I read a blog post today that recommended people forget what they learned in school about writing, and instead, write like they speak, and from the heart. It went on to suggest throwing out the rules of language, not worrying about grammar and spelling, and more.

I used to work at an artificial intelligence company that made foreign language translation software. Many of our software developers were, understandably, language experts, and a couple were PhDs. I loved to argue with them as to whether language was prescriptive or descriptive.

Common Russet Potato

If you don’t know this argument, prescriptive language is the language taught in the classroom, in which there is a set of fixed rules, developed by experts, and writers and speakers must follow them. Descriptive language is ever-changing, fluid, and owned by the individual, who is free to make changes and additions to suit a particular situation. (Guess which school I am from.)

Debates over meaning can be fascinating, arcane, or just plain annoying. And they can apply to any word. During the Monica Lewinsky affair, President Clinton famously argued that when he had said to his aides “there’s nothing going on between us,” (us referring to Clinton and Lewinsky) that the word “is” could be misinterpreted and therefore the statement was true. “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement,” Clinton said.

In the interest of bipartisanship, I here report that Donald Rumsfeld said:

“There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

The piece in The Economist that features this quote later makes use of the words “gyromancer” and “haruspexes.” Neither of these is in my Microsoft Word dictionary, which means they are good words.

Growing up, my favorite writers were Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, so I was imprinted with an affinity for florid, 19th century-style prose. The only way to learn to write well is to read, read, and read some more. This left me with a penchant for sending emails and texts with phrases like “inasmuch as the considerations contained herein pertain to only a limited range of phenomenon…” And I’m not even a lawyer.

You will notice my writing is full of commas, parentheses, (I do love parentheses) hyphens and other punctuation. I’m not a fan of the serial aka Oxford comma, wherein one is compelled to add a final comma at the end of a comma-delineated list, thusly: they bought wine, cheese, bread, and crackers. There really is no need for the comma after the word “bread.”

Back to the blog post. On the whole, I agree with its contentions. But I think it’s “dangerous.” The advice to discard the laws of language is fine for certain classes of people, like post-modern novelists, performance artists, diarists, graffiti artists, rappers, etc., for whom language is primarily a mode of artistic expression. If, on the other hand, you are in marketing, public relations, or even accounting or real estate, your writing is meant to convey something.

Here’s the problem. If someone who is already a poor writer buys off on this idea of writing without rules, then already bad writing will become unintelligible. The American Youth Soccer Organization has an “Everybody Plays!” strategy. It’s great for five-year-olds, but note that even for five-year olds playing soccer on Saturday morning, there are rules. Now, if we say “Everybody Writes, And There Are No Rules!” you’ll get millions of self-realized, happy writers who can’t communicate a damn thing.

If you haven’t guessed yet, I believe language is dynamically, formally, and informally prescriptive. Over 90 per cent of the rules are useful and worth knowing and following. Things like comma placement, the use of quotation marks, having a subject, noun and verb in a sentence, and so on, are useful for writing well. Even new words and slang are prescribed by “the community.” (Plenty of kids have tried to introduce new slang terms in the hopes they will be picked up by everyone at school, but few are successful. Most popular slang came from somewhere and its use is prescribed by all the people already using it.)

New words are born every year. A few years ago we would have laughed at the word “tweet,” but it is now so commonplace it turns up in New Yorker articles without quotes or explanation. (I still have a hard time using the word in conversation.) I’m just a little conservative about which words I add to my dictionary.

And as I mentioned, the rules change depending on your use of language. If you’re blogging for fun, or to communicate with friends, or as a means of self expression, you should feel free to refer to Volkswagen Jettas as potatoes. I just won’t ask you to go to the supermarket.

On the other hand, if you blog to influence people, or because you represent a business or organization, discard the rules at your peril. If you go too far, it’s no longer communications. It’s just performance art.

Tags: blogs, blogging, writing, descriptive, prescriptive, language