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The Ethics of Editing Student Essays

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:33:39 +0000

How far should we go when editing someone else's prose--in particular, the work of a student applying for admission to a college or university? To put it another way, when does editing cross an ethical boundary and turn into co-writing or ghostwriting?

In his New York Times column a couple of years ago, "freelance ethicist" Randy Cohen considered one teacher's dilemma:

As a high-school English teacher, I am frequently asked to proofread and make rewriting suggestions for students' college-application essays. I decline on the grounds that admissions officers assume that these essays accurately represent the students' work. Other teachers argue that our students lose the editing advantage many students receive. Is it ethical for me to read student essays?
("No Edit," The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2007)

It's an issue that concerns parents as well as teachers: should we go ahead and correct the problems we spot in a student's personal statement, or merely point them out?

Without hesitating, Cohen advocated a non-invasive approach:

A teacher may read student essays but not write them. You should eschew anything as hands-on as editing or proofreading and instead find ways to guide students toward producing first-rate work that is their own. . . . That is, help a student identify a problem, but let the student solve it.

But not everyone agrees. Certainly not the owners of online editing services, where, for $640 ($830 if it's a rush job), a student can receive what one outfit calls the Complete Package: "an upfront, wide-ranging interview, an outline, and after you write it, editing your essay."

Or consider the kind of assistance provided by the "Ivy-League educated editors and writers" at another site, the "best admission essay and personal statement development service on the Web":

Our most popular service, and the most unique offering of its kind on the Internet, our custom model essay development service provides you with an actual model essay drafted from scratch, completely tailored to your own personal facts. Through our proprietary Biograph(TM) process, our experienced writers gather all your pertinent personal facts, and turn them into a completely unique, one-of-a-kind model essay or personal statement.

With that kind of service available (and with career goals and scholarships at stake), is it naive--or perhaps even unfair--to keep our fingers off the keyboard and deprive students of the "editing advantage"?

Of course the guiding hand of a teacher or parent is not the same as a ghostwritten essay or a major revision peddled by a pricey (and dicey) editing outfit. But where do we draw the line? At what point does guiding turn into rewriting? What's the fair way to respond to a student's request for help--and what's the right thing to do?

We'd like to hear your thoughts on the ethics of editing student work. Just click on "comments" below.

More About Composing and Editing:

Image: Randy Cohen, ethics columnist for The New York Times and author of The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell Right From Wrong in Everyday Situations (Doubleday, 2002)

The Ethics of Editing Student Essays originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 06:33:39.

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Unfriend: Oxford USA's Word of the Year for 2009

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:21:35 +0000

The season of dubious annual honors is upon us, and blogs will soon be clogged with top-ten lists of the best and worst of the year: books, movies, iPhone apps, national health-care plans, excessively mourned celebrities, and--who knows--maybe presidential birthplace conspiracies.

Exercises in silliness? Of course. Shameless marketing schemes meant to stir up heated, meaningless debates? Definitely. Far too trivial for us to bother with? Well, sure--that is, unless the schemes have something to do with the English language.

For that reason alone I feel compelled to pass along the news that on Monday the editors of The New Oxford American Dictionary announced--without a trace of embarrassment--that Oxford's Word of the Year for 2009 is . . . unfriend:

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal."
(OUP Blog, Oxford University Press USA)

"Lex-appeal," maybe--but unfriend is not exactly a neologism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (or as some might say, the real OED), the noun unfriend dates back to Middle English: "a person who is not a friend or on friendly terms; an enemy."

Among countless other places, it shows up in Swinburne's play Bothwell ("With God to friend or unfriend, quick or dead"), Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped ("I am no unfriend to plainness"), and Kipling's novel Kim ("They were unfriends of mine"). In his 1961 autobiography, Headlines All My Life, British journalist Arthur Christiansen insisted that "'Unfriend' is a fine word (it means, I was told, just something short of 'Public Enemy')."

So rather than describe unfriend as a new word, it would be more accurate to say that it has undergone a conversion (from one part of speech to another)--an experience also known, more painfully, as a functional shift.

In any case, you may choose to follow the advice of my third-grade teacher: "Use this word in a sentence three times, and make it your own."

Or you might prefer to dip into Oxford's list of runners-up and pick an alternative nonce word or blend:

funemployed: taking advantage of one's newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

tramp stamp: a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman

choice mom: a person who chooses to be a single mother

intexticated: distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

sexting: the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

birther: a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama's birth certificate

deleb: a dead celebrity

Stay tuned: in a week or so, Merriam-Webster will be announcing its word of the year. Until then, let's try to curb our unbridled cynicism.

More Words About Words:

Image: The New Oxford American Dictionary, second edition, 2005

Unfriend: Oxford USA's Word of the Year for 2009 originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 05:21:35.

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Serial Commas on the Loose

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:05:24 +0000

The New Yorker magazine, The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and most book publishers in the U.S. favor the serial comma. The New York Times, the Guide to Canadian English Usage, most British writers and publishers and The AP Stylebook make a practice of omitting the serial (or Oxford) comma unless it's needed to avoid ambiguity.

Authors, publishers(,) and style guides have long disagreed about the need for a comma before the final and in a list. In the September 1894 issue of The Writer magazine, editor William H. Hills illustrated the value of the serial comma:

The necessity of using the comma after the next to the last of three or more adjectives in succession, when the last two are connected by a conjunction, was pointed out by E. Lincoln Kellogg in the July Writer. An excellent illustration of the rule is afforded by the following sentence, which I came across in a story yesterday: "He was a noble fellow--wonderfully versatile, brave, and generous to a fault." If you omit the comma after "brave," you say that the hero in question was brave to a fault, which is not what the author meant.

Again, take this sentence: "For dinner he had lobster and vinegar, and cherries, and terrapin, and bread and milk." All the commas used are absolutely essential, to give an accurate idea of the tempting repast. It will be observed that the use of "and" does not make the commas unnecessary, a sufficient answer to the assertion sometimes made that the comma after the second adjective in a group of three of which the last two are connected by "and " is unnecessary because the "and" takes the place of it.
w. в. н.

For what it's worth, we agree with Mr. Hills. Unless you're employed by an American newspaper or writing for publication in Canada, Australia, or the U.K., make the most of the serial comma. As New Yorker editor Harold Ross once said in its (and his) defense, "We're right, and all the rest are wrong."

For further discussion of this persistently controversial mark, please see What Is the Oxford (or Serial) Comma?

More About Punctuation:

Serial Commas on the Loose originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 00:05:24.

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Jonathan Swift on Writing and Revising

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:06:04 +0000

Consult yourself, and if you find
A powerful impulse urge your mind,
Impartial judge within your breast
What subject you can manage best;
Whether your genius most inclines
To satire, praise, or hum'rous lines,
To elegies in mournful tone,
Or prologue sent from hand unknown.
Then, rising with Aurora's light,
The Muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your head, and bite your nails.
(Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody," published on December 31, 1733)

More by Jonathan Swift:

Jonathan Swift on Writing and Revising originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 00:06:04.

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Is Spelling Reform a Shovel-Ready Project?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:50:50 +0000

In response to our recent article on the alphabet ("From A to Z"), an astute reader observed that English spelling was overdue for reform:

It could be down to my lack of understanding of how the English language works, but if words were to be taken just on the basis of the way they sound, it seems English actually could benefit from introduction of marks of accents, or diacritics, [as in the] case of some alphabets; for example, car and cat, jar and rat, but and put, and most probably many more.

It seems that an investment of time and money officially would just not be out of place in order to systematically incorporate all the sounds and make it easier to pronounce such words rather than having to rely on rote learning.

Our friend isn't the first to point out the peculiarities of English spelling (see Gerard Nolst Trenit�'s poem "The Chaos") or the advantages of aligning spelling with pronunciation.

For centuries the hybrid orthography of English (largely the result of the collision of two distinct spelling systems--those of Old English and Norman French) has inspired countless reformers to concoct new phonologically based alphabets. Benjamin Franklin, for example, suggested replacing the letters c, j, q, w, x and y with two new vowels and four new consonants. George Bernard Shaw championed an alphabet made up of 40 letters. More recently, the Simplified Spelling Society has endorsed a system known as Cut Spelling, wich removs redundnt letrs.

Noah Webster's Spelling Campaign

So far, the only remotely influential exponent of spelling reform in English has been the American lexicographer Noah Webster. Four decades before publishing the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), Webster spelled out a plan to renovate American English:

The principal alterations, necessary to render our orthography sufficiently regular and easy, are these:

The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.

A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound, for one that is more vague and indeterminate. Thus by putting ee instead of ea or ie, the words mean, near, speak grieve, zeal, would become meen, neer, speek, greev, zeel. This alteration could not occasion a moments trouble; at the same time it would prevent a doubt respecting the pronunciation; whereas the ea and ie having different sounds, may give a learner much difficulty. Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught. In this manner ch in Greek derivatives, should be changed into k; for the English ch has a soft sound, as in cherish; but k always a hard sound. Therefore character, chorus, cholic, architecture, should be written karacter, korus, kolic, arkitecture; and were they thus written, no person could mistake their true pronunciation.

Thus ch in French derivatives should be changed into sh; machine, chaise, chevalier, should be written masheen, shaze, shevaleer; and pique, tour, oblique, should be written peek, toor, obleek.

A trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel . . . might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the dipthong [sic] ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.
These, with a few other inconsiderable alterations, would answer every purpose, and render the orthography sufficiently correct and regular.
(Noah Webster, "An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation" in Dissertations on the English Language, 1789)

As you've probably noticed, only a small number of Webster's proposed spellings were ever adopted. Masheen and dawter quickly came to grief (never greef), but plow and draft have endured in American English. And it's true that most of the distinctive features of American spelling (such as the missing u in words like honor and favor) can be credited to the influence of Webster's best-selling Grammatical Institute of the English Language (popularly known as the "Blue-Backed Speller").

Kash for Konsonants?

But let's return to our reader's recommendation that "time and money" be "officially" invested in spelling reform. Before you scoff, consider that over the past century government-supported reforms of this kind have been carried out successfully in Germany, Austria, the old Soviet Union, the Netherlands, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

Now, with the global expansion of English as a lingua franca and unemployment in double digits, has the time for spelling reform come round at last? Are we ready to put the legion of laid-off journalists and phoneticians back to work sounding out alternative spelling schemes? Do we have the collective will to implement a system in which the digraph ou represents just one sound, not six or seven (young, though, through, thought, out, enough, lough)? Can we at last overcome our sentimental attachment to what Mark Twain called our "rotten spelling" and that "foolish" and "drunken old alphabet"?

Probably not. But let's hear your thoughts on the subject of spelling reform. Just klik on th koments butn belo.

More About English Spelling:

Image: Noah Webster (1758-1843)

Is Spelling Reform a Shovel-Ready Project? originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 03:50:50.

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A Passing Tense

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:59:00 +0000

Last week's episode of the HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm opened with a shot of Larry David, his cousin Andy, and Larry's father, Nat David, standing in front of Adele David's tombstone, which read:

Born
Sept 18, 1920

Past Away
Oct 21, 2001

Larry: "Past away"? P-a-s-t? Dad, you spelled "passed" wrong. It's not spelled p-a-s-t. "Passed away": p-a-s-s-e-d.
Nat: I know how to spell it. It's $50 a letter.
Larry: You spelled it wrong on purpose to save $100?
Nat: Yes. Why not? It's the same meaning. Everyone knows what it means.
Andy: It's not the same meaning.
Larry: You saved $100? Well, I would have paid for it. Are you kidding?
Nat: Well, I didn't ask you because I didn't want to bother you. That was the whole idea.
Andy: That's not the nicest way to honor your wife.
Larry: I'm sorry. I have to change this. You got the name of the stonemason?
Nat: Yes, I have the name of the stonemason.
Larry: I'm gonna change this. I'm gonna spell it the right way.
(Episode 67, "The Black Swan," first broadcast on November 1, 2009)

By the end of the episode--after Larry has quarreled with a waiter, killed a black swan, and insulted the stonemason--the marker has been corrected, though with language that can't be repeated with children in the room.

Now here's the funny thing. Though the distinction that Larry draws between the homophones passed and past is correct in our own time, a century or two back Nat could have gotten away with his miserly misspelling. Both words are derived from the verb pass, and at one time past was commonly used for the past tense and the past participle. The editors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) offer several examples:

I did not tell you how I past my time yesterday.
(Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 25 Jan. 1711)

. . . he was much offended . . . that he past the latter part of his life in a state of hostility.
(Samuel Johnson, Preface to Johnosn's edition of Shakespeare, 1765)

I know what has past between you.
(Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, 1773)

He past; a son of nobler tone.
(Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850)

Nowadays past has lost its status as a verb form (it's busy enough serving as a noun, adjective, adverb, and preposition), leaving passed to fill the role of past tense. But who knows? Perhaps this, too, shall pass.

More About Commonly Confused Words:

Image: Larry David, co-creator. producer, and star of the HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm � 2009 Home Box Office, Inc.

A Passing Tense originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 09:59:00.

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Is the Double Genitive Overly Possessive?

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:31:22 +0000

British novelist Henry Fielding used the construction in A Journey From This World to the Next (1749):

At seven years old I was carried into France . . . , where I lived with a person of quality, who was an acquaintance of my father's.

A century later it showed up in Anne Bront�'s second (and final) novel:

Shortly after, they both came up, and she introduced him as Mr. Huntingdon, the son of a late friend of my uncle's.
(The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848)

American writer Stephen Crane slipped it into a short story:

"Oh, just a toy of the child's," explained the mother. "She's grown so fond of it, she loves it so."
("The Stove," in Whilomville Stories, 1900)

And contemporary author Bil Wright doubled up on the construction in a novel published just last year:

He'd already proved he was a liar. And he had a girlfriend even though he wasn't divorced. No, not a monster. But definitely an enemy of my mother's and mine.
(When the Black Girl Sings, Simon and Schuster, 2008)

The combination of the preposition of and a possessive form (either a noun ending in -'s or a possessive pronoun) is called the double genitive. And it's been around for centuries.

But watch out. If you stare at it too long, you may convince yourself that you've found a mistake. That's what happened to one of the original language mavens, James Buchanan. Back in 1767, he tried to outlaw the double genitive:

Of being the sign of the Genitive Case, we cannot put it before a Noun with ('s) for this is making two Genitives.
(A Regular English Syntax)

As we're reminded by the editors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, "The 18th-century grammarians simply had a horror of anything double, because such constructions did not occur in Latin."

Despite its apparent redundancy, the double genitive is a well-established idiom--a functional part of the language dating back to Middle English. But if the construction continues to trouble you, simply follow the example of grammarians Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum and call it something else: "The oblique genitive construction is commonly referred to as the 'double genitive.' . . . [H]owever, we do not regard of as a genitive case marker, and hence there is only one genitive here, not two" (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 2002).

More Double Troubles:

Image: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Is the Double Genitive Overly Possessive? originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 06:31:22.

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From A to Z: A Few Facts About the Alphabet

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:44:00 +0000

"Writers spend years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet," novelist Richard Price once observed. "It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day." It's also a good enough reason to gather a few facts about one of the most significant inventions in human history.

What is the etymology of the word alphabet?

The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. These Greek words were in turn derived from the original Semitic names for the symbols: aleph ("ox") and beth ("house").

Where did the English alphabet come from?

Here's the 30-second version of the rich history of the alphabet.

The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 B.C. Most scholars believe that this alphabet, which consisted of signs for consonants only, is the ultimate ancestor of virtually all later alphabets. (The one significant exception appears to be Korea's han-gul script, created in the 15th century.)

Around 1,000 B.C., the Greeks adapted a shorter version of the Semitic alphabet, reassigning certain symbols to represent vowel sounds, and eventually the Romans developed their own version of the Greek (or Ionic) alphabet. It's generally accepted that the Roman alphabet reached England by way of the Irish sometime during the early period of Old English (5 c.- 12 c.).

Over the past millennium, the English alphabet has lost a few special letters and drawn fresh distinctions between others. But otherwise our modern English alphabet remains quite similar to the version of the Roman alphabet that we inherited from the Irish.

How many languages use the Roman alphabet?

About 100 languages rely on the Roman alphabet. Used by roughly two billion people, it's the world's most popular script. As David Sacks notes in Letter Perfect (2004), "There are variations of the Roman alphabet: For example, English employs 26 letters; Finnish, 21; Croatian, 30. But at the core are the 23 letters of ancient Rome. (The Romans lacked J, V, and W.)"

How many sounds are there in English?

There are more than 40 distinct sounds (or phonemes) in English. Because we have just 26 letters to represent those sounds, most letters stand for more than one sound. The consonant c, for example, is pronounced differently in the three words cook, city, and (combined with h) chop.

What are Majuscules and Minuscules?

Majuscules (from Latin majusculus, rather large) are CAPITAL LETTERS. Minuscules (from Latin minusculus, rather small) are lower-case letters. The combination of majuscules and minuscules in a single system (the so-called dual alphabet) first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule.

What's the name for a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet?

That would be a pangram. The best known example is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." A more efficient pangram is "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."

What's the name for a text that deliberately excludes a particular letter of the alphabet?

That's a lipogram. The best known example in English is Ernest Vincent Wright's novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939)--a story of more than 50,000 words in which the letter e never appears.

Why is the last letter of the alphabet pronounced "zee" by Americans and "zed" by most British, Canadian, and Australian speakers?

The older pronunciation of "zed" was inherited from Old French. The American "zee," a dialect form heard in England during the 17th century (perhaps by analogy with bee, dee, etc.), was approved by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

The letter z, by the way, has not always been relegated to the end of the alphabet. In the Greek alphabet it came in at a quite respectable number seven. According to Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), "The Romans adopted Z later than the rest of the alphabet, since /z/ was not a native Latin sound, adding it at the end of their list of letters and using it rarely." The Irish and English simply imitated the Roman convention of placing z last.

To learn more about this wondrous invention, pick up one of these fine books: The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, by Johanna Drucker (Thames and Hudson, 1995) and Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, by David Sacks (Broadway, 2004).

More About the Alphabet:

The Alphabet Poem from The Admiral's Caravan
What Is the NATO Phonetic Alphabet?

Mark Twain on the Rotten English Alphabet

From A to Z: A Few Facts About the Alphabet originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 23:44:00.

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Never Say Never: Five Bogus Rules of Grammar

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:45:55 +0000

To find out why these "rules" are bogus, click on the highlighted terms.

Never begin a sentence with the conjunction and or but.

Never end a sentence with a preposition.

Never split an infinitive.

Never use the passive voice.

Never use contractions.

More Superstitions About Writing:

Never Say Never: Five Bogus Rules of Grammar originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 06:45:55.

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Grammar Gurus and Muphry's Law

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:56:07 +0000

Before commenting (in sorrow or with glee) on the apparent misspelling in today's headline, please read to the end of the post.

Self-appointed guardians of the language go by various titles: grammar gurus, language mavens, usage police. What most have in common is a compulsion to point out the linguistic shortcomings of others and bemoan the sorry state of the English language--whether they know what they're talking about or not.

As Professor David Crystal demonstrates in The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford University Press, 2007), such lamentations have been heard since the days of Aelfric the Grammarian, a thousand years ago. In a spirit of "zero tolerance," these crusaders denounce the perceived foibles and infelicities of other English speakers--or "idiots" as they often prefer to call them.

Recently, a columnist for The New York Observer spotted a redundancy in the sports pages of The New York Times: "The Czechs played the way they can; the Americans reverted halfway back toward 1990 when they were drubbed, 5-1." The columnist snarled and pounced:

We all know that the verb "reverted" contains the direction "back" in it. To add "back" is thoroughly redundant. . . . To return is to turn back. Adding the word "back" may appear to solidify your meaning but it only exposes your ignorance.

To which an even more observant reader replied:

Now, we all know that the verb "contains" already contains the meaning "in it." To add "in it," as Phil does, is thoroughly redundant. Adding the phrase "in it" may appear to solidify your meaning but it only exposes your ignorance.

A perfect illustration of Muphry's Law: the principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling.

Trust me: anyone who assumes the role of grammar guru better be prepared for nit-picking rejoinders. And now please feel free to comment.

More About Grammar and Usage:

Image: The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, by David Crystal. Oxford University Press, 2007

Grammar Gurus and Muphry's Law originally appeared on About.com Grammar & Composition on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 04:56:07.

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