DFW violently annoys me once more
Over at Language Log - and I warn you, I can feel my anger levels rising already as I start to write about this - there is a link to a so-called "Grammar Test" devised by David Foster Wallace when he was running college workshops. It fills me with fury more than I can really express. It's a list of ten sentences, each containing one crucial
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Then I looked the chap up and confirmed my suspicion he was American (and incidentally discovered he was dead). For what it's worth, prescriptivism of this kind--well, not usually this petty, but then he was teaching seminars at Pomona and not remedial comp at Lamar or Touro--is far more important in the US, and with a thought to the national linguistic background and to the context of the university classes, one can see why. . . . apart from the role of continuous numerical assessment, ahem. (It's appalling how few teachers of college composition actually pay close attention to the essays, or assign enough of them for real practice. But then it's appalling that most US students don't already know how to write the requisite kinds of essays. And that would be a real rant.)
So for what it's worth, from my composite vantage-point:
1. I spotted "one another" but meh. If we're being that picky, "hardly" for "rarely" or "hardly ever" is worse. Do they merely glimpse body parts?
2. I would correct this sentence with a comma after "sentences" - strictly required and needed for clarity. The comma after "periods" is ungrammatical in US usage. t's is more standard than "t"s but usage guides vary.
3. I agree with him about "whether." But if he objects to the slapdash end of sentence position of adverbs as in #4, it should be "yet over."
4. I got "spent only," but see #3. He's inconsistent and really, it ain't important unless it's unclear in context. If the same student wrote both sentences, I would suggest he or she think about other ways to say things, such as "I spent a mere six weeks in Napa" or "I was only in Napa for six weeks." US English is much more formulaic and this produces students who think there's only one way to say something. It's valuable to force them out of that way of thinking, especially if they are over-using a pattern.
5. I agree, "In my own mind" is redundant.
6. I agree about "from whence," but "to which" or "in which" when the sentence should have only "which" (for example when there is a preposition somewhere else in it) is far worse and you cannot tell me he had a sheaf of US student essays in front of him and not a single instance of that. He's ignoring the elephants and tigers to plunk at rodents.
7. "About" would be even better than "as to," but this is trivial. The big problem with that sentence is the massive overlap between "unfounded and contrived" and shame on him for not coming down on that; that kind of sloppy piling up of adjectives is the kind of thing writing courses exist to highlight.
8. I don't like split infinitives and this one is avoidable, but "never seemed to stop" is a better fix.
9. I agree; the student meant "annoying." This has been in tests of mine. (Remember - American English is more prescriptive. And you only get to make plays on words when you understand the neat distinctions. So there is a payoff.) But misuse of "liable" and "flaunt," for example, are far more worthy of censure.
10. I agree, but I would also have pointed to the wimpiness of "allegedly" placed that late in the sentence. I would ask the student whether he or she thought the claim was that Christ nipped over to the Americas during his "lost years" after we see him teaching in the Temple, before his entry into Jerusalem? Or perhaps there is a theory to be constructed equating it with Hell, which he harrowed during the 3 days?
In short, this was apparently a very good class - or else the guy not only didn't have a sense of proportion, he was prone to missing stuff - and he missed opportunities to engage them or at least prove he'd read their stuff and not just marked it.
M
Hell's English teacher
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