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Do you have children? If so, do you teach them that it's okay to ignore proper grammar?
You're missing the point - - what you think is proper grammar has been disagreed on for centuries including today. You can take two different grammar handbooks and fine places where they disagree with each other.
For people who really want to learn about this instead of just railing against blacks and universities, I recommend the book Woe is I by Patricia T O'Conner.
As I said before, African American vernacular shares many qualities with Shakespeare and Chaucer. It's no more inherently wrong than any other dialect would be.
You're missing the point - - what you think is proper grammar has been disagreed on for centuries including today. You can take two different grammar handbooks and fine places where they disagree with each other.
For people who really want to learn about this instead of just railing against blacks and universities, I recommend the book Woe is I by Patricia T O'Conner.
As I said before, African American vernacular shares many qualities with Shakespeare and Chaucer. It's no more inherently wrong than any other dialect would be.
--The goal is to cancel everything "white". That is clear now. Walt Whitman FGS. I have seen calls to cancel classical music, western literature, the family, Christianity, and so forth. Liberals should stop watching TV, give up air conditioning, put away their iPhones, stop flying on planes, and sell their cars since "whiteness" is so offensive.
--I taught college English for many years. I have written a little bit about this before. Most years I taught at some major well known universities.
However, I once taught a few classes at a junior college outside of Atlanta. One of the classes there was remedial English grammar. One of my favorite students was a very smart black woman in her early 20s. We spent a great deal of time on concepts such as subject verb agreement, pronoun and antecedent agreement, and prepositional phrases.
At the end of the semester, she gave me a thank you card. She wrote "thank you for making the light bulb finally come on." That card meant more to me than all the fancy classes as prestigious universities. She wanted to learn. She realized that not being able to speak or write correctly was holding her back, and she worked to overcome that.
It wasn't about me being white or her being black. She wanted to learn, and I was able to teach her. It was a really great feeling as a teacher, to help a motivated student.
I also taught primarily white students at a major university located in the south, and they had the same learning curve. They had made it into college without ever learning proper grammar, and they were so grateful to learn it and to not sound "country" any more.
All this to say, learning to speak and to write properly is a major step in socioeconomic advancement. This isn't about white versus black. This is about education. We can and should inspire young people to achieve, instead of telling them that working to improve their minds is fruitless or racist.
From one former junior college writing tutor/instructor to another, I couldn't agree with you more. And I'm a "liberal."
But that this discussion takes place on City Data is pretty ironic. There are plenty of posters of all stripes who can't write with proper spelling, grammar and/or punctuation. And anyone who considers it important to speak and write properly is quickly slammed as a "grammar Nazi." Happens all the time.
It's very late here, so I'll get into this more tomorrow if the thread is still on the first page.
I have taught rhetoric and literature classes at four-year universities for 21 years now.
The idea of proper grammar is a myth.
For example, do you think that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition?
It's complete bunk. A 1700s clergyman named Robert Lowth wrote a grammar book saying that you can't end a sentence with a preposition. It's a complete fabrication. Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton have plenty of sentences that end with prepositions.
Split infinitives are allowed, double negatives can be used, verbs can come before subjects, etc.
The rural dialects of Southeastern white English is very similar to the black vernacular, especially with grammar and phonology.
There's no such thing as "traditional grammar". Diction, syntax, phonology - - they differ through out the United States, and in most cases, there is no "proper" formatting.
Agree with the bolded. But that doesn't mean there aren't any basic rules. Or is the fact that you used proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation in your post simply a matter of choice? Of writing style? Where Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton are concerned, it usually IS writing style, not lack of knowledge.
Should I accept a formal document submitted by someone on my team (who has a master's degree, no less) that reads, "I going to meeting next week" or "I seen an incident last month"? Am I just being an uptight grammar Nazi because I consider it unacceptable?
Moreover, you're not taking into consideration standards of English from one English-speaking country to another. Standards that you seem to suggest are acceptable here in the US are not accepted, let alone respected, elsewhere.
Fake news from a far right “media source” that pumps outrageous falsehoods along the lines of Alex Jones (which I have no doubt that a number of posters here believe). Oh, and there’s this:
Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos has family and likely financial connections to The College Fix, a conservative news site that often criticizes liberal bias in higher education. Read more: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/...tion-news-site
Remember her? Prior to heading up education in this country, her key accomplishments outside of bundling were losing a s***ton of money in a failed tech start up, losing more money in a Broadway musical developed by Kathy Lee Griffin (who didn’t see that coming?), and a sketchy enterprise on biofeedback. And, of course, a solid fundraiser for right wing causes and politicians.
So what motivates the secretary? I think she summed it up well herself: "My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence," she wrote. "Now I simply concede the point. They are right."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_DeVos
I’m certainly not going to buy any nonsense promoted by the secretary who hides in the shadows behind the quoted masthead. Though I imagine the Alex Jones crazies will no doubt have no problem with swallowing all of this Rutgers bs.
I guarantee that what you think is "proper grammar" is arguable in many circumstances.
The OP has it right - - it's "traditional" grammar, not "proper" grammar.
"Communicate clearly." Exactly. You wouldn't want your own children to say things like, "We be goin' to the store," so don't act like it's okay to teach other people to do it.
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Funny movie.
