Apologies to Conrad

Teaching writing is hard. And I hate reading papers, esp. demand writing, because I always become frustrated at the low skill level of students. The flights of logic I can understand, the grappling with meaning I have sympathy for; but their refusal to absorb the correct usage of the English language is frustrating.

I go over and over this stuff, but their patterns are stuck in their heads, and they fall back on them time and time again. Lack of agreement, no attempts at subordination, and the ubiquitous "they" when speaking of individuals. I want to scream, so I come here.

Our language use is not like our math use. The one is personal and part of our self-identities, the other is not. Even if we don't get our sums right, we all agree that there is a right answer, that we've made a mistake somewhere, and that it will never do to just keep going on adding together one and two and getting five. But language is not the same: the patterns of usage, our own idiolect, is so deeply ingrained in us that it is difficult to wholly and completely accept that how we use English is wrong and needs to be corrected before it is right. We think we're not so bad.

I have to re-design my content and come back to basic writing skills more and more often; I have to emphasize that the way they use language is not merely a matter of style, but that there is a matter of correctness that has nothing to do with style. It can by a stylistic feature to depart from standard usage, but the writer/speaker must know he's doing it in order to control it. And they don't know. Their non-standard usage is so ingrained in them that they will try to correct my standard English with their bastardized version, that they think is right. The irony, the horror.

Job security, I guess. Sigh…