LANGUAGE CORRECTNESS AS AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PROBLEM
Effective writing
Another demonstration of correct English is said to be effective writing, which displays clear thinking. Writing a coherent text longer than a sentence is one of the hardest of all the skills schools set out to teach. The role of the applied linguist here is to take on the second of Peters’ tasks and act prescriptively by explaining what is wrong with early written drafts and in what ways to make the draft clearer.
Given the difficulty of constructing a good piece of writing, it is not surprising that even well-known writers can fail to achieve the clarity they desire. Here is a short piece which opens the Preface to H. G. Wells’ The Common Sense of War and Peace, 1940, which it is not difficult to find fault with:
For the greater part of my life I have given most of my working time to the problem of the human future, studying the possibility of a world-wide reorganization of human society, that might avert the menace of defeat and extinction that hangs over our species. This has been my leading pre-occupation since I published The Time Machine in 1893. I have never thought, much less have I asserted, that progress was inevitable, though numerous people thought to fancy that about me.
The passage seems to have been hurriedly dictated, and not afterwards revised. Wells does not trouble to define the meanings of his words, confident that most of his readers will have read at least one or two of his important works and be able to make the definitions for themselves.
Here are some critical comments which are quoted as examples of applied linguistics at its most interventionist. They are followed by a proposed redraft of the passage:
1. ‘the problem of the human future’
(Comment: Wells gives no clue as to whether he is speaking in terms of a few months, a
few generations, or millions of years.)
2. ‘that might avert the menace of defeat and extinction that hangs over our species’
(Comment: does this mean that individual men and women might become physically
immortal?)
3. ‘the menace of defeat and extinction’
(Comment: a menace of defeat by what? Flood, fire, disease, exhaustion of food and
fuel supplies, moral degeneration? The concept ‘extinction’ contains ‘defeat’, which
could have been omitted.)
4. ‘my leading pre-occupation since I published The Time Machine.’
(Comment: any pre-occupation is a leading one; the ‘pre-’ in the word denotes priority.)
5. ‘I have never thought, much less have I asserted’
(Comment: how much is less than never? He means: ‘I have never asserted, nor even
thought.’)
Redraft
Ever since 1892, when I began to write The Time Machine, the two chief subjects of my literary studies have been the process of moral and physical degeneration that now threatens to make man extinct in a few hundred years, and the various theories of world-wide social reorganization that have been designed to arrest this process. Many people fancy me to have asserted, at some time or other, that nothing can prevent the beneficent progress of civilization from continuing indefinitely. They are wrong.
This redraft is taken from Graves and Hodge (1943: 211–14), from which the above comments are also taken. And since in one sense making a text ‘more correct’ is to redraft it so as to make it better, more effective in its context, then perhaps we should accept that ‘correct English is simply good English and incorrect, bad’ (Warburg 1966: 87). After all, for the applied linguist, being correct matters, not only for the sake of clarity but also because language is embedded in social life.
