Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

thebigcheese wrote:Under no circumstances were we allowed to use adverbs. Or be verbs. Ever.

I am really curious about this restriction. (I'm also a little surprised Katya didn't ask about this, but maybe she was trying to limit her rants? ) I will not pretend to be anything like a linguistics expert, but I will say that good writing often features both be verbs and adverbs. Just check the writing of well-respected writers (say, Shakespeare or Milton). (I can provide examples, if anyone would like.)

Frankly, although it sounds like your teacher was astounding in general, this particular rule sounds like a perfect example of what Language Log would classify as prescriptivist poppycock (an actual tag they mark some posts with). I'm not trying to offend you or to insult her, so hopefully I haven't upset you, but...it bugs me when I hear about this kind of thing being promulgated. Not as much as it bugs Katya, probably, but it does bother me. And she is very free to step in and tell me off if I'm mistaken about any of this.

Maybe your teacher noticed her students tended to overuse be verbs and adverbs, and went overboard with her absolute proscription?

(Oh, and if moderators feel like this should be a separate topic, I'm fine with splitting it out into its own thread.)

I think it is close enough to the root topic to stay.

It is specifically about how English writing is taught in this country, and I agree that many "rules" are arbitrary and not based on good writing principles, in general.

Story time. I went through three English teachers in my junior year of high school. The first was a new teacher, whom most of the students loved. She was a "fun" teacher, and, uh, a little attractive as well. Unfortunately, she was not a very good teacher. I challenged several of her prohibitions, and she was very uncomfortable with that, feeling it was a "challenge of her authority." Under the advice of her mentor (another more seasoned teacher. It is very common, at least in the district where I attended, to assign new teachers mentors to help them adjust) she transferred me out of her class, much to my frustration, as she was the only teacher who tought the honors course.

I was transferred into another English class. This teacher was also very frustrated with me (the only two, I think, in my entire high school career) and frequently failed me on assignments. She would even question my usage of words (the one instantiated that I recall was "deference") and mark me off for their usage. I would then go to my chess club advisor, an English teacher himself, who would laugh and tell me that I had used the word or words correctly. He would recommend I would go talk to her, but this never produced good results. On one particular paper, I was given an F. I took this paper, unmarked, to him and one other English teacher whom I was taking another subject from, and gave them the rubric which I was given, requesting that they grade it based on that rubric. Both teachers gave me an A. I voluntarily transferred out of this class at the semester's end.

I transferred into the class of the other teacher who graded my paper (not my advisor) as she was the only other teacher who taught English that hour. She and I already had somewhat of a relationship from that other class, but worked even better together in that one. It became one of my best class experience in the whole three years. One day I mentioned, after class, that I was glad that I had gotten her, as my English experience that year had been less than favorable. She asked what had happened, I told her, and she asked who my previous two teachers were.

I told her, and she laughed and apologized, telling me that she was the mentor of the first teacher, who had advised that I be transferred. She then told me that I was one of the best students she had, and that she always enjoyed my papers, and thought that I would have a great career as a writer. She is partially the reason why I am majoring in English in college.

And all of this is to say that student initiative is not the only problem with the education system, and particularly in the humanities there is a great variance in the quality of educators.

Laser Jock wrote:

thebigcheese wrote:Under no circumstances were we allowed to use adverbs. Or be verbs. Ever.

I am really curious about this restriction. (I'm also a little surprised Katya didn't ask about this, but maybe she was trying to limit her rants? ) I will not pretend to be anything like a linguistics expert, but I will say that good writing often features both be verbs and adverbs. Just check the writing of well-respected writers (say, Shakespeare or Milton). (I can provide examples, if anyone would like.)

Frankly, although it sounds like your teacher was astounding in general, this particular rule sounds like a perfect example of what Language Log would classify as prescriptivist poppycock (an actual tag they mark some posts with). I'm not trying to offend you or to insult her, so hopefully I haven't upset you, but...it bugs me when I hear about this kind of thing being promulgated. Not as much as it bugs Katya, probably, but it does bother me. And she is very free to step in and tell me off if I'm mistaken about any of this.

Maybe your teacher noticed her students tended to overuse be verbs and adverbs, and went overboard with her absolute proscription?

(Oh, and if moderators feel like this should be a separate topic, I'm fine with splitting it out into its own thread.)

Reading back over that again, I probably overemphasized the extent of this particular rule. We were strongly, strongly discouraged from using adverbs (notice the irony there) because they tend to water down your writing more than they help to emphasize a point. Instead, we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever. We were discouraged from using be verbs (more irony) because that forced us to use active voice. I suspect that she may have been using overemphasis as a teaching tool. If you are forced to write in this particular style, you have to actually think about the words you're using, instead of just writing how you talk. Either way, I felt like my writing benefited tremendously. Do I still write exactly that way? No, not exactly. But I feel like I learned the principle well enough that I've become really particular about things like diction and syntax.

Now that I've broken all of those rules, I also feel compelled to say that I only use these rules in formal settings. So don't judge my writing based on the stuff I've written here

Marduk: I feel like I can relate to your stories, since I had a few run-ins with teachers myself over rules that didn't make sense.

thebigcheese: fair enough. I think that everemphasis can be a valid tool. And I appreciated your irony.

Laser Jock wrote:

thebigcheese wrote:Under no circumstances were we allowed to use adverbs. Or be verbs. Ever.

I am really curious about this restriction. (I'm also a little surprised Katya didn't ask about this, but maybe she was trying to limit her rants? )

I didn't respond because I was too busy crying into a glass of club soda on the rocks.

OK. Here's the thing about style rules. A style rule is like the "hypothesis" portion of the scientific method. In order for the scientific method to work properly (i.e., in order for people's writing to improve), you have to be able to test your hypothesis / rule and then evaluate it.

Testing is pretty simple. We're always writing in school (and elsewhere), anyway, so you just write something that follows the rule or you write something that doesn't.

Evaluation is a whole different matter. You have to be able to evaluate what you've written to see if your rule did, indeed, produce superior results and you have to be able to identify counterexamples (times when following the rule produced inferior results or times when breaking the rule produced superior results) and then you have to be able to refine the rule you've learned, based on your experimentation and evaluation. But from an even more basic perspective, in order to evaluate a rule, you have to be able to understand the rule in the first place, which means being able to understand the individual concepts mentioned in the rule, as well as the overall intent of the rule.

It's this last step, and especially the last part I mentioned, that is utterly, utterly broken in English teaching. (And it may be broken all over the world, for all I know. It's hard to teach people to be aware of, alter, and evaluate their native language.)

So, I can more or less get behind the idea that we shouldn't "water down our writing" and I can definitely get behind not overusing "really." (And I can even get behind the idea of doing something so radical as eliminating adverbs as an experimental technique designed to make writers very aware of the language they use, although I wouldn't advocate it as a general technique any more than I'd advocate writing only in lipograms.)

But here's my real question for you, big cheese: Can you identify all of the adverbs in the following quote? (I'd say there's room for debate or alternate analysis regarding some of the words; I'd be interested to know which words you find debatable, as well.)

thebigcheese wrote:Reading back over that again, I probably overemphasized the extent of this particular rule. We were strongly, strongly discouraged from using adverbs (notice the irony there) because they tend to water down your writing more than they help to emphasize a point. Instead, we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever. We were discouraged from using be verbs (more irony) because that forced us to use active voice. I suspect that she may have been using overemphasis as a teaching tool. If you are forced to write in this particular style, you have to actually think about the words you're using, instead of just writing how you talk. Either way, I felt like my writing benefited tremendously. Do I still write exactly that way? No, not exactly. But I feel like I learned the principle well enough that I've become really particular about things like diction and syntax.

Now that I've broken all of those rules, I also feel compelled to say that I only use these rules in formal settings. So don't judge my writing based on the stuff I've written here

In response to your (rhetorical?) question about the proliferance of native-language analysis, I'd like to point out that both French and Spanish have governing bodies that actively regulate the usage of both the spoken and written form of their respective languages, which lends itself to "rule analysis" much, much better than in English, where no such dogmatic body exists.

Marduk wrote:In response to your (rhetorical?) question about the proliferance of native-language analysis, I'd like to point out that both French and Spanish have governing bodies that actively regulate the usage of both the spoken and written form of their respective languages, which lends itself to "rule analysis" much, much better than in English, where no such dogmatic body exists.

In response to your response, I'd like you to provide an example of a case where any such government body enacted linguistic legislation that had a significant effect on the spoken or written language of the body of people over which they had jurisdiction. (I hereby set aside spelling reform, changes in alphabet, or changes in punctuation as special cases which are inherently prescriptivist, and are therefore not examples of regulating natural language in any meaningful way.)

Katya wrote:

Marduk wrote:In response to your (rhetorical?) question about the proliferance of native-language analysis, I'd like to point out that both French and Spanish have governing bodies that actively regulate the usage of both the spoken and written form of their respective languages, which lends itself to "rule analysis" much, much better than in English, where no such dogmatic body exists.

In response to your response, I'd like you to provide an example of a case where any such government body enacted linguistic legislation that had a significant effect on the spoken or written language of the body of people over which they had jurisdiction. (I hereby set aside spelling reform, changes in alphabet, or changes in punctuation as special cases which are inherently prescriptivist, and are therefore not examples of regulating natural language in any meaningful way.)

i know the french created a new word for email to avoid allowing an english word to slip into their language (though whether or not the french people picked up that word in daily usage is another thing entirely).

Katya wrote:But here's my real question for you, big cheese: Can you identify all of the adverbs in the following quote? (I'd say there's room for debate or alternate analysis regarding some of the words; I'd be interested to know which words you find debatable, as well.)

I suddenly feel a little intimidated...are you an English major? These are the ones I'm pretty sure about:

thebigcheese wrote:Reading back over that again, I probably overemphasized the extent of this particular rule. We were strongly, strongly discouraged from using adverbs (notice the irony there) because they tend to water down your writing more than they help to emphasize a point. Instead, we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever. We were discouraged from using be verbs (more irony) because that forced us to use active voice. I suspect that she may have been using overemphasis as a teaching tool. If you are forced to write in this particular style, you have to actually think about the words you're using, instead of just writing how you talk. Either way, I felt like my writing benefited tremendously. Do I still write exactly that way? No, not exactly. But I feel like I learned the principle well enough that I've become really particular about things like diction and syntax.

Now that I've broken all of those rules, I also feel compelled to say that I only use these rules in formal settings. So don't judge my writing based on the stuff I've written here

Now, I'm less confident about the phrases and clauses (and I think that's just being picky). I might be totally off on some of these, but here's my list of maybes:

thebigcheese wrote:Reading back over that again, I probably overemphasized the extent of this particular rule. We were strongly, strongly discouraged from using adverbs (notice the irony there) because they tend to water down your writing more than they help to emphasize a point. Instead, we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever. We were discouraged from using be verbs (more irony) because that forced us to use active voice. I suspect that she may have been using overemphasis as a teaching tool. If you are forced to write in this particular style, you have to actually think about the words you're using, instead of just writing how you talk. Either way, I felt like my writing benefited tremendously. Do I still write exactly that way? No, not exactly. But I feel like I learned the principle well enough that I've become really particular about things like diction and syntax.

Now that I've broken all of those rules, I also feel compelled to say that I only use these rules in formal settings. So don't judge my writing based on the stuff I've written here

Now, I should admit that this exercise got me thinking a little bit. Perhaps it's a bit harsh to rule out all adverbs. A better rule might be: don't use adverbs for emphasis when you can be more concise. For example, if you can drop the adverb and use a stronger verb without changing the meaning.

thebigcheese wrote:... we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever...

My mother is an English major and one of her English professors taught that whenever you are tempted to use the word 'really' to instead use 'damn'.

I think that has forever colored my diction.

Imogen wrote:

Katya wrote:

Marduk wrote:In response to your (rhetorical?) question about the proliferance of native-language analysis, I'd like to point out that both French and Spanish have governing bodies that actively regulate the usage of both the spoken and written form of their respective languages, which lends itself to "rule analysis" much, much better than in English, where no such dogmatic body exists.

In response to your response, I'd like you to provide an example of a case where any such government body enacted linguistic legislation that had a significant effect on the spoken or written language of the body of people over which they had jurisdiction. (I hereby set aside spelling reform, changes in alphabet, or changes in punctuation as special cases which are inherently prescriptivist, and are therefore not examples of regulating natural language in any meaningful way.)

i know the french created a new word for email to avoid allowing an english word to slip into their language (though whether or not the french people picked up that word in daily usage is another thing entirely).

Exactly. Was the English word for email in wide use before the introduction of "courrier électronique"? Was there a marked dropoff after the introduction of the word? Were there different effects for French speakers living in different countries? (There are a lot of French speakers in the world, and any governmental linguistic entity is going to have jurisdiction over only a small part of them.)

Actually, the French Wikipedia has a good section on the usage of different terms, here. Roughly, it says that the vocabulary surrounding email isn't fixed in Europe and that speakers use various terms. In France, the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France* prescribes the use of "courrier électronique" in official documents, but that doesn't mean it's had a significant effect on the general population.

*The better-known Académie Française doesn't actually have any legal power, even over government publications.

thebigcheese wrote:I suddenly feel a little intimidated...are you an English major?

Worse, linguistics major. ("All shall love me and despair!")

English majors, stereotypically, have a lot of rules memorized, but don't actually know much about language analysis. BYU Linguistics majors, on the other hand, can't graduate without passing a fairly rigorous syntax class.

However, my intention wasn't to intimidate. (Using language knowledge to intimidate people is one of the worst forms of bullying, in my opinion.) I merely wanted to illustrate out that you (the general "you," not you, specifically) can't even claim to follow a writing rule if you don't have the tools to analyze your writing.

This:

thebigcheese wrote:Now, I should admit that this exercise got me thinking a little bit. Perhaps it's a bit harsh to rule out all adverbs. A better rule might be: don't use adverbs for emphasis when you can be more concise. For example, if you can drop the adverb and use a stronger verb without changing the meaning.

is all I wanted. Hypothesis, testing, analysis, new hypothesis.

Do you want my analysis of the adverbs in the quote, anyway?

Sure. How'd I do?

Utah doesn't teach grammar. I only guessed about half the adverbs because ... I guessed them. I'd love to see what you say, Katya.

(Well, I shouldn't say the whole state doesn't teach grammar. But I sure didn't learn it.)

Katya, what about modern Hebrew? Since their language is based off of biblical Hebrew, and there are lots of words today that, well, aren't in the Bible, they have a committee whose job it is to make up new words. Like the word for computer is an intensified version of "to think". (Best description of intensifying I can think of is when you intensify, "to break" you get, "to shatter.") From what I understand, they are official authority on the modern Hebrew language.

Well, the first thing to say is that English majors tend to look at grammar differently from Linguistics majors, so I'm kind of going back and forth between both systems. In linguistics, we look at grammar from a very functional perspective, while classical grammar is more about creating a fixed set of categories and fitting words into those categories as best possible.

Reading back over that again, I probably overemphasized the extent of this particular rule. We were strongly, strongly discouraged from using adverbs (notice the irony there) because they tend to water down your writing more than they help to emphasize a point. Instead, we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever. We were discouraged from using be verbs (more irony) because that forced us to use active voice. I suspect that she may have been using overemphasis as a teaching tool. If you are forced to write in this particular style, you have to actually think about the words you're using, instead of just writing how you talk. Either way, I felt like my writing benefited tremendously. Do I still write exactly that way? No, not exactly. But I feel like I learned the principle well enough that I've become really particular about things like diction and syntax.

Now that I've broken all of those rules, I also feel compelled to say that I only use these rules in formal settings. So don't judge my writing based on the stuff I've written here

red words - Adverbs that are formed regularly from adjectives by adding an "-ly" suffix. (That said, "really" and "only" are such common words that most English speakers probably don't associate them with "real" and "one.") I'm thinking that these are the ones your English teacher wanted you to avoid (when they modified verbs, at least).

green words - Adverbs not formed regularly from adjectives. (Such adverbs are typically very old in English, although the one formed from a preposition + a noun is more recent.)

blue words - In linguistics we'd call these particles. (Many of them are words that can also be prepositions, but prepositions and particles behave quite differently.) In classical grammar, they're called adverbs because they accompany verbs and because there's no separate category for particles. Linguists consider particles different from adverbs because they behave differently in terms of placement (adverb placement is quite fluid, while particles have to follow verbs, and may follow or precede objects) and because they can significantly alter the meaning of a verb, instead of just modifying it somewhat. I thought I saw another particle when I first read through this, but now I can't find it.

orange words - Words that I'm not sure about. (I'd have to think more about these or poll a bunch of my language-loving friends to see if any of them can think of good tests to run on them.)

purple words - Words that I don't think are adverbs, with explanation:

"instead of" - "Instead," by itself, is pretty obviously an adverb. It's a single word that modifies an entire sentence or clause, which can be interpreted as modifying the main verb in that sentence or clause. You can also grammatically switch it out with something like "however," a word that is unquestionably an adverb.

However (!), when you put "instead" in front of "of," it starts behaving very differently. For starters, prepositional phrases don't modify adverbs, and there's no other nearby verb, noun, or determiner (= linguistics term roughly equivalent to pronouns), for it to modify. And notice that you can't switch it out with the adverb "however" and have the phrase make sense, but you can switch out with the prepositional phrase "in place." (E.g., "Instead of saying X, Y, Z . . ." "In place of saying X, Y, Z . . .") So, I'd argue that "instead" before "of" is a preposition and a noun that happen to be written as one word. (Historically, "instead" was written as two separate words, and the adverb "instead" definitely comes from the phrase "in stead," but in modern English, the adverb "instead" behaves differently from the "instead" in front of "of.") Of course, classical grammar people want each word to fit into one category, and "prepositional phrase" is not an option, so I don't know what they'd do with "instead" in front of "of." But I do know that it fails all the tests I can think of for adverbs.

"all of those rules" - My gut says that "all" is a determiner, which is basically the linguistics category that comprises pronouns (and articles). However, the OED is trying to convince me that it's an adjective or a noun, which I'm not buying. Regardless, it's failing the tests for adverbs.

"this particular rule" - "This" is a determiner. The OED calls it (*sigh*) an adjective. For it to be functioning as an adverb, it would have to be in a phrase like "walk this far" or "be this tall."

As for the phrases, you've pulled out what linguists would call inflectional phrases (the phrases starting with an infinitive) and a couple of prepositional phrases. If memory serves, classical grammar is fond of all kinds of special adverbial phrases, and I'm not sure if these would qualify or not. Linguists name a phrase by the function of the head word of the phrase, not by the function of the phrase overall.

Fun times! And I should say that you caught several adverbs I missed in my first reading, so I definitely had the advantage of making you go first. Now I will probably dream of adverbs, tonight.

Tao wrote:

thebigcheese wrote:... we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever...

My mother is an English major and one of her English professors taught that whenever you are tempted to use the word 'really' to instead use 'damn'.

Was this at BYU? I've heard the same story from someone else.

C is for wrote:Utah doesn't teach grammar. I only guessed about half the adverbs because ... I guessed them. I'd love to see what you say, Katya.

(Well, I shouldn't say the whole state doesn't teach grammar. But I sure didn't learn it.)

All the grammar I learned (in Utah) was from studying foreign languages and from linguistics classes in college.

Dragon Lady wrote:Katya, what about modern Hebrew? Since their language is based off of biblical Hebrew, and there are lots of words today that, well, aren't in the Bible, they have a committee whose job it is to make up new words. Like the word for computer is an intensified version of "to think". (Best description of intensifying I can think of is when you intensify, "to break" you get, "to shatter.") From what I understand, they are official authority on the modern Hebrew language.

Modern Hebrew is a really interesting case, because it's arguably an artificial language that became a natural language and because I'm guessing there are very few monolingual Hebrew speakers out there. I'd be interested to see studies of what word Hebrew speakers used for "computer" before the committee came up with one and what word(s) are commonly used now. However, I may have to admit that, for a small group of bilingual people who speak a language which was artificially reconstructed, a national entity may very well be able to determine what word they're going to use in some cases. (Sort of like how the Klingon Language Institute comes up with official translations for English words into Klingon. )

My larger point (which seems to have been swallowed up in this side discussion), is that I don't think that speakers of Hebrew or French or Spanish are necessarily better at analyzing their own language in terms of syntax (grammar), even though they have national entities that are supposed to regulate language.

And you don't need to have a national regulating body to be able to do some sort of basic language analysis or word substitution. If you were told that the words "spud" and "spudly," for instance, were terribly offensive in Idaho, and that you really needed to say "potato" and "potato-like," most English speakers could do that without having to sit down and analyze the class of word they were replacing. It seems to me that that's about all that the national language agencies are ever accomplishing, and on a very limited scale, at that.

I can't believe you just said "spudly" on a public forum! [gasp!] I am soooooo offended.