, “who” is used much more frequently than “whom” so it appears to be changing.

1 5 3 2 5 5 2 2

Though not really happy with the options:

1: I don’t like talking about language errors in terms of chastisement or firing. Errors of the kind one would definitely want to avoid may happen because someone still needed to learn some aspect of an intricate job (editors are not born fully formed), lacked information or something was wrong with the work process. I’m more interested in solutions than punishment. Clear thinking about language, usage and style isn’t exactly encouraged by an atmosphere of real or threatened moral indignation.

2: Either I think it’s wrong or I don’t. Whether it is the result of a laissez-faire attitude or not is an unrelated question. Some of the sentences give me the impression of general sloppiness, though they do not necessarily contain clear-cut errors. That’s what I used this score for.

3: It’s hard to judge the syntactical choices in an isolated sentence. But I used this for the dangling whatever in the third example. It’s something I wouldn’t care about. But other people might and strictly, it’s a error.

4: Whether textbook rules are arbitrary depends rather crucially on the textbook.

5: Someone will always find a problem, and I can often guess what it will be. We lack an option that just says: I think there is nothing wrong with this sentence.

Too bad you didn’t take the time to vet your characterizations before stuffing sentences into the Procrustean bed of the false choice between “right” and “wrong.”  To play your game the reader has to accept “This sentence manifests certain grammatical, vocab, and syntactical choices on the part of the author or editor that don’t follow textbook ‘rules’; but they are not mistakes, since these so-called rules are arbitrary.”

Here is your error in understanding: “…they are not mistakes, since these so-called rules are arbitrary.”  You seem to be saying “anything goes” or “the rules are infallible.”  Those are not the only two choices.

It isn’t true that “the rules” are arbitrary.  The 4/9 sentence is a rhetorically effective play on a “rule” about sentence fragments.   I see nordicexpat has made much the same point below.

The who/whom problem is adequately described below.  Hardly anyone among the non-linguist reading public can parse a sentence out of normal word order with embedded clauses/phrases.  If in doubt, use WHO and you’ll almost always sound like an informal but self-confident speaker of English.  The defensive over use of WHOM is what raises eyebrows among the cognescenti who cry “hypercorrection.”

Also under 5/2 you have a putative dangling modifier that cannot be sensibly misconstrued as a modifier of the noun clause that follows it as subject of the main clause.  Again it isn’t that dangling modifiers don’t exist or that the identification of a dangling modifier is “arbitrary”: it is rather the analysis of this sentence is not a good  example of a dangling modifier.

The sentence under 5/6 falls between a true dangling modifier and the participial modifier discussed above.  It’s not a “who cares?” sentence and the dangling modifier rule isn’t “arbitrary.”  It is, rather, an example of a sentence that can be  improved by getting the modifier closer to what it modifies, probably by shortening the sentence and/or breaking it up.  The point again is that the choice is NOT between right and wrong.

The second 5/6 sentence is idiomatic English, but complicating the writing of “it was  him” is an  educated reader’s certain knowledge that it will be read as “wrong” by otherwise intelligent and sensitive readers who, like Lucy Ferris, have so internalized a right (obeys a simplistic rule) and wrong (violates an inadequate rule) dichotomy that they cannot read an idiomatic sentence without having a knee-jerk right/wrong response.  The writer wanting to stay in Ferris’s  good grace might try “it was he” but run smack into an awkward sentence, which is not idiomatic English, but which “obeys” the rule, annoying educated, intelligent readers of another camp.  Your  choice, as a writer, is not linguistic or syntactic: it is POLITICAL.  A revision of the “He was the one person …” variety is the best politically “neutral” choice.

The sentence from 5/8 combines problems in the modification placement and pronoun case choice.  Some intelligent and sensitive readers will interpret the sentence as intended.  When a patient’s illness or condition is made WORSE by medical  intervention, it is called an “iatrogenic” condition.  This sentence is an iatrogenic syntactic muddle.

On 5/18 the choice of “relatability” violates my knowledge of English vocabulary, but I’m open to having the term described or explained with a new meaning.  Until then, I’d call it an error: not because it violates a rule, but because I don’t know the word (and because I expect to know most of the words I encounter, though I  could always learn something new).

On 5/13 the relative clause is either restrictive (no comma) if all the staff are urging as described or nonrestrictive (insert comma) if some are and some aren’t.  When the meaning of a sentence hangs on a comma, most of the time it should be  revised.

Through no fault of your own,  you are trapped inside a right/wrong dichotomy that does not adequately describe the language as we  know it.  Most of the rules began with an intuitively based observation that something is “wrong” or “awkward” about a particular sentence.  The folks who made up the rules were not insane, just lazy.  The distinctions they articulate/d are usually half-true:  introductory participial phrases have a bad habit of latching onto noun phrases that they cannot sensibly modify, but not all introductory participial phrases absolutely must modify  the first noun following the comma.   People who avoid all introductory participial phrases out of fear of error limit their syntactic development and see dangling modifiers in every sentence adverbial modifier that  passes in the night.

There is a cognitive trap in these “textbook rules” that I simply cannot understand the attraction of.  It appears that those who take the prescriptivist position believe the burden of proof is on whoever would challenge them, although that burden shifted long ago.  The hang up in recognizing that the burden of proof has shifted is in English departments where the handbooks are sold to unsuspecting students who are given to understand (incorrectly) that the handbooks are authoritative.  

Talking about grammatical rules is like talking about logic to someone who is committed to “intelligent design.”  It  doesn’t do any good, and it annoys the believer.

Forgive me if I misunderstand, but are you saying that I am making some sort of right/wrong judgment? Not my intention at all. I am looking for how people interested in language read these sentences. Please see the friendly amendment proposed (and accepted) in the first comment. For my own part, the choice of sentences and the survey are born out of a deep curiosity, not out of any sort of disguised judgment. My good graces are not at stake here.

Actually, yabba, I meant for #4 to be an acceptable form of your last option. I certainly take your point about textbooks, though I imagine citing any particular textbook here would provoke even more controversy. And the reason I included a reference to general laissez-faire in #2 was that there are those who blame individual writers or copy editors (often with a vengeance, as in choice #1) whereas other see these variations in usage as an example of language “drift.” In any case, I appreciate your taking the survey!

I can’t believe the lengths crunchycon is going to to try to justify the pretentious and clearly incorrect use of whom rather than who in the second sentence. I’ve become almost inured to the unfortunate misuse of “begs the question,” but relatability still irks me. And if someone asks me, “Is that you, Ludo?” I wouldn’t respond, “It is I,” so I guess I can’t really take much exception with “it was him” or “not him.” Instead, I would have written those sentences another way.

But, yeah, I think they’re firing offenses all.

I think it would be more accurate to assign 4 to all of them, with the caveat that 4 might mean something different in each case.

Gotcha! Thanks so much for contributing to the discussion.

2 3 4 4 4 3 4 3.

Thanks for the correction, hypatia. Interesting point!

But such is not my intention. I’m not certain why you presume that it is. The sentences that came across my horizon seemed to me ones to which some readers might take exception and others not. And indeed, such seems to be the case. Moreover, the questioning of my categories–which could range, really, in any way you like, from “this horrifies me” to “this is fine by me” or from “I would never ever make a choice like this” to “this is exactly the wording and structure I would choose,” and so on–is itself enlightening in terms of the way people think about knowledge, choice, and judgment when it comes to the ways in which English is deployed by journalists and editors. The viability of textbook rules may be the concern of others; it is not mine. More to follow in a blog post in June.

Well, in this area we have, to begin with, historically two sharply competing concepts of rules.

There are rules that have been posited by various authors of style guides based on their own intuition, and then there are rules which have been substantiated by research on the language as actually used by competent authors.

Since it is much easier to research large quantities of text nowadays than it was, for example, in HW Fowler’s day, it should not be surprising that some of the things Fowler considered to be (or wanted to be) rules have turned out not to be substantiated. Therefore there are some points still often propagated which are not just arbitrary but wrong, in the sense that they attempt to prohibit things that have been normal English for a long time.

Then there are things such as your next-to-last example Her charm comes in part from her relatability… Now, relatability strikes me as an odd word but what I would really object to is that I can’t see what meaning it adds to her charm.  Is that a rule? It’s a kind of thing I think an editor should definitely question, and it is possible to formulate that in a way that is not arbitrary. But the sentence is not ungrammatical and it’s not hard to guess what relatability means.

So we’ll never make any sense out of the issues here without describing what we mean by rules, because even after we weed out the wrong, the silly and the arbitrary, we will be left with different levels of description and different kinds of rules applying to each one. Some represent the boundaries of grammar or syntax. Some describe lexical and collocational/semantic choices, some are concerned with making texts coherent, readable and concise, and some have to do with the suitablity of the text for specific purposes, e.g. a scientific paper, a piece of advertising, a legal instrument, a voiceover or speech, or information for a readership of non-native speakers. It is possible to say reasonable and verifiable things about all of these.

Suzette Haden Elgin, the linguist and author of “The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense” series,  once advised that when you come across a statement that seems clearly untrue, you should stop, take a breath,  ASSUME THAT IT is TRUE, then ask yourself what it  could be TRUE OF.  We all need to remind ourselves from time to time that we are NOT mind readers.  I have to confess, I really don’t know what you INTEND.  Perhaps when you write about your experience with the survey, you can clarify.

Ben Yagoda’s post asserts — as nearly as I understand him — that the distinction between descriptivist and prescriptivist approaches to the study of language is one of REGISTER.  Like if I say, “Hey, y’all,” when I meet friends in the coffee shop and, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” when I hold forth at an academic conference.  In point of fact, a descriptivist could tell you quite a lot about both expressions without ever judging the acceptability (appropriateness) of either.  The prescriptivist would begin by saying that hay is for horses, and ‘y’all’ is a lower-class Southern marker that I would be well advised to avoid if I want to be taken seriously in the academic world.

But register is not the same thing as grammaticality.  Our tolerance of error/ungrammaticality does not correspond with formality/informality.  [See Martin Joos (1961): frozen, formal, consultative, casual, intimate.]

 Your descriptors correlate severity of response to an expression with attitude toward textbook rules.  To paraphrase you:  #1. Rules is rules.  You’re fired.  #2 Laissez-faire attitude? I’m annoyed.  #3 Poor choice, but who cares?  #4 You violated a rule, but they’re arbitrary anyway.  #5 I see no problem here. I know nothing of rules.

If those descriptors relate to register, then I don’t understand what you mean by register.  I don’t think you’re trying to explain the competence/performance distinction (except in the actor’s capacity for “relatability”).  [See Victoria Fromkin for predictable slips of the tongue: “I hissed my mystery lecture.”]  There IS such a thing as  ERROR.  Native speakers do run afoul of their language.  Sometimes they haven’t acquired the complexities that the syntax allows: noun clauses are added almost effortlessly; adverbial clauses extend ease of fluency, added complexity at either end of a sentence, less happily breaking up a sentence; relative clauses are the most difficult  and the last acquired.  Undergraduates could profit from clause extension exercises, but while they’ll practice their jump shot on the basket ball court for hours on end, syntax practice is regarded as “soul-destroying, mindless drill.”  More’s the pity.

You’re right.  I don’t know what you intend.  It seems to me that you’re confusing grammaticality (or tolerance of ungrammaticality) with register, but I could be wrong.