> Good spellings and knowledge of grammar rules does not indicate a good writer, and there are tools (spelling/grammar check) and (editorial) processes to take care of that.
Good grammar doesn't indicate a good writer, but bad grammar does indicate a bad one[1]. (Good grammar meaning, in this case, an ear for language. Good writers avoid grammatical errors because grammatical errors sound wrong, like an off-pitch note to a musician[2]. Explicit knowledge of grammar isn't particularly important. For example, good writers may not know what the subjunctive mood is, but they know how and when to use it. Conversely, a writer who has the knowledge but lacks the ear is in for a rough ride.)
1. Unless it's for effect, obviously, which can range from Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" to Zora Neal Hurston.
2. Which, of course, may also be done for effect. Which is why listing out rules (about writing, about music, etc.) is so fruitless. Which is true even if the rule is "Don't start three sentences in a row with the word 'which.'"
I agree with your premise but your post is a case in point. There are as many words inside parenthesis as outside making it incredibly confusing to read. Even worse, you have a reference '[2]' nested inside parenthesis.
Using parenthesis like this indicates that it should be either a footnote or worded differently. Nesting it just makes my brain shut off.
I fall victim to using parenthesis in this manor myself quite often, its a hard habit to get out of.
Indeed. But in this manor is the median the messuage?
(Despite what my spell check says, there are no misspellings there. A dictionary might be useful though ;-) Apologies at picking on typos and showing off knowledge of obscure words.)
"Good grammar doesn't indicate a good writer, but bad grammar does indicate a bad one"
that is not true at all - not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
Grammar is just a technicality to be overcome. Creative writing (as opposed to technical writing), is something that is not measured by the knowledge of the language, but by the knowledge of humanity, science, culture and anything that intersects in between. An eye for details also helps. But not grammar.
>that is not true at all - not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
Having something to say and saying it effectively are not synonymous. There are many people with worthy ideas who fail to express themselves competently.
I have yet to encounter a good writer who has poor grammar. Good writers care about grammar, for the same reason good programmers care about style: it's a mark of careful and deliberate artifice.
A good programmer doesn't simply want their programs to compile and run without error; they want it to be readable, maintainable, and elegant. They want the quality of their code to speak for itself. Similarly, a good writer seeks not only to clearly express their ideas, but to do so in a way that evokes thought and emotion on the part of the reader. To do so it is necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve technical mastery of the language in which you write.
Good carpenters don't make sloppy cuts, good chefs don't burn the rice, and good painters don't make stray strokes. These are the easy things to get right: the bare essentials for being competent at your task. A person cooking a meal for their family may use too much salt, a person playing guitar around a campfire may play the wrong chord, and someone responding to a comment on the Internet may talk lik dis,, or use unnessary punctuaton!
The difference between the craftsman and the lay person is that the craftsman takes as writ the technical mastery of their skills, and focuses on composition. The lay person is concerned only with the gist.
Having something good, creative or worthwhile to say and saying it well are two different things. I understand the phrse "good writer" to mean the latter.
Too often have I come across excellent insights buried like diamonds in a dungheap in ugly, tortuous prose. This runs the great risk of these insights being lost or misinterpreted.
The converse is possible too, of course; utter nonsense put beautifully.
To support that, ghostwriters and copywriters are two examples of writers that take the gist of another person's thoughts and express them well in writing. They are creative writers, but they don't necessarily have to have anything to say to do their job.
not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
In those cases the person in question (and his potential readers) would be much better served if he worked with a skilled ghost writer or co-author, rather than trying to write something on his own. Much in the way a scientist or mathematician, who only knows a little programming, is often better served working together with a skilled programmer rather trying translate their domain knowledge to code on their own.
Actually, I am not at all convinced by Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. I think here the structuralists and post-structuralists have an important edge (post-structuralism is built on structuralism and the basic thesis is that meaning arises from the system of rules, not the individual rules). IMO Chomsky tries to move away from the basic Structuralist thesis (by Sapir and others) and move towards something else.
So for example when you look across language families you find that most of the constraints follow in an almost mathematical way from other choices. For example, once you have a language which is fairly isolated (as opposed to synthetic or polysynthetic) and doesn't use a lot of inflections, then word order becomes the only reasonable way to express relationships between words. If on the other hand, you have a synthetic language with lots of inflections, you might not need to worry about word order at all (Old English poetry for example).
The options available for polysynthetic languages are different still.
But these aren't the only constraints. Consider for example the way Austronesian languages often essentially "unbound" words by redoubling them, so in Indonesian duduk means to sit, but duduk-duduk means to sit about casually, or informally, or repeatedly (unbounding can occur with regard to time, social structures, etc). Similarly kuru means "horse" and kuru-kuru can either mean "horses" (but only if no numbers are specified) or horse-like (i.e. a sawhorse). Similarly ayam means chicken, and ayam-ayam can either mean chickens or it can mean a kind of fish that people decided is somehow chicken-like ("sea-ckicken?")... On the other hand we would never say dua kuru-kuru to mean "two horses" since that would probably mean "two sawhorses" instead. Instead it is "dua kuru" (translating word-for-word without converting structures, this means "two horse," note the singular).
Where structuralism breaks down (and where post-structuralism is important) is an area which was noted even by Sapir, one of the founders of structuralism, and this is the dynamic quality of grammar over time. Sapir's example from 1912 was the slow, gradual death of "whom" as an objective/dative form of "who." He points out that nobody really would say in every day speech "whom did you see today?" but instead "who did you see today?" and that no cadre of English teachers could reverse that trend. The idea that grammar is not static but changing over time, and hence is fluid is something which really lead to the development of post-structuralism as a general thesis in language study.
I don't think you can get from brain structures directly to grammar for the same reason you can't just treat chemistry as applied quantum physics. The added complexity, esp. combined with neuroplasticity, provides infinite possibilities regarding language structures, provided that we have some way of referencing things (breaking this down strictly into words, phrases, and sentences doesn't work for reasons Sapir points out in his surveys of Native American languages-- all languages may somehow break things down into words and sentences, but there is no natural mapping of objects to words or multiple words to phrases or sentences).
Back to non-standard dialects.... I wonder for example, how the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) phrases in Jason Mraz's song "I'm Yours" get misunderstood. Granted he shifts back and forth between AAVE and Contemporary Standard American English (CSAE) seemingly fluidly. But phrases like "before the cool done run out" have relatively specific meanings and carry a lot more meaning in AAVE while they sound just wrong in CSAE.
Comments
> Good spellings and knowledge of grammar rules does not indicate a good writer, and there are tools (spelling/grammar check) and (editorial) processes to take care of that.
Good grammar doesn't indicate a good writer, but bad grammar does indicate a bad one[1]. (Good grammar meaning, in this case, an ear for language. Good writers avoid grammatical errors because grammatical errors sound wrong, like an off-pitch note to a musician[2]. Explicit knowledge of grammar isn't particularly important. For example, good writers may not know what the subjunctive mood is, but they know how and when to use it. Conversely, a writer who has the knowledge but lacks the ear is in for a rough ride.)
1. Unless it's for effect, obviously, which can range from Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" to Zora Neal Hurston.
2. Which, of course, may also be done for effect. Which is why listing out rules (about writing, about music, etc.) is so fruitless. Which is true even if the rule is "Don't start three sentences in a row with the word 'which.'"
I agree with your premise but your post is a case in point. There are as many words inside parenthesis as outside making it incredibly confusing to read. Even worse, you have a reference '[2]' nested inside parenthesis.
Using parenthesis like this indicates that it should be either a footnote or worded differently. Nesting it just makes my brain shut off.
I fall victim to using parenthesis in this manor myself quite often, its a hard habit to get out of.
Indeed. But in this manor is the median the messuage?
(Despite what my spell check says, there are no misspellings there. A dictionary might be useful though ;-) Apologies at picking on typos and showing off knowledge of obscure words.)
the cute thing is, it even makes sense
"Good grammar doesn't indicate a good writer, but bad grammar does indicate a bad one"
that is not true at all - not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
Grammar is just a technicality to be overcome. Creative writing (as opposed to technical writing), is something that is not measured by the knowledge of the language, but by the knowledge of humanity, science, culture and anything that intersects in between. An eye for details also helps. But not grammar.
>that is not true at all - not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
Having something to say and saying it effectively are not synonymous. There are many people with worthy ideas who fail to express themselves competently.
I have yet to encounter a good writer who has poor grammar. Good writers care about grammar, for the same reason good programmers care about style: it's a mark of careful and deliberate artifice.
A good programmer doesn't simply want their programs to compile and run without error; they want it to be readable, maintainable, and elegant. They want the quality of their code to speak for itself. Similarly, a good writer seeks not only to clearly express their ideas, but to do so in a way that evokes thought and emotion on the part of the reader. To do so it is necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve technical mastery of the language in which you write.
Good carpenters don't make sloppy cuts, good chefs don't burn the rice, and good painters don't make stray strokes. These are the easy things to get right: the bare essentials for being competent at your task. A person cooking a meal for their family may use too much salt, a person playing guitar around a campfire may play the wrong chord, and someone responding to a comment on the Internet may talk lik dis,, or use unnessary punctuaton!
The difference between the craftsman and the lay person is that the craftsman takes as writ the technical mastery of their skills, and focuses on composition. The lay person is concerned only with the gist.
Having something good, creative or worthwhile to say and saying it well are two different things. I understand the phrse "good writer" to mean the latter. Too often have I come across excellent insights buried like diamonds in a dungheap in ugly, tortuous prose. This runs the great risk of these insights being lost or misinterpreted. The converse is possible too, of course; utter nonsense put beautifully.
To support that, ghostwriters and copywriters are two examples of writers that take the gist of another person's thoughts and express them well in writing. They are creative writers, but they don't necessarily have to have anything to say to do their job.
not knowing grammar well doesn't mean the writer has nothing good or creative, or worthwhile to say (or write about).
In those cases the person in question (and his potential readers) would be much better served if he worked with a skilled ghost writer or co-author, rather than trying to write something on his own. Much in the way a scientist or mathematician, who only knows a little programming, is often better served working together with a skilled programmer rather trying translate their domain knowledge to code on their own.
i see that as the way of the future. Aka, collaboration. Subjects these days are way to difficult to really master anyhting multi-disiplinary.
There are times when good writers use "bad grammar," though. More often though it's "good grammar in a non-standard dialect."
> More often though it's "good grammar in a non-standard dialect."
Exactly! I wrote a blog post about this: http://kuznetsverve.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/what-is-grammat...
Actually, I am not at all convinced by Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. I think here the structuralists and post-structuralists have an important edge (post-structuralism is built on structuralism and the basic thesis is that meaning arises from the system of rules, not the individual rules). IMO Chomsky tries to move away from the basic Structuralist thesis (by Sapir and others) and move towards something else.
So for example when you look across language families you find that most of the constraints follow in an almost mathematical way from other choices. For example, once you have a language which is fairly isolated (as opposed to synthetic or polysynthetic) and doesn't use a lot of inflections, then word order becomes the only reasonable way to express relationships between words. If on the other hand, you have a synthetic language with lots of inflections, you might not need to worry about word order at all (Old English poetry for example).
The options available for polysynthetic languages are different still.
But these aren't the only constraints. Consider for example the way Austronesian languages often essentially "unbound" words by redoubling them, so in Indonesian duduk means to sit, but duduk-duduk means to sit about casually, or informally, or repeatedly (unbounding can occur with regard to time, social structures, etc). Similarly kuru means "horse" and kuru-kuru can either mean "horses" (but only if no numbers are specified) or horse-like (i.e. a sawhorse). Similarly ayam means chicken, and ayam-ayam can either mean chickens or it can mean a kind of fish that people decided is somehow chicken-like ("sea-ckicken?")... On the other hand we would never say dua kuru-kuru to mean "two horses" since that would probably mean "two sawhorses" instead. Instead it is "dua kuru" (translating word-for-word without converting structures, this means "two horse," note the singular).
Where structuralism breaks down (and where post-structuralism is important) is an area which was noted even by Sapir, one of the founders of structuralism, and this is the dynamic quality of grammar over time. Sapir's example from 1912 was the slow, gradual death of "whom" as an objective/dative form of "who." He points out that nobody really would say in every day speech "whom did you see today?" but instead "who did you see today?" and that no cadre of English teachers could reverse that trend. The idea that grammar is not static but changing over time, and hence is fluid is something which really lead to the development of post-structuralism as a general thesis in language study.
I don't think you can get from brain structures directly to grammar for the same reason you can't just treat chemistry as applied quantum physics. The added complexity, esp. combined with neuroplasticity, provides infinite possibilities regarding language structures, provided that we have some way of referencing things (breaking this down strictly into words, phrases, and sentences doesn't work for reasons Sapir points out in his surveys of Native American languages-- all languages may somehow break things down into words and sentences, but there is no natural mapping of objects to words or multiple words to phrases or sentences).
Back to non-standard dialects.... I wonder for example, how the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) phrases in Jason Mraz's song "I'm Yours" get misunderstood. Granted he shifts back and forth between AAVE and Contemporary Standard American English (CSAE) seemingly fluidly. But phrases like "before the cool done run out" have relatively specific meanings and carry a lot more meaning in AAVE while they sound just wrong in CSAE.
I hadn't heard of Rimbaud's letter until now. It's damn crafty! Thanks. :)