The curse of grammarphobia

Accidence Will Happen by Oliver Kamm is spot on for adult literacy teachers and students

In the 1970s I was involved in adult literacy work, starting with the 1974 British Association of Settlements campaign “Status Illiterate, Prospects zero”. As a result, the government found £1 million to set up the Adult Literacy Resource Agency, which funded projects like mine. Then came the BBC’s smash hit series On the Move, which gave Bob Hoskins his first real acting job. He played an intelligent, amusing yet illiterate cockney lorry driver. Screened on Sundays at 6.15pm for 15 minutes, the programme was a terrific hit. With a national help-line at the end of each programme plus a system to connect callers to their local adult education provider, the series generated a huge demand which all but overwhelmed many providers. My little project (in Bedfordshire) started that year with six students and ended it with 1500 or so.

Hoskins provided a successful hook, but in reality the genuinely illiterate were a minority. The majority of our learners had problems with higher level reading skills and, most commonly, writing. They usually articulated this as “spelling and grammar”. And they were terrified.

This piece went viral in a 1970s way (most literacy schemes had at least a faded photocopy of a scruffy handout). It looks like a poem but that wasn’t the aim. We often used to transcribe what students said, break it into units of sense to make it easier to read and present it to them, typed out. The aim was to demonstrate that their spoken words could become powerful, expressive writing. They were often delighted and amazed. It could also stimulate productive debate as to whether the real “writer” was the speaker or the scribe.

One of our tasks as adult literacy specialists was training volunteer tutors. An essential element was flushing out and challenging attitudes to those with literacy problems. We used text presented as mirror writing to help people understand how it feels to struggle with reading (and how easy it is to mix up b, d, p and q — try it) and we used quizzes, brainstorms and case studies to flush out and challenge knee-jerk negative attitudes to poor spelling and grammar. Here are some examples.

The people Kamm calls “pedants” have many less fluent disciples. For example, the belief that bad spelling is caused by laziness is widely held, together with many of the “shibboleth” rules and standards that Kamm challenges. People like Carole B, who are convinced that they are too dumb to write, hear what the pedants say and believe them. It helps to confirm the fear and shame they probably acquired at school. Kamm highlights the absurdly colourful language the pedants habitually use when condemning usages that are often perfectly all right or pretty unimportant, like John Humphrys calling a popular usage “illiterate” or “a hanging offence”. It hits hardest in the minds of people who feel that their literacy problem is a guilty secret. They are easily humiliated. Hyperbolic insults don’t bother the confident and well educated. But those who are unconfident and uncertain just shrivel up. They feel justifiably condemned and have no defence.

Kamm’s book is a terrific resource for building confidence in these learners, and helping them to understand what grammar is really for. Here’s a quote:

It debunks the hyperbolic rhetoric of such as John Humphyrs, Lynn Truss and co, demonstrating that they are often mistaken and that so-called “wrong” usages are frequently used by some of English’s greatest writers. He starts from the assumption shared by modern researchers into language: that correct usage is what most people think it is! Parts one and two explain Kamm’s assumptions and the research they are based on. Part three is a mini-thesaurus of controversial idioms, many of which are frequently, mistakenly and vociferously condemned by the pedants. It provides the ammunition that adult literacy teachers need to help students feel better about who they are: normal, intelligent humans who are allowed to struggle with stuff that is genuinely difficult. Here’s another taste

The importance of Standard English

An odd feature of several attacks on Kamm’s book is the accusation that he denigrates Standard English. He doesn’t. He advocates it, and believes it should be taught because it’s often appropriate. He does relegate it from its position as the only correct form to being one of many alternatives, all of which have their place in the gorgeous kaleidoscope of English. A job application letter to the Bank of England using the salutation “Dude” is pretty unlikely to go down well (except perhaps in the IT department). But it’s fine for communications with members of the dude-ism sect.

Remembering Mary

One student I can’t forget was the wife of a prominent local conservative figure. She was terrified of being exposed as someone who couldn’t spell. In fact her spelling was pretty good; like most of us she made the odd mistake from time to time (in those days you couldn’t blame typos as handwriting was still the predominant medium). It was hard to help her — she was so petrified and yet her position meant that she frequently had to send out invitations written in her own hand to other prominent figures in the area. She was obsessed about things like -ise versus -ize and “I before e except … when it isn’t). She was often paralyzed by acute uncertainty. We managed to help her be more accurate by having her compile a list of common words she could rely on and keep in her handbag plus a few other obvious tips. One was to draft and correct as much as possible herself and, in an emergency, ask someone she could trust for help. But I suspect that she was never able to trust anyone enough.

Inside her head she could hear those little people with their hammers bashing away: “lazy … hanging offence … it’s easy … you are destroying our beloved language … blah blah blah”.

Oliver, where were you when she needed you?

copyright february 2015: Martin Good