Correct English

Correct English

I have recently taken action to improve my English. It has been a few weeks of work and for my own sake, it seems worth recording here, why not? A huge part of my spirituality is my obsession with self-improvement and communication is a skill that everyone needs to work on. So here, I am learning about English.

I have always been insecure about my use of English. I often find my English skills lacking. It was the one subject that I struggled with at school and sadly no teacher was really available to tell me the difference between good English and bad English, particularly when it came to writing essays. A certain abscess of knowledge impacted me during my school years.

I thought that English was a matter of opinion. It was not like Maths or Science, where if you wrote the answer then it couldn't be denied. It seemed the teacher might have a good day or a bad day. I wondered if our grades could be affected more by how much caffeine the examiner had in their system than what we wrote on paper. In fact, sometimes I imagined that if I and my best friends submitted the same answer for an English exam, then they would get an A and I would get a C because the teacher had more faith in my friend's skill with the subject than their faith in me. Sometimes I think that my whole process of self-improvement is secretly a process of unpicking the woven threads of a troubled history, but whatever the reason improvement is always good.

Luckily through my degree at London Metropolitan University, I was aided by some incredible tutors who noted my tendency to dance around subjects and often assume everyone else was there with me already knowing what I knew. If they already knew, then why would they read what I had to say? I had to actually say it in a concrete way, not allude to it.

There was still a certain absence of style. My close friends were obsessed with it. One in particular, who will remain nameless, would not submit an essay until she was content with the style. By the time she was content with it, the essay would often be late and the tardiness often detracted from her score. Too often she got a lower score having improved the work due to the tardiness than if she had just handed it in on time with poor style, in the first place. What was this style that my friends were obsessed with and how could it be objectively achieved?

Luckily in later years, communication was a higher priority than a good readable style. I was able to work well as a type of secretary for a Law Court which involved drafting many letters and legal documents. I was able to learn a bit about the Ministry of Justice's "house-style", through the staff intranet and ensure that my writing was at least consistent. The house-style documents also taught me to remove many of the common mistakes that plague a lot of writers of Modern English.

However, my skill still affects me today. I found myself feeling unable to stand up for what I believed when someone, who clearly could not tell the difference between direct speech and indirect speech, started to disagree with me. I struggled the first time I came across someone referring to a work environment as "a fifty strong office" with no hyphen. Finally, I find myself in disagreement with people with whom I run a business about how we should draft something that is going to a newspaper, staff or customer.

I need a better command of English for the future. In recent years, I have begun a number of blogs, written quite a lot and continue to write public-facing emails and web publishing for Dragged Around London Ltd, where I am a director. So not only do I need to demonstrate skill, but I also need to be confident. In fact, I think confidence and academic sources is what I need.

How did I go about this? Well, I worked through Simon Heffer's Strictly English : The correct way to write... And why it matters. For each section, I took some time to work through some examples of what had just been explained and I tried to apply it to everything I wrote when I was not studying. I was actually quite shocked at the sheer number of times I had the opportunity to use the subjunctive mood for example, which is almost always substituted for the indicative in spoken English. This practise helped it form part of my skills.

There were many common mistakes and explanations of the finer points of grammar. If I were to reproduce them all here, I would end up writing a book's worth of information. But I will leave some comments about style, since that was the greatest effect this work had on me.

Can Simon Heffer really be considered a good source of information though? One of the main things I noticed was that the author was a writer for the Daily Mail. In my mind, the Daily Mail will forever have an impression that its authors and readers believe that there is a correct way to live one's life. In my experience, the publication has often passed judgement on people who are different. And hello, I'm one of them. When the author kept saying, some people think this archaic way of speaking is pompous, but I think it should be retained, I frequently felt that the author's prejudices about people who live and speak differently from him, has prevented him from recognising an evolving modern culture, which had already begun to leave him behind. He fails repeatedly to accept the last 40-70 years of language evolution, which is strange because what we call Modern English has been evolving as its own language for about 500 years. Why would he accept the first 450 years of that evolution and not the last 50? It seems to me, he is simply a man stuck in his time. In fact, a modern article suggested that correctly punctuated English induced anxiety in text messages and social media messaging. Using proper grammar often indicated someone switching to a level of formality which demonstrated that they were avoiding familiarity with the reader. The reader would often wonder what they had done wrong to deserve this formality. That does not however mean that Simon Heffer has nothing to offer us, but that his approach is limited.

One of the main things that I took from the book was some very useful sources of information, which the author collected nicely together. His main sources were as follows:

• Modern English Syntax - C. T. Onions [1974]
• The King's English - Ascribed to the Brothers Fowler [circa 1908]
• Politics and the English Language - An essay by George Orwell [1946]

The key takeaways from this process of learning are a few lists on what makes good written style; knowledge that I was denied in my youth.

Fowler's text lays this out with 6 simple criteria in his section on vocabulary:

1. Prefer commonly used words over far-fetched.
2. Prefer concrete words over abstract
3. Prefer singular words over circumlocution (beating about the bush).
4. Prefer short words over long.
5. Prefer Saxon words over Romantic.

My first criticism of Fowler, is that it is focused primarily on singular words since that was the intention of the piece and it does not comment on flow or anything that requires a less microscopic view. Secondly, while it mostly holds true today it is over 100 years old and there are other concerns today, which should be higher on the list. For example, there was no respect for concise sentences at the time and the result is often something that is unreadable today. Finally, I am not entirely sure I agree with the preference for Saxon words. In today's modern English we are more of a multicultural society than ever before. For the last 40 years, our children have been raised with the metric system rather than the imperial so we can better communicate with Europe. There is more migration than ever before meaning more romantic words get imported into this country with people than ever before. Choosing words derived from the Romantic languages often makes our English more suitable for publication on the internet and more acceptable for a wide audience. Fowler was however characterising the "King's English" not modern English for the internet-age 100 years before it happened.

George Orwell also provides us with a list:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This is far more suitable since it looks with a wider lens rather than microscopically looking at individual words. It covers more detail and is a good 40 years or so later than Fowler's, but it is still over 70 years old. It is still missing a few things.

Simon Heffer's book made me consider quite a lot of my own opinions and the 7 C's of communication mentioned on the MoJ's staff intranet. I eventually looked at some of my own blog posts that I did not like and concluded why. In the process of thinking about my own writing, I came up with my own list to replace those that came before.

My own additions:

1. Keep your sentences short to avoid derailing the reader's attention. Remember in modern day people are used to reading Tweets not blogs. If you can break a sentence into separate packets of information, then you would probably be wise to do so and use them like brick to rebuild the full information by their proximity. A sentence really should be shorter than 20 words.
2. Vary your sentence length to create a sense of fluidity.
3. Be weird. Don't say the expected. Don't conform. Don't be a Daily Mail reader. If you write what they expect, they will assume the rest of the sentence and stop reading. I think this is the reason for Orwell's first point. They assume they know what you're saying and stop reading. They also feel like they heard it before; that makes it boring.
4. Be complete. Say everything your reader needs to know. If they might want more, but also might not, then give them a way to get it, but don't include it. A hyperlink is good for this. Say things as precisely as you can.
5. Break up paragraphs into different points. The first sentence of the paragraph should announce what the paragraph is about. Then you should explain the point and finally, close. This helps organise your work into digestible chunks.
6. Avoid pronouns at the beginning of a new paragraph. If you're making a new point then you should say who the actors are again. Don't use "it", "he" and "she" when you are starting a new point: "The difficulty of obtaining these books in Chinese" instead of "it", "Daniel" instead of "he" and "The unknown older lady" instead of "she". Yeah it's longer, but it makes it less likely people will lose track.
7. Be clear about what's fact and opinion. Differentiate between them in your writing. Opinions could be prefaced with words like "I conclude that", "it seems to me that" or anything else, which makes it clear where this information comes from.
8. Avoid jumps in logic. Like maths you need to cover all your working out. For example it is clear from x that y is true and we are led to believe by z that when y is true abc must also be true, so we can conclude that abc is true. Straight forward formulaic logic.
9. Follow all Orwell's comments on good style from his essay Politics and the English language (above).
10. Prefer less words over many. If you can say it in less words try to do so so long as you don't end up breaking Orwell's rules.
11. Prefer verbs which don't come with loads of prepositions to help convey their meaning. They often have multiple meanings and can lead to poor communication. Instead of "I cleaned up the table" prefer "I tidied the table" after all what does "cleaned up" mean? Cleaned? Tidied? Put everything away? Instead of "I want to give up sweets" prefer "I want to forgo / abstain from sweets". Note that 'give' can mean passing a gift to someone else, 'give up' can also mean a form of surrender as well as abstaining. So why use 'give' when 'abstain', although it also has a preposition, does not have these multiple meanings? Where the preposition is required to ensure that meaning of the verb is clear, consider another option. This is most obvious when the verb means something different when it has no preposition. " These are sometimes called phrasal verbs. Avoid them.
12. Don't be pompous. If one is truly an intelligent educated person they don't need to emphasize it and make others feel disrespected.

More than anything, I realised that my use of language is actually quite acceptable. I simply had a lot of insecurity from poor teaching in school, which could not be reversed by my last English teacher in the 6 months she had with us. My work, blogging and academic writing have had an impact on my ability as well. While my vocabulary to describe literature could still be grown, I tend to write in a clear style which is far more suitable for a modern audience than Simon Heffer could achieve. I am more confident than before and this time was definitely a success.