[Critique Me] Hey, I sort of got Published!
Well, not really. It was just an essay contest. But the results did arrive in the form of a relatively shiny book full of essays.
English Is Crazy -- Or Is It?
Everyone knows that English is a crazy language (where writers write but grocers never groce), and that its spelling system is so irrational that 'fish' could be spelled 'ghoti' (as George Bernard Shaw showed). Schools used to teach studnts to speak properly, but today a typical class of high school students cannot construct a grammatical sentence. Right?
A high-school-level course in linguistics -- the study of language -- would prove that the above statements are completely false! I believe that high school students should be required or strongly encouraged to study linguistics, which is almost never offered in high schools today.
Linguistics knowledge makes it much easier to learn foreign languages. My father's French teacher complained to his English-teaching colleagues that he had to teach the students English grammar before he could teach them French grammar. He was mistaken: in describing points such as the difference between indicative and subjunctive mood, he was not teaching English grammar but universal grammar, or linguistics. The fact that the subjunctive mood indicates desires, possibilities, and hypotheticals (among other things) is not unique to French; nor is it unique to English. It is a fact about language that transcends individual tongues, and it finds its natural home in a linguistics course, instead of being redundantly and inefficiently taught in foreign language classes.
Current high-school curricula are very compartmentalized and do not give adequate practice at bringing knowledge from one field into play in another field. How often does an English student mention an idea from a history class, let alone a science class? Linguistics is an inherently interdisciplinary field, which draws on acoustics, formal logic, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Interdisciplinary thinking is an essential tool for success in college and in the workplace, and it is taught far too rarely in high schools. A linguistics class would be an ideal place to practice integrating knowledge from disparate fields.
How many teenagers have been completely turned off writing by teachers who hold them to archaic, Latin-derived rules such as "Don't split infinitives" and "Never end a sentence with a preposition?" These teachers, espousing the prescriptivist viewpoint, are attempting to pound English's square peg into Latin's round hole. Instead of improving English's expressive ability, prescriptivists force writers into unnatural syntactic contortions that limit expression. Linguists take the opposite, descriptivist view: whatever native speakers produce defines what is "correct" in that language. Prescriptivism is propagated by students' fear of sounding uneducated, and by teachers' fear of letting the younger generation off easy. Linguistics classes would easily counteract this destructive dynamic. Teaching descriptivism can even counteract racism, by revealing that Ebonics and similar dialects are fully fledged, logical and regular dialects of English, rather than "uneducated" or even "subhuman."
Linguistics is one of the most ignored fields in modern academia. It will never cure cancer or reduce pollution, but it can teach us the fascinating intricacies and inner workings of a medium in which we swim every day but which we hardly ever notice.
I feel a tad hypocritical for following a whole lot of prescriptivist rules in that essay :P
It's not prototypical publishment, and I wish my essay could have been three times longer, but it's still a nice thing. Pending comment on the other essays. (I was distinctly unimpressed with last year's top winners, which were given on the contest website.)
English Is Crazy -- Or Is It?
Everyone knows that English is a crazy language (where writers write but grocers never groce), and that its spelling system is so irrational that 'fish' could be spelled 'ghoti' (as George Bernard Shaw showed). Schools used to teach studnts to speak properly, but today a typical class of high school students cannot construct a grammatical sentence. Right?
A high-school-level course in linguistics -- the study of language -- would prove that the above statements are completely false! I believe that high school students should be required or strongly encouraged to study linguistics, which is almost never offered in high schools today.
Linguistics knowledge makes it much easier to learn foreign languages. My father's French teacher complained to his English-teaching colleagues that he had to teach the students English grammar before he could teach them French grammar. He was mistaken: in describing points such as the difference between indicative and subjunctive mood, he was not teaching English grammar but universal grammar, or linguistics. The fact that the subjunctive mood indicates desires, possibilities, and hypotheticals (among other things) is not unique to French; nor is it unique to English. It is a fact about language that transcends individual tongues, and it finds its natural home in a linguistics course, instead of being redundantly and inefficiently taught in foreign language classes.
Current high-school curricula are very compartmentalized and do not give adequate practice at bringing knowledge from one field into play in another field. How often does an English student mention an idea from a history class, let alone a science class? Linguistics is an inherently interdisciplinary field, which draws on acoustics, formal logic, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Interdisciplinary thinking is an essential tool for success in college and in the workplace, and it is taught far too rarely in high schools. A linguistics class would be an ideal place to practice integrating knowledge from disparate fields.
How many teenagers have been completely turned off writing by teachers who hold them to archaic, Latin-derived rules such as "Don't split infinitives" and "Never end a sentence with a preposition?" These teachers, espousing the prescriptivist viewpoint, are attempting to pound English's square peg into Latin's round hole. Instead of improving English's expressive ability, prescriptivists force writers into unnatural syntactic contortions that limit expression. Linguists take the opposite, descriptivist view: whatever native speakers produce defines what is "correct" in that language. Prescriptivism is propagated by students' fear of sounding uneducated, and by teachers' fear of letting the younger generation off easy. Linguistics classes would easily counteract this destructive dynamic. Teaching descriptivism can even counteract racism, by revealing that Ebonics and similar dialects are fully fledged, logical and regular dialects of English, rather than "uneducated" or even "subhuman."
Linguistics is one of the most ignored fields in modern academia. It will never cure cancer or reduce pollution, but it can teach us the fascinating intricacies and inner workings of a medium in which we swim every day but which we hardly ever notice.
I feel a tad hypocritical for following a whole lot of prescriptivist rules in that essay :P
It's not prototypical publishment, and I wish my essay could have been three times longer, but it's still a nice thing. Pending comment on the other essays. (I was distinctly unimpressed with last year's top winners, which were given on the contest website.)