The International Writer

[sartorias]

Cora Buhlert has posted a sobering article about the situation of the International writerI find it especially telling that fingers are pointed at some of these English as second language writers for errors when there are so many American writers whose grammar is, um, creative. ("I was laying in bed when I . . ." "As a writer, the publishing

Comments

[asakiyume]

I *love* different flavors of English. It's part of what I love about reading the blog posts of my LJ friends in India, and it's what I love about reading regional literature--different idioms, different slang, different use of language. I think English speakers are so very lucky that people with other parent languages want to write in English--because then we're that much richer in expression, as they bring their locutions and so on into English. I have an LJ friend from Finland--I love what she writes, in English.

[sartorias]

I find traces of word choices and evidence of the footprint of other sentence structures in English--and I also adore translated idioms, and glimpses of other ways of looking at things.

And while it's true that errors do show up . . . um, natives don't get a free pass here, either. English grammar is weird, and our spelling is best described as convoluted.

[cschells]

Oh, I love all the diversity of English out there! And I love the insights you get into another culture or individual's thought processes when you hear or read someone using English as their second (or, anyway, not-first) language. I've learned a lot of French by hearing French people speak English. *g* I've done a couple of editing projects lately where I'm supposed to make somebody's article sound like it was written by a native speaker, which I get, but it's a little sad to me to take all the flavor and personality out. And yes, the vast majority of "native speakers" have really terrible grammar; let's not be pointing fingers!

[sartorias]

Totsl agreement here.

[la_marquise_de_]

That's an excellent link: thank you.

[sartorias]

:-)

[jade_sabre_301]

haven't read the article yet (packing...so much packing...), but the bit about American writers made me think of this op-ed about typos in the publishing business.

edit: the article doesn't say anything about failed html tags, but I suspect they're pretty detrimental too. *g*

(also--I've never had trouble with the word "definite," but I have never before seen the word "finite" in it. I just remember it's two "i"s. huh.)

[sartorias]

What an awesome article!

[sartorias]

I remembered definite only because I set myself to remember three vexing words as a unit: definIte, sepArate, despErate. I too never saw the finite, but then I'm also one of those the writer describes who "sees through" words to the image or idea, unlike those who see language as a mathematical puzzle.

[jade_sabre_301]

It made me laugh because when we first started dating my boyfriend was "definately" all over the place, though I have since broken him of the habit--but he's an engineer and I'm the English nerd who willingly came up with a three-week grammar class for the sake of GRAMMAR.

[anna_wing]

Not to mention that apart from the Commonwealth writers whose first language is English, someone who has learned English formally to a high degree of fluency (as many in EU countries do, for instance), may well both speak and write it to a far higher degree of grammatical correctness and indeed elegance than a native speaker. Consider Joseph Conrad.