In which I rant about the study of English

So, I had my first classes today – a math class (Ordinary Differential Equations) and the first-year English Composition class. The math class was awesome. The English class wasn't.

Before I go on, let me make it clear that I'm not picking on this class or this professor in particular; I'll be naming specific things from this class, but I'm mainly doing that in order to talk about a general attitude about the study of English composition.

Item 1: What Is Good Writing?

First, the professor said that good prose was a lot less subjective than you think. That's a laughable assertion, for two reasons. First, it assumes that everyone in the class has the same thoughts about the subjectivity of good prose. And that's a diversity issue, because we're in a society that actively discourages people from expressing opinions outside what's expected of them. Among the students, there are probably a wide variety of different opinions on how subjective prose-quality really is, and the professor will never know those opinions, because ze didn't wait and ask people's opinions; ze pushed zir own ideas onto the students, probably generalizing from zir own feelings when ze was a student.

Of course, the bigger point is that, well, good prose really is incredibly subjective.

But first, I'm going to jump back to the smaller point. Because I think the smaller point really does show the attitude behind thinking that prose-quality is subjective. Because if you believe that everybody thinks in the same way, then you will believe that the same prose is good for everyone. And so it privileges one way of thinking over all the others. An attitude that privileges normal thinking is the opposite of neurodiversity; it's neurelitism.

Now, let me tell you how subjective prose is!

But first, let me tell you why it makes any sense to talk about that in the first place. Because I actually have two options here: Either...

1. I can decide that the phrase good writing doesn't actually mean anything.
2. I can decide that good writing does mean something, and then talk about what it means.

A lot of people say they're taking the second option, but effectively take the first option. They say things like I don't know how to explain what good writing is, but I know it when I see it. There's nothing wrong with a person using that definition for zemself, but it makes it impossible to have a detailed discussion about good writing. Sometimes that's all you can do, because sometimes your ideas just aren't well-formed enough to talk about, but here, it'd be nice to have a definition we can work with.

Guess what? I do have a definition we can work with!

Definition: Good writing is writing that is effective for some purpose. Writing that someone enjoys is good writing. Writing that influences someone's way of thinking is good writing. If I'm trying to sell pizza, writing that convinces people to buy pizza is good writing, and so on.

There, I defined it! Now, is this subjective?

Heck yes! If I write a super formal essay to give to a nine-year-old history student, my audience will probably find it boring, and hence I have failed as a writer. If I write an essay full of urban slang and show it to a college professor, it'll probably be outside the professor's reading-comfort-zone, so ze'll have trouble reading it, and hence I will have failed as a writer. And if I write an essay that's super formal when my audience is people who use urban slang all the time, it'll be less familiar to them, so the essay full of slang would have been a better essay, and it would be better in a way that is clearly visible.

The institution of Prestigious-University-English doesn't agree with me. It thinks that there's one specific style of English that's more important than the others. And that's bad, because privileging one style of English over the others also privileges one group of people over the others. If grammatically correct English is the dominant form of the language used, that marginalizes anyone who can't (or won't) read that style easily. It's sort of like going to a bilingual community and saying that English is correct and Spanish is incorrect. Sure, an English class is going to teach English and not Spanish, and that's not a problem, but it is a problem if it teaches that English is how you're supposed to write, and Spanish is unnecessary. And that's exactly what the college is doing by requiring an English Composition (i.e. Formal English Composition) class, while not requiring an Informal English Composition class.¹

Item 2: What are the rules, and why?

My English professor has an opinion about what the rules of English grammar are. I happen to disagree with zem on a variety of points.

One, there's no such thing as formal rules of English grammar. The meaning of language is defined by how people use it and how people understand it, not by how someone else says it's supposed to be used or understood. General guidelines help people understand each other, but when it comes to hard-and-fast rules, there just aren't any. Trying to assign rules is called prescriptivism, because you're prescribing what the rules should be, rather than watching how they develop on their own. Saying what the rules/guidelines seem to be, by observing how the language is actually used, is called descriptivism. I am a descriptivist, and I dislike prescriptivism (as you've probably figured out already!).

Take this blog, for instance. It's full of grammatical errors. Of course, they're not actually errors, since most of them are intentional. Some of them are just colloquialisms, like when I begin a sentence with So, ...; those ones are informal grammar, not incorrect grammar. How do I know it's correct? Simple: Because that's how people use it, and usage defines the rules!

Some of my other errors are there for bigger reasons. For instance, I bet most English professors wouldn't consider ze to be proper English. Or they think that you should always put punctuation inside a quotation mark. That's grammatically correct, but logically incorrect, because you're not quoting the punctuation and so logically it shouldn't be inside the quote marks. That's kind of obvious; the only reason to do it the other way is because the other way is conventional, which is really not a reason at all, since doing it this way is just as easy to understand.

That makes me a revisionist – I don't just observe the evolution of language and try to copy it, I actively participate in the evolution of language, by favoring words and grammatical structures that I think make the language work better. English is hardly a perfect language, and it has a lot of limitations, so anybody who isn't willing to change the language is limited in what ze can say. By adding words and phrases like ze, lateral thinking, lol, and so forth (just to give a few examples of words/phrases that have been invented and added to the language recently), we're not commiting errors that make bad writing – we're improving the language and thereby making our writting better than ever before!

My professor gave the usual line of You need to know the rules in order to break them... Great writers know the rules, and they sometimes break the rules, but they do it for a reason. Which is a statement that has some merit; after all, most of the rules of grammar are actually good ideas, and I think it's good to follow most of them (the thing I don't agree with is if someone tries to enforce the rules). On the other hand, I disagree with it from a factual perspective. A lot of historical great writers didn't respect, or even necessarily know, the rules. Here's a quote from Joan Didion, whom lots of English-department-type people consider a great writer:

This quote is wonderful! (And I also happen to think that Joan Didion's writing is great in general.) Because that's the way grammar really works – I mean, I'm an abstract mathematician, and I love formalizing things, but even I don't read text in a purely formal way. People read text in an intuitive way, and so the way to be really good at constructing sentences is to be really good at that intuition. And there are lots of different ways to learn that intuition. Some people can learn it by studying and understanding formal rules, but other people learn it by consciously immersing themself in the everyday use of the language. Nobody becomes fluent in a foreign language by studying the formal rules, so why should we expect a person to become excellent in zir own language by that means?

Item 3: Where do we go from here?

My professor gave a few examples of where you need to be able to write formal English: Applications for graduate school. Job applications. College classes (which give you grades, and grades basically only affect your applications to graduate schools and jobs).

You know what those have in common?

They're all zero-sum games. If you get the scholarship, someone else loses the scholarship. If you get the job, someone else doesn't get the job. And most jobs don't actually require formal writing. Some public-relations jobs require writing, but that writing should be a lot less formal. Jobs in the sciences require a lot of writing, but – although there's a lot of overlap – science writing is very different than the formal English that they teach in English departments. In short – as I've been saying for this whole post – writing should be done for a purpose. And when you teach writing, you should teach how to best use the tools of writing to achieve a purpose, rather than teaching how to best fit within the mold given to you by centuries of prescriptivists.²

This might be a little silly, but I'm going to use this blog as an example again. This blog is here to express ideas. I write this blog because I have lots of cool ideas and I want other people to benefit from them. Since I don't want to exclude anyone, I try to use the most neutral, accessible language that I can. Sometimes that's difficult, because my ideas are complicated, and so I sometimes need to use complicated language. And sometimes I need to use a specific term (like zero-sum game – it's important to use that phrase because there's no other concise term for the concept). And sometimes I just don't come up with the right way to express an idea, and I end up writing an awkward sentence instead. But the point is – when I fail, it's because I fail at my intended purpose. When I succeed, it's because I fulfilled my intended purpose.

Both of those things are related to the grammar and style that English classes teach, but the purpose must come first, and the style must come second.

A story idea

I had an idea that doesn't fit into any of the current stories I'm developing, and basically wants to be a novel in its own right, so I'm probably not going to be able to write it. So I'll write about it here instead. For fun, I'm going to describe it in the order I thought of it.

It started with the idea of destroying a person's mind. Zir body still functions, and ze can even still talk a little and give basic replies, but most of zir personality is gone, ze doesn't recognize people ze used to know, ze's completely cold and unfeeling, and ze barely bothers to fulfill zir basic needs. This kind of thing can happen in real life, but it's more common in fantasy settings, especially horror-fantasy; I was thinking about it because something similar happens in HP:MoR.

I've got a lot of respect for good horror stories. After all, what is writing if not an attempt to effectively convey an image or idea, and what is horror if not a very specific, very powerful image or idea? The destroying-someone's-mind thing fits right in; it's been done a lot of times, because it's effective. After all, the standard advice for horror fantasy is that the closer something is to reality, the more horrifying it is. Or, another way to look at it is that humans usually have a very strong fear of losing people they know, and they tend to be somewhat numb to actual death because there's lots of death in stories, so when you find a way to destroy a person that isn't actual killing, you get the full horror with much less resistance.

Back to the story. At this point, it was only a germ of an idea, and not a particularly strong one, because technically, doing that to a person is pretty much the same as killing them, and somebody dies isn't really the basis for a story. But I was fascinated by the idea. It's got an obvious question in it: What to do with the non-functional person? To me, the answer is easy: It's not a person anymore, just a shell. If it causes you inconvenience, go ahead and kill it.

But whenever something is easy, I try to make it hard. So I thought, what if a little bit of the original person is left? So little that you'd barely think they're the same person, so little that it'd practically be revolting to make the comparison, but just enough that if you knew who ze was, there can be moments where you almost think ze's back again. And then the moment passes and ze's the shell again. I can get a big variety of different reactions from the people who knew zem before the change: There can be one who wants to kill the shell because ze's an insult to the memory of the original person, there can be one who thinks ze can be brought back somehow (hah!¹), there can be one who tries to be nice to the shell anyway, but gets nothing in return because the shell has no sense of gratitude or empathy anymore (and because even if ze did, ze'd be able to tell that the kindness was sort of condescending). Ze sometimes acts weak and vulnerable and oblivious and naive, sometimes cynical and jaded and violent, and nobody can tell what the pattern is (I'd know how ze worked, but the other characters wouldn't). This kind of thing is great fodder for a story, because it's got lots of natural conflict built into it.

But there's still something in the corner of my mind, something I feel like known the whole time but can't put my finger on, that makes the idea yucky and incomplete.

And then it hits me.

Like any good fantasy story, what we're really talking about here is real life. Sure, in real life, there isn't a villain with magical powers who destroys your mind, but what we're really talking about is a person who develops major psychological problems over the course of zir life, for reasons we don't understand. And the story I've just described is a strong story in technical terms, but it's also a pretty condescending story. It's the Look at these poor people who have to LIVE with a DISABLED person, see what THEY have to DEAL WITH story. The story that leaves out what the disabled person zemself has to live with (one, a disability, and two, non-disabled people who aren't nice). What my germ-of-an-idea is missing is the perspective of the shell.

And yeah, the shell's perspective is really messed up. Half the time, ze can barely even tell what's going on around zem. Sometimes ze's aware that something's wrong; when somebody insults zem, ze feels like ze's supposed to be angry about it, and wonders why ze doesn't feel anything. It's like being half-asleep in a dream, and only being vaguely aware that things aren't the way they would be if you were awake. Other times, ze feels like ze knows what ze has to do, and has a strong impluse to hurt another person, and does it without wondering why or even feeling angry. And then there are those eerie moments of lucidity where ze knows exactly what's going on, and can talk about it, but doesn't know how long ze can stay that way.

But there's just enough of zem there to still be a person. Ze knows how ze feels about things, even though ze usually can't express it (especially because, before the change, ze didn't have the same feelings and didn't need to figure out how to express them). Ze can carry on a conversation, although ze tends to lose interest quickly, because most people try to talk to zem about things ze doesn't care about anymore. Ze can feed zemself, and dress zemself, most of the time.

The story goes like this:

The main characters are two siblings of the same gender, if any (I'm imagining them female, but it could be anything). The first is calm and calculating; the second is emotional and aggressive. The first likes comfort, the second likes fun and excitement. The first has a strong sense of tactics, the second has a strong sense of justice. If I don't mind the cliché, they're identical twins. They complement each other perfectly, and they have a really strong, loving bond.

Then something happens (industrial accident? battle with an evil wizard?), and Twin 2 isn't the same anymore. The first thing Twin 1 notices is that Twin 2's facial expression is wrong. Twin 2 is usually either grinning or furious, or both, but now, ze's expressionless and quiet. Twin 1 asks what's wrong, and Twin 2 ignores zem. Twin 1 pesters Twin 2 for answers until ze turns and says, Shut up. I don't like you.. And means it.

The rest of the story has two main conflicts.

The first, the more obvious one, is Twin 1's internal conflict. Twin 1 has to deal with the loss of zir sibling – probably the most important entity in the world, to zem – and worse yet, the presence of this... thing in zir sibling's body. But there's just enough of zir sibling left for zem to cling to the hope that it'll come back. So ze keeps going back to Twin 2, trying to talk to zem, trying to get zem back somehow. Twin 1 keeps telling zemself that Twin 2 is gone, and trying to convince zemself not to keep trying at it.

But the real story is Twin 2's story. The story of someone whose brain doesn't work the way everyone else thinks it's supposed to. The story of someone who has to figure out what to make of zir life, when ze doesn't feel like ze fits into any of the stories everyone else is telling about zem. When Twin 1 tries to tell zem what zir life was like before, ze only feels alienated.² Twin 2's memory is still there just enough that ze knows ze's supposed to be sticking with Twin 1, but the feeling of connection is basically gone, and the only reason they stay together is because neither knows where to go from there. Twin 1 clings to Twin 2 like ze's desperately holding on to the side of a sinking ship, while Twin 2 stays with Twin 1 like ze's hanging around a crime scene out of morbid fascination. Each of them needs to realize that it's not healthy, and cut off contact with the other.

And it's all made much, much more complicated by the fact that there's just enough of Twin 2's original personality remaining that you can't say ze's just a whole different person.

In a bunch of cool things like feminism, there's the concept of agency. An agent is a person who does something, so agency is when a person, or character, plays an active role in deciding what happens in zir life, rather than being a hapless victim. One part of disability-conscious writing is to make sure your disabled characters have agency – make sure they're not just victims to be pitied or monsters to be avoided.

And so Twin 2 is ultimately the one who moves on first. Ze finally manages to find a group of people who accept zem for what ze is, and moves away from Twin 1 for good.

– Eli