There is more to good usage than grammar. Style and clarity are important; the style should be appropriate to the recipient of the communication, whether spoken or oral, and the content should be clearly arranged and expressed.
I once received a phone call from a university student who was having trouble with Shakespeare and was heading for a resit exam. Could I help her? I am strictly a language teacher and I was very reluctant to take her on, but she insisted that her problem was with language and so, with the very clear understanding that I was not a literature specialist and had no more than an averagely well educated Englishman’s knowledge of the Bard, she came to me.
It was immediately clear that she hadn’t the slightest idea of how to construct an essay. She understood the need for an introduction and conclusion but couldn’t write them properly, while the body of her work was hopelessly confused. I sat with her reorganising the content, which was good enough, into a coherent structure: one topic or point of view per paragraph and using appropriate linking and contrasting words to express and compare different points of view. She was bright and could see what I was doing, and after just a few hours with me she was able to do it herself and easily pass an exam that had been a source of great worry to her.
Leaving aside the question of how such a situation could have arisen in the first place, I was reminded of it when I read this on the Language Log. Mark Liberman writes about Michael Gove, who is the British education minister. Gove chooses to give advice about written English style but does so in a way that shows an ignorance of the passive voice, which he condemns but uses correctly, and he actually contradicts his own stylistic advice on clear paragraph construction. It is well worth following the links to the Spectator and Telegraph contained in the first paragraph of Mark’s piece.
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