VOLUME 33, NO. 2, FEBRUARY, 1956
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MODERN GRAMMAR AND ITS APPLICATION TO TECHNICAL WRITING' E. R. SPANGLER University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
N o EDUCATIONAL program can operate effectively if language msume meaningful patterns. But the overit fails to scrutinize its subject matter continuously. whelming tendency in the composition courses has been, If it does not, it may water down whatever valuable and unfortunately still is a t the secondary level, to material i t presents with the kind of inaccuracies and treat grammar as a law of nature, like gravity: imfallacies that may subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, mutable, omniscient, and ultimately mysterious. Thus insult the intelligences of those whom it plans to teach. the student in the composition of English is early led Nothing will make a standent,of any age a t any level, to believe that the road to mastery of his language is balk from learning so quickly as recognition that some to memorize a set of disjointed rules and regulat,ions, of what he is supposed to learn is false or improperly whose painstaking and generally uncompromising applinnderstood. His immediate reaction is naturally one cation then constitutes good writing. This unfortunate practice began early in the sevenof general antagonism. The teaching of English composition in high schools teenth century. Scholars, then and before, were first and colleges has universally been founded on the gram- of all students of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or the other mar of the language. Very properly so, for grammar classical languages in which learning was couched. is t,he superstructure of language, the system of forms These languages had no vernacular and were under no and relationships by means of which the sounds of the pressure from the spoken word of the market place; they were, in short, dead languages, and their gram'Presented as par+ of the Symposium on Training Chemists mars, because they were static, were amenable to the and Chemical Engineers in Technical Writing before the Division of Chemical Literature a t the 128th Meeting of the American kind of rigid analysis and description they received. Consequently, when the disdain for popular languages Chemical Society, Minneapolis, September, 1955.
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man Melville and Winston Churchill dangle their modifiers consistently with a view to effectiveness rather than rule. The double conditional, it is interesting to note, is even more illogical than these two, but it passes by unquestioned in a vast amount of technical writing simply because no one has popularized its illogic and meanwhile no one is misunderstanding. The trouble with these locutions is not lack of logic, since normally no reader will misunderstand; where trouble does in fact exist, the fault lies in clarity or appropriateness, terms which I shall define shortly. The entire framework of this prescriptive, or normative, grammar is in fact unrealistic and in many places as dead as the languages on which it is based. To found our efforts to improve writing on such a system therefore strikes me as both intellectually dishonest and, in the final proof, relatively ineffectiveas compared to the more accurate approach of contemporary linguistics. The science of linguistics is a young one and in many respects brash and ignorant, going with many of its spokesmen so far as to argue that the words good and bad are meaningless when applied to language. But, these faults notwithstanding, linguistics has demonstrated beyond argument that grammar in order to.be functional must be scientific. That is, it must approach the language openly and without prejudice to describe and to understand what it finds without reMODERN ENGLISH GRAMMAR IS DESCRIPTIVE course of any kind to preconceived notions of "proper" Modern, descriptive grammar of English discards the structure or syntax. The practical result ~f such an approach is that the "eight parts of speech" analysis of prescriptive grammar as not very accurate, and instead divides the forms person learning the language, or, as in the case a t hand, of the language roughly into two classes: (1) the lezi- of becoming more adept in the language, mill find an con of the language, which includes all of the forms ordered description which he perceives is both accurate which symbolize things, actions, and judgments, and and functional as he proceeds further into the language. ( 2 ) the forms which indicate the relationships among the USAGE ESTABLISHES RULES lexical forms. The second forms are said to have relational or grammatical meaning. Strictly speaking, The rules or laws of scientific or descriptive grammar t.hen, the study of grammar is exclusively the study of are not prescriptions about what should be, but are this part of the language, the devices which English rather general statements which attempt to describe uses for signaling relational meanings. These devices the ways in which the language operates. What is consist of, and only of, word order, function words, and important to recognize is that they do not determine "good English"; they are rather determined by it. inflections, in that order of importance. The scientific approach to grammar is healthy be- The rules and laws are valid only in so far as they are cause classic methods in modern grammars establish accurate descriptions of the facts of usage. When the the feeling that one can legislate good English into ex- facts of usage change, the rules, if they are to remain istence, that one can decide on the basis of rules or realistic, must also change. Of course there are many levels of usage, and therelogical extension of rules that a given locution or phraseology is correct or incorrect. Libraries full of hooks on fore many simultaneous grammars. What is acceptEnglish composition, including the majority of hand- able usage in church is unacceptable in the factory;
began to dispel in the late Renaissance, treatment of all of the modern living tongues in the West was founded exclusively on the description of languages that had emerged from the scholars' studies of the classical languages. The entire paraphernalia and vocabulary of form and structure were lifted intact and brought to bear on the living languages. The battle of the scholars to force the square peg into the round hole has been bitter and uncompromising for 300 years. The classical languages, without exception, are highly inflected. The operation and meaning of words in these languages are determined largely by their form, irrespective of their position. Modern English on the other hand is only slightly inflected, the functiou and meaning of words being almost entirely derived from position or word order. I t is awkward, then, to try to describe the grammar of modern English in terms of the inflected languages, to speak rigidly in terms of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, subjunctive, etc., terms which designate static word forms and only incidentally their function. It is healthy, I believe, for the modern student of English to remember that these terms and this type of analysis are largely bistorical accidents, not intrinsic to languages themselves, and that they are inapplicable to English to the extent that English grammar differs basically from that of the classical languages.
wrong because they are illogical, it is argued, canceling each other out, while practitioners of the language as eminently successful as William Shakespeare and George Gobel use double negatives splendidly and unambiguously. The dangling modifier under no condition should he used, it is argued, for the modifier must always stand adjacent to the word it modifies or it is illogical and hence ungrammatical. Meanwhile Her-
complicate the analysis of grammar, however, the existence of levels of usage simplifies the problem, for in setting down a description of the grammar which is proper for technical writing we can limit ourselves exclusively to that level, a level which in inflexibility and thus in ease of description stands somewhat below what is broadly termed formal English hut a great deal above what is called informal English.
VOLUME 33, NO. 2, FEBRUARY, 1956
Recognition and description of this level of usage allows us to arrive a t the criterion of appropriateness in grammar. What is t n ~ eof usage a t the level of technical writing is appropriate; what is not trne is inappropriate. Thus double negatives generally are disallowed, not because they are illogical-logic has nothing to do with the problem-but because they are inappropriate, like tennis shoes in church. Determination of good English from the point of view of appropriateness, then, is exclusively a matter of judgment founded on as wide an experience as possible in the particular level of usage a t hand. It is a matter of the writer choosing the expression that is suitable for his specific purpose. Unless we are in the realm of artistic literature, English is never good abstractly; it is good in a particular set of circumstances, an audience, a location, and a particular time. Language in this respect is a part of conduct in almost complete analogy with the fact that our manner of dress is controlled on the basis of something we have developed called good taste. And just as taste in clot,hing varies from time to time, so can-nd does-taste in speech, with the writing of that speech only a short time lag behind. CLARITY AN IMPORTANT CRITERION
The other criterion from the point of view I am developing, and the only other one that applies in the determination of good technical writing, is that of clarity. The writer's choice of language cannot be guided exclusively by the criterion of appropriateness, for he has the obligation to communicate with the minimum possihilit,y of misunderstanding. This means not only that he must try to frame his language in such a way that i t can be understoodin only one way, but that in addition this understanding may he achieved relatively quickly. A needlessly complex manner of presentation is incorrect or bad English in that it fails to act on the chief basis for existence that expository writing has: to convey meaning. The criterion of clarity in application means then, first of all, simplicity-simplicity of mords, sentences, and all of the larger language units. One of the largest errors that exists in contemporary writing in chemistry, for example, is the worship of the argot of the profession. The vocabulary which is peculiar to chemistry is of course in some places essential because the subject matter is new, but in the larger number of instances the writer searches for and apostatizes this argot as preferable in the instances when a more familiar term exists. Given a choice of an esoteric term and a common one, he will choose the esoteric (in his effort to sound exact, I suppose), when unquestionably for the sake of clarity he should choose the common because it is more quickly understood. Direct, straightforward presentation is also demanded by simplicity. Here again, technical writing tends to go astray in its superstition that it is somehow sinful to write in the first person. As a consequence, instead of making a direct statement a writer will prefer the paesive voice, choosing indirection in the fear that he will
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lapse into the sinful first person. Appropriateness in technical writine: demands that the annroach be impersonal, but not verbose; objectivity is quite feasible in the first person. Clarity also requires careful attention to the level of abstraction at which the writer is working, keeping his terms and concepts as concrete as is consistent with fact. Strictly speaking, a completely abstract term has no place a t all in a technical report by the nature of the subject matter, but it also needs to be pointed out that most concrete terms tend to be only relatively exact in their referents. A word such as ''red," for example, may or may not be as concrete as possible, but for the sake of c1arit.y it warrants examination in the event that the color, if it has any importance at all, can be specified more concretely. Words must be watched attentively, since they can block the clarity of a report in three fashions. They can have no meaning: trite or ponderous words or phrases whose definition is wholly a free translation on the part of the reader. They can have too little meaning: vague words such as "a successful experiment." Or they can have too much meaning: rigidly circumscribed words such aa "unique," "only," or "necessary" whose application may, if one is not careful, obfuscate meaning as often as the vague or meaningless term.
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COMMON DIWICULTIES IN TECHNICAL WRITING
To carry the disucussion to more specific instances, we can divide the most common difficulties in technical writing into some 11 categories. With these categories labeled and the source of the difficulties recognized in terms of the brief analysis I have just given, the task of getting a chemist, a t any degree of literacy, to appreciate what he is doing and why becomes more realistic and, I should hope, more frnitful. Four of these areas of difficulty I should label as exclusively a matter of appropriateness. That is to say, it is foolish to argue that in any sense of right or wrong the correct form is preferable to any other. The proper way is proper simply because that is the way it is done among the audience being addressed. These four are: (1) the sentence fragment, ( 2 ) the comma splice, (3) the case forms of pronouns, and (4) idiomatic expressions, i. e., the choice of prepositions, comparative forms, etc.
Three other areas of difficulty are explicable in view of the achievement of clarity. Errors in these areas are consequently more objectively apparent and less likely to create asperity on the writer's part when his attention is called to them. These are: (1) the punctuation of restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers, (2) the placing of items intelligibly in series, and (3) the verb tenses. The remaining four areas are trouble makers in that normally the correct form is justified by editors and
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experts on the basis of logic or clear writing, hut actually in many instances only appropriateness is involved. In other words, the following need to he examined as individual cases in order to detect the particular reason for the preference of one form over another:
grammar, will allow a more realistic and probably a more successful basis for the evaluation of technical writing, especially on the part of the technical writer.
(I) the shifted constntction, i. e., the use or failure to use parallel constructions; (2) nlisused word forms: possessives, plurals, adjective or adverb forms; (3) agreement in form of pronoun and antecedent or subject and verb; (1)misplaced modifiers, the most frequently occurring of which is the word "only."
(2) BI~OOMFIELD, LEONARD, "Language," Henry Halt and Co., New York, 1933. (3) Farm, C. C., "American English Grammar," Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1940. (4) Ibid., A N D A. T. KITCHIN,"Thorndike-Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary," Scott, Foresman and Co., Chicago, 1951, pp. 16-20. (5) JESPERSEN, Omo, "Philoaophy of Grammar," Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1924. ( 6 ) Ibid.."Modern Enelish Grammar," Carl Winter. Heidelbere. -. 19'28-31, 4 vols.' (7) Ibid., "Essentialsof English Grammar,"Henry Holt andCo., New York, 1933. (8) MARCKWARDT, A. H.,"Introduction to the English Language," Oxford University Press, New York, 1942. (9) PERRIN,P. G., "Writer's Guide and Index to English," Scott, Foresmsn and Co., Chicago, 1942, pp. 1-50. (10) STURTEYANT, E. H., "Linguistic Change," University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1919. (11) WHITEHALL,H. E., "Webster's New World Dictionary," World Publishing Co., Cleveland, 1953, pp. xxi-v.
Very briefly, I have attempted here to advocate two things with respect to the attainment of better technical writing. First of all, I believe that the recognition, use, and application of descriptive grammar by editors and teachers will tend to produce a quicker and friendlier grasp of the essentials of good writing by the t,echnical writer. And, second, the use of the simple two criteria for judsng writing, stemming from the modification brought about by the use of descriptive
BIBLIOGRAPHY (1) BAUGH, A. C., "A History of the English Language," Appleton-Century Co., New Yolk, 1935.
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