If you are at university or school, you know how important writing is to your academic progress. Once you graduate you'll learn that the workplace requires Standard English, the language of prestige and power in much of the world. We acknowledge the tremendous pressure that many of the students are under to write as well as those whose first language is English.
It is clear that English is the world's lingua franca. It is used all over the planet. You need to use Standard English in academic, corporate, and government communication. Many employers react strongly against non-standard English because they believe that errors inspire undesirable reactions in readers and erode the credibility of the organisation. You'll exponentially enhance your employment prospects if you write well.
English has no protector of language such as the 400-year-old body of revered experts who protect the French language. Standard English is the set of standards that professional experts have agreed upon, while acknowledging how language constantly changes. The rules for Standard English are defined by how educated people use it. There are two tribes of grammarians. That are known as descriptivists and prescriptivists. Descriptivists describe how language is used and how it changes. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought to be used.
Professor Geoffrey Pullum, a world authority on grammar as the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, who blogs regularly on Lingua Franca on The Chronicle of Higher Education site, resists this dichotomy. He says that grammarians who study the language are not all 'bow-tie-wearing martinets', nor are they 'flaming liberals' who think that everything should be allowed, that 'anything goes'.
He stands on the sensible middle ground, where the rules of Standard English are based on the way that expert native speakers use the language. And so do we. We aim to give you good grammatical guidance because, in any formal written context, only standard English is regarded as acceptable and correct. Language scholars have argued that humans find meaning in the world by exploring it through their own language. When people write about something, they understand and learn it better; it's called the writing-thinking learning connection and you should exploit it.
Many creative writers testify that they don't know what they're thinking until they start writing about it. This is what the novelist E. M. Forster had to say: 'How do I know what I think until I've seen what I've said?' Many professionals keep a writing journal. In her Christmas Day message in 2013, even Queen Elizabeth of England advocated keeping a journal. Keeping a journal is valuable for you as student writers, because it will enhance your writing-thinking-learning processes. We'd like you to create and maintain a writing journal that will allow you to practise writing, to experiment with different styles, and to develop a sourcebook of materials from which you can extract material to share with others as blog posts for your writing assignments.
A double-entry journal, that is, a journal in which you reflect upon what you have written previously, is particularly valuable. We want you to think about your writing process and prepare a 300-wordblog post to submit. In what ways is writing like running or cooking or dancing or boxing or painting or any other activity that you can think of? Jot down some points, then write a few sentences describing your process.
Haruki Murakami has written about writing and running. Neil Gaiman has written about how writing is like cooking. You might like to Google them to see what they have to say. Ferris Jarbr has a wonderful essay in the New Yorker about why walking helps us think.
In an essay 'Cooking Dumb, Eating Dumb', Nahum Waxman, who has a fabulous cookbook shop on the Upper East side of Manhattan called Kitchen Arts and Letters, says that he dreads being asked by his customers if the recipes in a book 'work'.
He tells them that it is they who must work. He says that his customers 'must think, must apply their intelligence and judgment to ideas and to the materials that will be turned into a dish'. He could well be talking about writing when he goes on to say that 'they need to bring their own good sense to cooking - their ability to understand variability in ingredients, to recognise error in a written text, to acknowledge their own tastes and preferences, to not let themselves be intimidated by the food arbiters into dreary cooking-by-numbers'.
