Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [269]
A great many readers regard technical errors as an inattention to detail that also signals sloppiness at more important levels of thinking. If you produce writing that contains such errors, you risk not only distracting readers from your message but also undermining your authority to deliver the message in the first place.
THE CONCEPT OF BASIC WRITING ERRORS (BWEs)
You get a paper back, and it’s a sea of red ink. But if you look more closely, you’ll often find that you haven’t made a million mistakes—you’ve made only a few, but over and over in various forms. This phenomenon is what the rhetorician Mina Shaughnessy in a book called Errors & Expectations addressed in creating the category of “basic writing errors,” or BWEs. Shaughnessy argues that, in order to improve your writing for style and correctness, you need to do two things:
Look for a pattern of error, which will require you to understand your own logic in the mistakes you typically make.
Recognize that not all errors are created equal, which means that you need to address errors in some order of importance—beginning with those most likely to interfere with your readers’ understanding.
This chapter’s BWE guide, Nine Basic Writing Errors and How to Fix Them, reflects Shaughnessy’s view. It does not cover all of the rules of grammar, punctuation, diction, and usage, such as where to place the comma or period when you close a quotation or whether or not to write out numerals. Instead, it emphasizes the errors that are potentially the most damaging to the clarity of your writing and to your credibility with readers. We have arranged the error types in a hierarchy, moving in descending order of severity (from most to least problematic).
As in our discussion of style in Chapter 18, the key premises of this chapter are that a sentence is made up of moveable parts and that sentences disclose the relationships among those parts. Keep these premises in mind, and you will see what the errors have in common.
WHY GRAMMAR ERRORS MAKE SOME PEOPLE SO ANGRY
Grammar is a volatile subject. Grammatical errors evoke not just disapproval but anger in some people. Why? Well, clearly correct grammar matters. Readers should not have to struggle to figure out where your sentences begin and end or what goes with what. But the fact that correctness matters—that correctness is necessary to being taken seriously as a writer—does not account for the sheer venom that goes into spotting other people’s grammatical errors. (See Chapter 1, the Short Take entitled A Quick Word on Style Guides.)
Language use is social and conventional. Conforming to the rules is, in a sense, a sign that you agree to be governed by the same conventions that others conform to. Perhaps this is why the intentional sentence fragment has the impact that it does. Really. The gesture makes the writer’s style seem daring. It says, “You and I both recognize that I control the standard conventions with sufficient assurance to break them on purpose, not by accident.”
USAGE: HOW LANGUAGE CUSTOMS CHANGE
Errors of grammar are relatively stable and locked down. “The eggs was tasty” is wrong; so is “Obama are President” and “Obama is Presidents.” But usage, a kind of troublesome and embarrassing cousin to grammar, is a more vexed subject. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, usage has to do with “established or customary use or employment of language, words, expressions, etc.” Established by whom? Customary within which what group? Usage, in short, tends to be less clear cut than grammar.
That is why some dictionaries offer brief paragraphs of discussion from a “usage panel”—a group of experts who weigh in on what is proper and improper in language use. Most of the usage guides you will find at the back of grammar handbooks offer a range of examples of usage. At one end of the range, there are examples in which one form is clearly preferred and another disapproved.