In Pursuit of the Unattainable: The Quest for Perfection

Having been deeply absorbed in the spurious pursuit of the unattainable these past few weeks, I have been reminded how entirely obnoxious people are when they focus on individual trees rather than the entire forest. Okay, you're thinking, where is this going? I understand. Where this is going, of course, given the tone, is in the general tilt of a rant. I get into ranting moods when I am confronted by situations that do not permit me to express a sense of humour about things I don't think are terribly important. When my sarcasm has to be contained, it leads to rants.

Correction, editing, and sentence-level grammar are of very little intrinsic interest to me. These tasks are considered, rightly, the final stage of the writing process. Think of it as the clean-up phase that comes long after inspiration, invention, creation, production, etc. In other words, only appropriate when the words you're mostly happy with have already been created. Too many writers, however, focus on this step in the writing process, which has the effect of truncating their thoughts. Now, thoughts, from my perspective, are precious commodities. They are the hardest part to come up with. Invention of a new thought is one of those things I take very seriously, and adamantly resist any force that comes close to interfering with it.

The clean-up phase requires a fair amount of attention to detail, but it also attracts obsessives and perfectionists. There is a mentality that focuses on error that is positively annoying, but it's also dangerous for some students, especially those who are marginalized. Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations deals with this subject. The politics of error correction has the effect of limiting what students are allowed to say, and how they are allowed to say it. There are not-so-subtle social expectations that there is one "right" way to say something, and when we force this on writers (and students, especially) we squash their creativity and tell them they are deficient the way they are. We tend to shut down their communicative abilities, as we attempt to reform them in "our" image.

Correcting error is a tricky path to walk. It is extremely difficult to correct someone without employing criticism, or implying the other is a flawed being. Very few people are so self-confident that they have learned how to ignore the psychological and emotional affect of having been corrected. Most people feel it very keenly, and if the act of criticism is handled badly by the person in power who is authorized to do the correcting, the person who is being corrected might shut down completely and stop writing entirely. There is no error that makes taking this risk with a student's creativity worthwhile.

How right does the error-corrector need to be? Writers need to know when they've made a mistake, yes. However, there are people who correct writing who carry this need to convey wrongness to extremes. Think about the effect your need to be right will have on your student, or on the basic writer—or even on the published writer who is, nonetheless, insecure. The quest for perfection, and forcing correctness on others (especially students who cannot defend themselves, due to the inherent power imbalance in the student-teacher relationship) is redolent of the Victorian era, when the English dominated the planet and were allowed to tell everyone, in judgemental tones, how to conduct their business. I keep wondering when students will rebel against this treatment.

The Political Nature of Grammar

Grammar is typically taught very much as a form of "inside the box" thinking. In other words, there are rules, they're packaged and sold as being fairly linear; follow them, and your writing will improve. However, the deeper truth about grammar is that it's actually extremely complicated, and accurate use (an arguably impossible task) depends very much on who you're reading and why they wrote their grammar guide. Scariest of all, there are actually multiple grammars.

Let me start with my strangest-sounding proposition first, the notion that there are, in reality, multiple grammars. This statement flies in the face of what we grow up being taught, that there is "one" grammar, one way of doing something, and one true way to write. In fact, grammar use is highly political, it's fluid, and it changes with the prevailing values of the dominant culture. You are forgetting, even as I write this, the grammar you learned to set in cement when you were a child.

The reason you're forgetting is because you do not use the grammar you learned as a child. You don't realise it most of the time, but it's true. A great deal of what you learned when you were young is probably still valid, but there are once-important bits and pieces that no longer matter, that no one cares about, and that few people, except perhaps die-hard grammarians and linguists, think are important. In other words, the grammar you were taught to cling to as a life raft on the sea of errant words has been over-written by more recent information, and that newer information was written when you weren't paying all that much attention.

So the concept of multiple grammars starts with the simple fact that there are acceptable ways of saying something and unacceptable ways of saying something. The second aspect to the concept of multiple grammars lies with the inherent politicization of the use of language when a grammar is applied to it; the grammar forms and restrictions determine 'correctness' at the cost of meaning, but if you're representing the dominant voice in society, do you honestly care if a group's meaning is erased by the power of your grammar? No, you do not. Your concern is to make the group learn 'the correct way' to say something.

Unfortunately for those you dominate with your grammar rules, they had their own forms, methods, and ways of saying something, now in the process of being erased by your need to 'correct' them. Grammars then become a method of controlling what people are allowed to say, how they are allowed to say it, and who, ultimately, will be heard. In this way, the deep structure of language is controlled by the very few in charge who are authorised by society to make the decision to approve or disapprove language use.

You begin to see the inherent risk of making it necessary to say something in any one way, when you start to realise how rigid, limiting, and controlling the concept of grammar can be. Grammar is never a value-neutral activity; it always carries with it the danger of oppressing the writer's unique voice, creativity, and style, and replacing it with what you approve of, what the dominant voice in society approves of—this is what makes grammars political. Yet, control constantly slips through the hands of those who seek to manage the unmanageable. The very fluidity of language makes it an impossible quest for lost verb forms to try to tell someone to use the language the way it was used in your Aunt Sally's era.

Further, the disparity between the grammar that is approved by those 'in charge,' and the grammar that is actually used, reveals the divergence between someone's reality and someone's ideal, and that territory belongs to philosophy. Grammar exists in that space very uneasily, and should come with a warning label: danger, you're entering heavily politicized ground! User beware! Just remember that correcting someone carries with it a tremendous responsibility. Who and what are you turning them into, precisely, when you correct their language use? You? Perhaps they'd like to be themselves instead.

Let our pen be at first slow, provided that it be accurate...

"We must write, therefore, as carefully and as much as we can, for as the ground, by being dug to a great depth, becomes more fitted for fructifying and nourishing seeds, so improvement of the mind, acquired from more than mere superficial cultivation, pours forth the fruits of study in richer abundance and retains them with greater fidelity. For without this precaution, the very faculty of speaking extempore will but furnish us with empty loquacity and words born on the lips. In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence. By writing, resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, from where they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies or as circumstances require. Let us above all things get strength, which may suffice for the labor of our contests and may not be exhausted by use. Nature has herself appointed that nothing great is to be accomplished quickly and has ordained that difficulty should precede every work of excellence. She has even made it a law, with regard to gestation, that the larger animals are retained longer in the womb of the parent...."



—Quintilian, Book 10, Chapter 3, Institutio Oratorio.