Grammarly Is Not Your Friend

I'm sure that the people who work at Grammarly are good citizens, great at cocktail parties, and willing to save kittens from trees, burning buildings, etc.  I want to start proleptically by saying my beef with Grammarly is not with its employees, nor is it necessarily with the founders, owners, and/or investors of the company.  My goal with this long-overdue post in the Oratoria is to warn you--the language-interested reader who desires to have excellent if not flawless writing for whatever your writing needs may be--that what you want from Grammarly is not necessarily what you're going to get.  Because it can't be.  So what's a writer to do?  I've got a few suggestions for you, some of which you'll like more than others.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a company that is heavily invested--to the tune of approximately $110 million, primarily from five venture-capital firms--in "using artificial intelligence to help people with the substance and content of what they write," according to CEO Brad Hoover.

My gloss on this is that Grammarly is a glorified version of the frankly adorable paperclip in ancient iterations of Microsoft Word, except that the paperclip gave users pointers about how to use Word in addition to pointing out typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.  Grammarly sticks to the errors (Wikipedia says that Grammarly checks 250 million rules, but I can't verify that anywhere else, so consider it hearsay at this point).  I would also be remiss not to note that this claim is problematic insofar as changes to grammar do not necessarily equate to "substan[tive]" changes to meaning, let alone writing.  Chomsky proved that decades ago.

What is it, as a service?  Imagine paying a monthly fee to have Word check your spelling and grammar.  Imagine paying a monthly fee so that you can have a plugin for your browser that does what Word does in checking your spelling and grammar as you, say, type an email (or a blog post).  That's what people pay for when they pay for Grammarly.  The algorithms that the company uses to help narrow down the probability that certain conditions have or have not been met in any combination of words (i.e., that sentences are grammatical or not) are maybe better than Word's, more refined, more nuanced, more-regularly updated (but does it constitute the development of artificial intelligence?  Well, the mere use of algorithms does not artificial intelligence make), but even proving the validity of that assertion would depend on which test is being administered.

What's So Problematic about Grammarly?

Nothing, except that it's only marginally helpful.

"But wait!" you say.  "I use Grammarly, and just like in the commercials, it saved me from using a typo or misplacing a modifier in that email to my boss.  Yikes!"  Sure, but Word might have been able to help you catch that, too.  For free.

What's really problematic was a problem that started well before the point at which you, the Grammarly user, thought to yourself, "I better make sure my boss doesn't catch any errors in what I write for work."  Here's a brief summary of the layers upon layers of problems that led you to Grammarly:

1. You weren't taught properly to rely upon--not just how to use but that you need to use--a proper handbook.  Anything that you feel unsure about, you could look up in a writer's handbook like The Everyday Writer or A College Grammar of English, depending on your needs.  A cheap handbook that I love to recommend is The Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford.  Everything that Grammarly "knows" is in that handbook, and you can get it for less than the price of one month's subscription to Grammarly.
2. You weren't taught the basics of grammar.  When you open up a handbook to learn about why "which" needs a comma but "that" doesn't, you may be thrown off by terms like "restrictive."  And what's a "modifier," anyway?  "Gerund"?  Who is "Gerund"? Your parents (and you) should have gone to your school board and demanded to be challenged in your English classes.  Shakespeare is important, too, but understanding grammar is far, far more important insofar as you need to understand the fundamentals of the linguistic tools you use to navigate your world each day of your life.  Which leads to the next point...
3. The education and teacher-training system set you up to be ignorant.  This is partly because of standardized testing and the need to teach lots and lots of things to students.  Learning grammar takes time, especially if it's not intuitive (chemistry isn't intuitive for me, so I empathize).  Frankly, I'd bet that if you had a map of the U.S. and put a dot for each city/town in which at least one school has an expert in English language or even someone with more than six hours of English-grammar college-level education, the map would have fewer than 50 tiny specks.  Instead, we have teachers who aren't equipped to teach anything about grammar and usage, so why do we assume our students will know it?  Don't blame the teachers, though...
4. I put a lot of blame on my own field, rhetoric and composition, for downplaying the importance of teaching the formal aspects of language for the sake of promoting the cultural aspects of communication.  Yes, it's true that there are multiple dialects of English and that communities should have the right to the use of their own dialect, that no dialect is inherently better than another.  However, if our students can't describe the ways in which a dialect operates and differs from another dialect--if they can't identify articles, verbs, syntactic complexity, etc., and analyze why, rhetorically, speakers and writers might use those elements for a purpose in any given context--then our attention to the cultural aspects of communication are pointless, because we're just telling people that something is a certain way without empowering them to understand how it is.  The "social turn" in my field should have been a time when we doubled down on teaching grammar, linguistics, and usage and then coupling them with cultural rhetorics and linguistics; instead, we chucked the one that looked like science and embraced the one that we thought was important by itself, for itself.  I argue that our students would be more empowered if they could explain how and why they are communicating or how and why others' communication affects their identities and rights; right now, few can.
5. Because of the highly conditional nature of language--a function of the highly conditional nature of human social and cognitive contexts--what counts as an error to one person may not to another at any given point in time.  It wasn't until grad school that I learned how to use an em dash properly.  Now I find out that I'm applying the rule I learned far too stringently--that it's okay to use as an extendo tool like this.  It drives me nuts when people do it, even though it's something I used to do all the time.  I have a different set of rules in my head.  What rules does Grammarly have?  How adaptable is its "reasoning"?  Can you talk back and forth with the algorithm about what the rhetorical repercussions are of having used an em dash in the way that you did, in any given context?  Can Grammarly's alleged AI help you weigh the cost-benefit for a nuanced audience?  How do you know that something is an error?  How does Grammarly know?  Who gets to decide what's right and wrong in language use?

Grammarly fixes exactly none of these problems.  It doesn't educate the user.  It doesn't advocate for better teacher education to empower writers to be able to control their own language.  It takes money from people and puts a bandaid over all of this.  What's more, when people use Grammarly, they can't tell whether the fixes proposed by the Grammarly system are actually fixes.  In this way, Grammarly is kind of like going to a psychic.  Your psychic might be 100% right that you shouldn't marry your fiance, but you don't know that, and there's no way for you to verify it until it's too late.  Similarly, unless you can open up a handbook and point to the place where the handbook explains that no, you don't need a comma before a coordinating conjunction that splices two independent clauses in most cases (or what "coordinating conjunction" and "independent clause" even mean), among any number of additional rules about commas, then you don't know whether Grammarly has given you an accurate fix when it suggested deleting that one comma.  You are at Grammarly's mercy, in that case.

Don't Even Get Me Started with the Plagiarism-Detection Service

Companies like Turnitin and, now, Grammarly are compiling gigantic databases of writing.  This should give each of you pause.  What are they doing with your writing?  Is your privacy protected?  Which copyrights have you given away by virtue of having used these services?  Read all about it here.

What's the Solution?

I suppose we have to find a time machine and go back to the '80s and tell rhet-compsters not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  There isn't enough R&D funding for that at the moment, I hear, so instead you have a range of options that are better than Grammarly:

• Less-costly options:
  • Merely using Word (or whatever word processor you prefer)
  • Using a handbook.  This will take more time than using Word, because you'll have to spend time with it, learning about grammar, before you can really get optimal use out of it.
• More-costly options:
  • Take a class on writing, but look at the syllabus first to make sure that there's plenty of attention paid to grammar and usage
  • Better yet, take an introductory linguistics class.  Then buy a handbook; you'll suddenly find it much more approachable. 
  • Ideally, you'd be able to secure the services of a professional editor.  I negotiate payment plans for students (and, really, anyone else who knows they're going to have difficulty paying a single lump sum for professional help), and many other copyeditors will, too.  Yes, it will be more than $15/month, but the monthly subscription price that you're paying to Grammarly is really just for wishful thinking.  If you're only using Grammarly, then you'll still need to have your writing checked over by a professional to ensure that it's actually correct because, hey, you don't know enough to know whether the automated advice given to you by Grammarly is worth anything or not.  Kinda undercuts the value of the subscription, doesn't it?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who thought that Grammarly was the panacea for your writing woes.  What I'm trying to tell you is that it's actually much more important that you understand how writing works so that you'll be able to evaluate whether you're getting good advice, whether it's from an algorithm or from a copyeditor such as me.  Both the algorithm and I can make suggestions for improving your grammaticality, but I can make suggestions and changes that affect your writing qua writing, not qua grammatical strings of words that may or may not be meaningful or effective.  And I can teach you about how I've done it, if you want to know.

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Why My English 101 Students Were Better Writers Than Most Copywriters

I get a weekly update from a certain biz/marketing guru who shall remain nameless.  I like her work, generally, so I don't want to seem ungrateful for the gems she shares with us.

And I will, if I name her, because I'm gonna read (but not drag) one of her latest posts about how to improve your website copy.

In the advice she gives in that post, she's missing a big secret, and it's something that I used to teach even my introductory-level English students.  So regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur trying to get more hits or a freshman in college trying to understand why this writing class that you're forced to take even exists, this post in the Oratoria is for you.

It's the Rhetoric, Folks

Take a look at my second sentence in this post:

I like her work, generally, so I don't want to seem ungrateful for the gems she shares with us.

This sentence is rhetorically off the mark.  How so, you ask?  My English 101 students could have told you.

On day two (or so) of English 101, I told (NB: I don't teach anymore) students about rhetoric.  Aristotle defined it as the art of knowing the available means of persuasion in any given situation.  Today's rhetorical studies is less concerned with persuasion than with "communication of meaning," which encompasses persuasion.  But the rest of the basic elements are still important.  Based on that definition, what can we see that Aristotle emphasizes?

• Audience: In order to persuade someone, I have to know what they believe, think, like, are moved by, etc.  In order to communicate with them successfully, I have to know what language they speak (even better: what dialect of that language), what their mood is, what they care to hear about at any given moment, etc.  I have to know their motivations for listening.
• Topic: What am I trying to persuade them of or communicate to them?  What are the details of that topic that they'd be interested in?  Uninterested in?  Repelled by?  Curious about?  Aristotle spent hours and hours lecturing about how to appeal to very specific demographics of the typical audiences that his students might encounter, as proven by the hundreds of pages of class notes from his lectures that now comprise his Rhetoric. 
• Purpose: Why do you want to communicate?  Why is the other party listening and, perhaps, responding in a specific way?  What are you trying to achieve?

Those are the basics.  For any given item of writing--from a grocery list to War and Peace--my English 101 students knew how to break down any communication and understand it rhetorically.

In my sample sentence, there are a few problems, mostly to do with audience.  First, I don't identify who "us" is.  Secondly, I seem to assume that my audience will be persuaded by my discussing what I like, which is the topic of that particular sentence.  Speaking of topics, that sentence is shaky, because its topic seems to be what I like, while the rest of the introduction of this post is headed in a very different direction.  That set-em-up/switch-em-up approach isn't always problematic, but it's certainly risky, especially vis-a-vis purpose.  Why did I need to do that re-direct?  Why did I need to explain what I like and don't like?  Why did I need to shift gears suddenly thereafter?

This is, admittedly, a very, very close reading of just one little sentence, but my point is that my English 101 students were equipped to do that.

Oh, the Errors You'll Catch

So I'm watching this video post by this guru, and she's giving out very helpful advice: people should write their businesses' websites with the customer in mind, not themselves.  What does that mean?  Well, for example, my "About" section on this site is tucked away behind two pages; it's past the page about my company, Laughing Saint Editorial LLC, on a sub-page of that sub-page.  Why?  Because what I do for a living is about providing a service, not about providing a spotlight for myself.  It's you, the customers and readers, who come here looking for (here comes purpose) information about my services and about how to survive in the usage jungle.  (NB: Someday, I'm going to write a book titled Oh, the Errors You'll Catch: How to Survive in the Usage Jungle.)  So instead of writing about how I like copyediting, I write about what my services are and what they provide to you when I'm writing the main pages.  I do the same thing for my clients: your website (rather than your LinkedIn profile) is about your customers, so I'm going to write your website copy with a lot of "you" and "your," a bit of "our" and "we," and almost no "I" or "my."

The guru, in explaining that, was 100% right.

But, right at the very end of the post, she mentioned that being "cute" and funny on your website is pretty much required for catching customers today.

Woah, there.  Not so fast.

Clearly, she knows her own audience: they like her quirky style, and her brand is all about being personable.  Her audience expects this, but not all audiences are her audience.  Not all industries are her industry.

If I'm writing a website for someone in an insurance firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy on the website.  If I'm writing a website for a financial-services firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy.  If I'm writing a website for a community organization dealing with emergency services, I'm not going to use cute, funny copy.

Why not?  Because it wouldn't serve my purpose.  It might confuse readers, because rhetoric also includes issues of tone, genre, and timing.  If you're looking for a bankruptcy attorney, do you want that person to be cute and funny when they're trying to solicit business?  Apparently, this guru thinks you do.  My experience says differently.

Research and Field Testing

Thankfully, we could do a rhetorical analysis of other websites in any given industry to see what the norm is, and we can follow up with clients and in focus groups to ask people what their response to website copy is.  We don't have to trust a guru's gut (Not Trusting the Guru Gut will be the next book) about what's effective for any given purpose and audience. 

If cute and funny end up winning the day in every industry, sector, and audience, so be it!  I know, though, that if had asked my students about whether that was a sound rhetorical analysis, they'd have frowned.

Do Your Homework

So, instead of going to the copywriting service that this guru was recommending, which shall also go nameless here, you should find a copywriter who's got some knowledge of rhetoric or some very detailed knowledge about the audience you're trying to communicate with or the industry/sector that you're trying to reach.  Finding just anyone and figuring out too late that that person thinks a blanket approach to writing website copy will do...  Yeah, you don't want to find yourself in that position.  It'll be an expensive bag to be left holding.

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Why It's Never Okay to Self-Plagiarize, Especially If You're a Scholar in the Humanities

When I was a writing program administrator, I dealt with plagiarism occasionally.  It's a fact of life, but it's rarely something to get wrapped around the axle about.  That said, I have something on my mind, and I'm not going to pull any punches with this post.  Even if you're not in the field of academia, keep reading.  I'm going to explain a different way of thinking about plagiarism than you're probably used to, and I'm going to give you some insight into how we should value the services that academics in the humanities provide you.

My Students Almost Never Plagiarized.  Here's Why.

There's probably as much moral outrage connected to plagiarism as there is confusion about what actually constitutes plagiarism.  That's not a stable combination.  But as a teacher, I rarely had students plagiarize in my classes.  This was for three reasons:

1. I made them write drafts, sometimes in class, so no one could show up to class with a complete paper out of the thin, blue sky.  They'd fail a substantial portion of the paper grade if they did.  We also talked explicitly about what plagiarism is, and they knew that part of the reason they were doing drafts was to help them avoid plagiarism.  There was no mystery to the process, because I wasn't trying to catch them or trick them.
2. I had unique paper prompts that required writers to synthesize and/or address unusual topics and/or incorporate their own experiences.  This is the number-one way that teachers can avoid cases of plagiarism.  Not having unique assignments that ask students to do something truly unique (like incorporate their personal experiences into their analysis or to analyze things that few other folks would think to analyze) is a good way to avoid getting paper-mill papers.
3. I warn students in the first few days of class that I am a rhetorician with enough training in linguistics that I can analyze their rhetorical/linguistic/discursive fingerprints based on samples of their in-class writing and compare that analysis with a similar analysis of any paper they turn in that I think might be plagiarized.  Armed with forensic linguistics, I would tell them, I could bring charges of plagiarism that would be pretty hard to deny even in the absence of a matching source if the analysis indicates that plagiarism had, indeed, occurred.

But when I did catch students plagiarizing, it was usually because they were:

1. Ignorant about the topic they were to write about.  These were the students who'd bailed on class or hadn't done the readings.  They were stealing other people's ideas (yeah, I said it: stealing) because they didn't have any of their own to put into words.
2. Ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism.  Yes, sometimes you have students (especially from foreign cultures) who just don't understand how our culture defines plagiarism, no matter how much we discuss the basics of plagiarism in class.  They might not realize that it's not okay to take a sentence from a paper they'd written in high school and plop it into a new paper, or that they have to provide actual citations for all materials--directly quoted or otherwise--that didn't come from their own brains or aren't common knowledge.  My response to this was, typically: "Except for common-knowledge issues, if you can cite a source for any idea or words you're writing, then you must."
3. Out of time.  Maybe they knew the material inside and out.  Maybe they knew what plagiarism is.  But maybe they put off writing the paper and just don't have the time to write 6000 words in the next 3 hours or whatever before class, so they decide to lift someone else's ideas or words without proper attribution.  Yikes.  That's why plagiarism penalties exist, indeed.

All of that is understandable, if not always excusable.  We hold students to a high standard, and it's our responsibility as teachers to teach students what those standards are so that students can live up to them.  We're also here to help them do that "living up to" part, too.

Here's the thing: We cannot do that if we, their teachers, are plagiarists.  We have to hold ourselves to the highest standard if we want to be taken seriously.

Who's Afraid of the Humanities?

Nary a month goes by but that there's an op-ed piece in a major newspaper or academic trade publication about how important the humanities are.  Ever wondered why that is?  It's not as if there are op-eds about how unnecessary the humanities are, right?  Well, it's true that after the boom times of the 1990s, university budget cuts struck humanities programs first.  These programs weren't flashy (no robots getting built by philosophy professors, even though their work makes AI possible), they didn't get big grant funds (no pharmaceuticals being created by cultural-studies experts, even though their work informs how we categorize disorders and diseases), and they appeared to be more expensive than they were worth (even though some courses, like first-year writing courses, are huge money-makers for universities, largely because they're so cheap to teach and because students are conscripted into them).  Right before I went on the job market for a tenure-track job, the economy crashed, and English and other humanities departments around the country dried up.  Suddenly, our scholarship wasn't as valuable as it had been; it wasn't worth the same level of investment in the form of professorships and departmental funding.  So it goes.  The humanities really are vulnerable to the money-focused forces that steer contemporary universities. 

The problem isn't that we're not actually valuable.  It's also not that we're not inherently valuable, by which I mean that the humanities aren't valuable for their own sake.  Humanities scholarship is valuable, and humanities scholars have to be able to articulate the nature of that value in order to persuade others of it.  Torrential rainstorms of ink have been spilled in the effort to articulate that value, so I'm going to keep it brief here, but the best reason I can think of to indicate the value of the humanities is this: Imagine that everything we know about human culture didn't get passed down to the next generations.  Imagine that in two generations we don't know anything about what we were doing at any point beyond 200 years ago.  Imagine that we didn't understand anything about ourselves and how we got to where we are.  Sounds dangerous, right?  Not to mention wasteful.  That's what abandoning the humanities means.  We're worth investing time, effort, and, yes, money in.

Self-Plagiarism (Especially in the Humanities) Is Damn Ugly

The following scenario is hypothetical, okay?  But let's say that in the course of being the loving, diligent copyeditor of a book written by a group of smart, capable, insightful scholars in the humanities, I see a bit of code that indicates that a few words have come from an online source.  I used to see this code in my students' papers all the time when they'd copy and paste a quotation from whatever online source they were reading.  With proper attribution, this is not a problem.  In fact, with proper attribution, signal phrases, and fully integrating whatever was copied into their ideas and sentences, the inclusion of those outside words--whether they were copied and pasted or not--would constitute successful academic writing.  The code in and of itself wasn't the problem for my students.

So let's say I decide, "Well, I better double check that these words don't need to be cited, since they seem to be copied and pasted."  Because the words aren't cited.  Why would they be copied and pasted, then, I might wonder?  Let's say that I then search the interweb for the words, and find that, lo and behold, that exact phrase has already been published in an article on the same topic in a peer-reviewed, academic journal that specializes in publishing information about this topic.  Gasp!  And not cited??  This is not okay!

What I've just described to you in this hypothetical situation is plagiarism.  The author of the chapter hasn't given attribution to the exact wording of a pretty distinctive phrase that comes from another source that, in all likelihood, the author came in contact with in the course of doing research for this article.  Standard plagiarism that an editor can query: "Does this sentence require attribution?  It comes from an outside source.  Please provide complete citation information."

But let's say I look at the byline for the article from which this phrase has been flat-out plagiarized, and I find that the article was written by the same person who's written the chapter that I'm currently copyediting.

Um, no.  No, no, no.  Say it ain't so.  This humanities scholar has self-plagiarized.  This person has just repeated themselves verbatim in a totally new work of "scholarship."  And, let's go to the worst-case scenario: let's say that this person is a rhetoric-and-composition scholar with a tenure-track position and has even written a textbook about academic writing.

Let's say that happened.  Just, like, hypothetically.

This is truly ugly.  It's hypocritical.  It's professional malpractice.  It's self-sabotage.  Any humanities scholar, especially someone who specializes in rhetoric and/or writing, has no excuse.  They have no appeal to any of the three reasons why students might plagiarize.  Let me count the ways:

1. Self-plagiarists in the humanities, especially writing-studies specialists, cannot claim ignorance of the subject matter they're writing about.  Clearly, as someone who's published on this topic before, they should be able to think of new things to say about this topic.  If they can't, they should take several seats and let someone else who has something new and fresh to say have a chance.  But this is one of the many problems of the academy today: publish or perish leads to a glut of echo-chamber publications.  It leads to cliques of scholars publishing each other's scholarship once one of them gets into an editorial position.  Perhaps self-plagiarizing humanities scholars think that no one is actually reading their work, at least not closely, and they'll never get caught.  That's woefully abject in its cynicism.
2. They cannot claim to be ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism.  If you're a professional academic, you've encountered dozens of definitions of plagiarism.  It's your job to enforce plagiarism policies in your classes.  You can't say that you didn't realize that just repeating your own words and not providing a citation to that information is dishonest.  You can't say that you think there's no harm in trying to get ahead in the publish or perish game by cutting corners, by trying to seem as if you've got new, fresh ideas when in fact you're just repeating yourself.  This is why outsiders don't take the humanities seriously.  Things like this.  When we don't actually bring new, worthwhile knowledge to the table.  This is why.  This.
3. They cannot claim to have run out of time.  Behind on that deadline?  Either ask for an extension or sit down and let someone else have a go.  I'm in the middle of an epic battle with myself about whether I'm ever going to get a chapter submitted for a certain edited collection.  But I'm not going to steal someone else's words or try to pass off words that I've already published somewhere else in order to have another publication line on my CV.  Neither would I steal just one sentence.  It's not going to save me that much time.  In the time that I saved by not trying to think of a new way to phrase that same idea, I'm not going to be able to fit in another student advising session or another email or another meeting or time enough to prep a whole class, etc.  It's not saving that much time to self-plagiarize just one line.  So why bother?  It's just lazy and ugly, and it suggests that what we do is cheap and not worthy of building upon.  It suggests that even we "really" know that what we do is just the same thing over and over.  As long as we get the publication glory, right?

So, I'm not saying anything.  I'm just saying.  If you're a scholar in the humanities and you're thinking of self-plagiarizing, don't.  Wait to write when you actually have something new to contribute.  Give someone else a chance, if the best you can do is repeat yourself.  If we're in this cosmic cocktail party together, then just remember that no one likes to chat up the person who just keeps saying the same thing over and over.  What's the point of listening to that?

How to Correct Someone's Usage, or: (Not) Making Usage Great Again

I used to date a philosopher.  He was (is still, I'm sure) brilliant.  I remember having a long, adversarial conversation with him about the use of "beg the question."  In case you don't know--and many people don't--"beg the question" is a technical term.  It's used to refer to a flaw in logic/argumentation in which the assertion you're making essentially assumes that the basis of the assertion is true.  If I say that G-d exists because G-d said "I AM," then I'm begging the question: it's already assumed in my assertion--that G-d said "I AM"--that G-d exists.  (This possible logical fallacy is not a problem for me as a Christian, because I haven't confused logic with faith, and I don't require that my faith be logically sound.  But that's a conversation for another day.)  The philosopher was making what philosophers would call a "strong" claim that anyone who misuses "beg the question" should be corrected lest the phrase lose its meaning because of (but not due to) misuse.  That is, if everyone uses it to mean "presents the question" or "requires you to wonder," then no one will know its (true) technical meaning!!  And how will we sleep at night??

The point I made in response to him was descriptive (though he took it as prescriptive): the phrase is already being misused, so don't get too hung up on correcting everyone, because that's a Sisyphean task. 

The philosopher was not amused.

What is Usage?

Usage has to do with how we use language--from punctuation to turns of phrase--to communicate.  It's governed by convention, not divine law and not dictionaries.  It changes over time.  What you learned about the "right" (read: customary) way to say or write this or that can differ greatly from the way that someone else who lives a few blocks, states, or continents away from you.  I'll never forget telling a flatmate of mine in London to stop talking about her "pants" because the Londoners in the room were getting uncomfortable thinking that she was talking about her underwear (to them, she meant "trousers"). 

Do you have a pet peeve about a phrase that gets commonly misused (or so you think)?  They're everywhere.  Some of my favorite examples:

• "for all intensive purposes" should be "for all intents and purposes"
• "flushed out" should be "fleshed out" ("I fleshed out the details")
• "moment being" should, to my ears, be "time being" ("I'm home, at least for the time being")

Some pet peeves might turn out just to be regional variations that you didn't know about.  My hillbilly kinfolk say "you'ns" to indicate the plural second-person.  Think that's annoying?  Sorry, but it's not wrong, at least not according to certain dialects of regional English.  It's just not customary to use outside of that regional variation.  For all I know, "moment being" might be the same way.

Here's what you can't attribute what you think is a misuse of English to:

• stupidity
• neglect
• moral failure
• an untrained mind
• poor parenting
• economic background
• poor education.

The philosopher was convinced that he had it "right," and he did, in a technical sense.  But people who say "beg the question" in a non-technical sense probably don't have his extensive and excellent training in philosophy.  It's not because they're dumb or lazy or had parents who didn't discipline and/or love them sufficiently.  It's because they just don't know.  People rarely like getting usage wrong; we hang so much judgment on using "correct grammar" (which people usually use incorrectly to refer to both "correct" and "grammar," so add that phrase to my pet peeve list), so it's unlikely that the misuser is doing so on purpose.  Hard to judge someone for not doing something right that they didn't know was wrong.

Correcting Misusers

Oh, wait.  The subheading here and the title of this post kinda beg the question, don't they?  We're assuming that we should correct people who misuse language conventions!  I don't accept that assumption, actually, so let's approach this issue somewhat algorithmically.

How to determine whether you should correct someone's usage:

• The most important question must be: do you know FOR A FACT that the phrase (or whatever) in question has been used in a way that does not adhere to current convention?  Could you point to a passage in a handbook, for example, that unequivocally proves that whatever you're about to lay down a correction for is, in fact, in need of correction?  If not, abandon your intention.  In this case, you do not possess the requisite knowledge, expertise, or validation to issue a correction. 
  • What can you do instead?  At best, you could ask a question: "Oh, that's interesting.  You said 'beg the question.'  I thought it was only used to refer to logical fallacies.  Have I gotten that wrong?"  Always, always assume the position of humility.  Do not ask, "Where did you learn to say it that way?" or "Were you aware that it's actually...?"  Your objective is to make, not alienate, friends, right?
• Is the person you want to correct a loved one to whom you are not a parent?  If yes, then...
  • What can you do?  Don't correct them.  Why would you want to?  Just let them be.  That said, parents get the right to correct their children's everything: behavior, attitudes, use of salad forks, and language.  Parents, you still need to answer question 1 in the affirmative before you correct your kid's language use without an appeal to a handbook or authoritative resource.  But if you think that your kid has misused a phrase or word, you can say, "I don't think that 'beg the question' means what you think it means.  Go get your English handbook [or tablet or dictionary, etc.] and look it up and come tell me what it says."  That way, you'll both learn things!  And you'll be modelling for kiddo that it's okay not to know things and to risk being wrong.  Takes a lot of strength, that.
• Is the person you want to correct someone over whom you have some kind of managerial authority?  That is, you're his boss or you're her mentor or you're their teacher.  In that case...
  • What can you do?  Never, ever, ever correct that person in front of other people.  Again, the less-enlightened among us still judge others for their "correct" usage of conventions.  Be aware of that before you go shaming someone for misusing "flushed out."  That said, in large office settings, if you're the boss, you might be able to get away with a general email that says something like "I want to make sure we're using 'flush out' correctly.  Unless we're talking about plumbing, we ought to avoid it.  Let's make sure we're using 'flesh out' from here on to refer to adding details or looking at additional information.  That'll help us stay consistent across the whole office."  But in individual contexts, I would recommend adding a comment about a misuse as an afterthought to something else: "It really was a great first draft.  I'm glad we've spent the last 30 minutes discussing it.  By the way, before we talk about when we're having our next conversation, I noticed that you use 'flushed out' when I would have used 'fleshed out.'  I looked it up in my usage dictionary, and where you have 'flushed out,' it should be 'fleshed out.'  I wanted to make sure I mention it to you so that you adjust this draft.  It's important to impress your readers, so I wanted to make sure that you've got the tightest prose possible."  Wordy?  Yes.  Tactful?  Mostly.  Better than red ink with no explanation for the correction or why it was important to make?  Totally.
• Is the person a stranger to you?  Then stop.  You'll exhaust yourself trying to be everyone's real-time, flesh-and-blood copyeditor.  It's not your job to make usage great again.  Change comes to all things, and if "flesh out" becomes "flush out," what's the difference?  If "begging the question" has both a technical and a colloquial sense, the Earth will continue to spin around the sun without your correcting this hapless (mis)user.

There are surely other scenarios I'm not thinking of, but the upshot is this: how should you correct someone's usage?  Generally, you shouldn't.  You should only intervene--and then, tactfully and empathetically--when the quality of your/your employee's/your student's/your child's work and/or reputation are at stake.  And that's if and only if you know for sure that the correction you're making is actually a correction and not, say, just your imposition of your own personal standards.

Life's short.  There are some battles worth fighting.  "Begging the question," in most (but not all) circumstances, isn't one of them.

Much Ado about Singular "They"

I promised myself that I'd only spend an hour on this post, because rapid rivers of ink have gushed forth from those smarter and more qualified than I to opine on the matter of the use of singular "they."  But a friend and colleague asked the other day whether it's right or wrong to use the singular "they," so let's have that conversation.

Neither right nor wrong

As with most usage issues in English, it's not as if there's a definitively right or wrong way to use singular "they."  I say that with my descriptivist hat on: I'm trying just to describe how English gets used, not lay down proscriptions about whether it should be used in this way or that.  The "should" approach is called the prescriptivist approach.  We'll get to that.  But the upshot is that you'll never hear me or anyone from the Laughing Saint Editorial's crew say that singular "they" is right or wrong per se.  We're going to talk about whether it's appropriate once we get into the prescriptive side of things later on.

So, what are you going to learn in this post?  A little bit about what other experts say, a little about gender theory, and a little about yourself.

Please ignore Grammar Girl

I've got a post I'm saving up about why Grammar Girl isn't your friend (do you use WebMD instead of a doctor?  No.  So you shouldn't use Grammar Girl and assume you've gotten accurate grammar/usage advice.  I digress).  That said, we do need to start this conversation by looking at what experts (i.e., not Grammar Girl) have said about the use of singular "they," both descriptively and prescriptively.

I'm a rhetorician with a background in linguistics (my dissertation director was a nationally-recognized linguist who helped create the Dictionary of American Regional English, and I have something like a master's worth of coursework in English grammar, including English-language history and functional, cognitive, and generative grammars), which means I think of language/linguistics as the foundation of rhetoric.  Rhetoric is, more or less, how we use communication--verbal and otherwise--to do things.  Note the importance there of the word "use."  "English language usage" refers to customs of language usage, not the rules (flexible and dynamic though they may be) of grammar, which is really about how words get put together to make sense (but whether they achieve some purpose, well, that's a question for rhetoric and usage and style rather than grammar).  Grammar is how the Lego blocks fit together; rhetoric is whether you've used your blocks to make a castle or a bridge and why you'd want to build one or the other.

So, before we can understand whether and how to use (!) singular "they," we have to understand its basis in language and the history of the language.  The fact is that singular "they" has been used in the English language since before "correct spelling" was a thing.  There's something like four centuries of time lag between the two, actually: singular "they" is at least as old as the 14th century, and spelling and other matters of language use were being codified in the 18th and 19th centuries.  That's just the descriptive facts.  So the historical argument suggests that there's precedent both for using singular "they" and for not using it, as language standards started to be implemented.

Since history won't save you, how about the brain?  Here's a great analysis from the Bible of approachable linguistics scholarly news, Language Log, about how using the singular "they" has been shown to require increased processing time (meaning: it does seem to take a handful of milliseconds longer to understand what "they" or "their" refers to when it refers to a singular noun).  But we're talking about milliseconds, not a complete breakdown in semantics (how sentences make meaning).  So cognitive arguments aren't going to save you, either, because it would be patently risible to claim that understanding singular "they" creates such a significant cognitive burden that singular "they" should never be used.

What about semantics, though?  Can you argue that the use of singular "they" creates vagueness in sentences that can't be overcome?  Actually, I think this is the best argument against using it.  Note that the sentence "The student took their book to class" makes perfect sense to some folks.  To me, it causes at least momentary confusion: Wait, did this person intend to use "their"?  Are we suddenly talking about some other group of people?  Did I miss the change in subject or meaning?  Grammatically, we can change the rules (or change them back) such that "they" is officially alright to use in singular contexts, but just like I have to read some sentences a couple of times before I understand whether "read" is past or present tense, I might have to read a sentence that uses singular "they" a couple of times before I'm assured of whom we're talking about, and there might still be some ambiguity.  Furthermore, at the moment, we don't allow for "themself," which would be the singular reflexive form of the plural pronoun, which suggests to me that we're still not there, descriptively, when it comes to the singular use of the plural pronoun.  I could be asking for too much (we use "themselves" as the singular reflexive instead), but I think that when we get to "themself," we'll be fully in singular "they" semantics.  Right now, we're not.

On the ground

That said, when it comes to language use on the ground, some folks use singular "they" to promote a gender-neutral perspective.  In many ways, I support this, but that's not my only reason for using singular "they," though I don't use it all that often (see the semantic argument against it, above).  That said, I do use singular "they" not only in speech but occasionally in my Oratoria posts and elsewhere.  There are good reasons to use singular "they," just a few of which include:

1. Respecting other people's wishes when it comes to the pronouns they prefer.  Don't be a self-righteous jerk: if someone asks that you use "she" or "they" or "he," just do your best to do that.  There's no reason to make a big deal about it.  If that person changes their (!) mind about it later (an argument I've heard against having to keep up with personal pronoun choices), what's it to you?  You can be forgiven slip-ups, in that case, but remember that most of the time, making that kind of change isn't something an individual takes lightly, so don't plan on being asked to adjust more than once per person.
2. Accepting linguistic (and social) change.  It's not so much that words change, but our use of and rules for them change.  Happens all the time.  Don't imagine that you've got the form of English that G-d loves best.  Unless you've got some stone tablets lying about that you wanna tell us about, and those tablets are about grammar and usage, there's no reason to be upset about language change.  Unless you're trying to use language as a tool of oppression or control, that is.
3. It fits the context you're writing or speaking for.  If I'm editing a blog post written for a website geared to people in their teens, I'm giving a pass to singular "they."  If I'm editing a book written by one of my clients in the business world, there shall be no singular "they" if I have anything to say about it.  The Chicago Manual of Style is unequivocal about their rejection of singular "they" (I have to believe it's because it occasionally creates ambiguities that can't be resolved semantically/grammatically), for example.  So is The New Yorker.  As a rule, for me, I decide to allow singular "they" if and only if:
   1. It doesn't create ambiguities that can't be resolved easily by the reader
   2. The applicable style guide allows for it
   3. The audience is likely not to have a fit about it
   4. The writer wrote it (i.e., I won't go adding it where it isn't already).

So, it's not as if this is a right-or-wrong issue.  It's really a matter of rhetoric: how do you plan to use singular "they," and why?  Will it work in your specific context?  Those are the salient questions.