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I was reading a post at a well-known history blog yesterday. Its author is a historian employed by an American college or university to teach. At his first use of"alot," I was surprised. At his second, I was appalled. He does not know that "a lot" is two words. Don't tell me that language is malleable. As I type this, my computer keeps automatically correcting my attempt to type"alot". Its use is an error common among gum-snapping undergraduates. Can it be that a liberal arts education, doctoral study, a dissertation, and experience teaching history at an American college or university has not taught this historian that"a lot" is two words? I will no longer bother to read anything he posts. Please tell me where he teaches so I won't waste money on tuition there.
Shouldn't that be "utterest?" My spellchecker wants to change it. ;)
As the subject of this entry, and the person who threatens to bring down all that is holy about western civilization through two spelling errors, let me say that I appreciate Ralph's keen eye, if not his overreaction.
Jeremy Young -
1/11/2009
No no, it's "dead wrong" in the way that your being a conservative is "dead wrong" -- which is to say, I disagree with you strenuously, but of course you're entitled to your opinion.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/11/2009
How could it *possibly* be "dead wrong" when my right to read what I choose is *my right* -- unmediated by the state or any authority. It could be "dead wrong" only in the totalitarian mind that is willing to shove crap down people's throats, regardless of whether it is intelligent, interesting, or well written.
Jeremy Young -
1/11/2009
It's not hard to understand. It's just dead wrong, where blogging is concerned.
But your choices are your choices. Read what you like, of course.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/11/2009
If you don't care enough to make sure that your writing is the best that you can do, I don't care to read it. How hard is that to understand?
Jeremy Young -
1/11/2009
I don't disagree that good prose is both engaging and grammatical. It's the outlandish claims you're making about the consequences of ungrammatical-ness in the blogosphere that bother me. Perfect grammar, in some media, is not an absolute prerequisite for good prose -- and insisting that it is so is what I find stuffy of you.
Again, I would be in complete agreement with your comments in an academic setting. But blogging is not an academic setting -- it's a new and populist medium that plays by its own rules. I would argue that learning and observing the proper rules of decorum for a given setting is if anything more important than always observing the rules of grammar no matter what the setting. In the blogosphere, there are certain rules of decorum that are particular to the medium -- don't ask for a link exchange on a blog that doesn't offer them publicly, don't discuss a post by name without linking to it, and so on. Grammar has not been one of those rules, in my five years' blogging experience, until you wrote your post.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
Your equation of "stuffy" and "grammatical" is the utterist nonsense. Good prose is both engaging and grammatical. Breaking the rules of grammar is occasionally the right thing to do -- but you'd better damn well be sure that you know that you're doing it and why you've done it. Otherwise, don't bother me with anything that you've written.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Ralph, I guess the issue for me is that I think the very reason so many people read my blog, your blog, and other blogs is their slapdash, unpretentious nature. People just don't want to read a bunch of stuffy, perfectly-grammatical prose; they want something fresh, exciting, and imperfect. Don't get me wrong -- I'm dedicating my life to writing books in stuffy, perfectly-grammatical prose, because that's the stuff that makes a contribution to the field. But I think the blogosphere's informality, and the very fact that people don't generally go around "disciplining" those who dare to show poor grammar, is exactly what has endeared it to millions of readers. What you're doing in this post seems to me to undermine the essential nature of the blogosphere, and deprive it of the very spirit that draws in non-historians.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
I actually do proofread most of my stuff. However, PH has built its audience from the ground up precisely because of its informal, slapdash nature. We don't have the institutional support of HNN, or the star power of Cliopatria's contributor list, but we've done quite well for ourselves with a list of mostly amateur, pseudonymous historians. I see no reason to change the winning formula now -- though as you and I have discussed, it likely won't be my decision much longer.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
To put a fine point on it, Jeremy. If you don't have time to proof read your stuff, I don't have time to read it.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
I dare say that more people will read posts at PH than will read your articles. You would want to present your ideas in the best possible form there -- not test your audience's patience with slapdash -- or I don't have any more time for them than you do. Less, actually, they're *your* ideas -- not mine.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
It's not "apologetics for low standards," nor does it have anything to do with what's appropriate in student papers. Different levels of perfection are appropriate for different media. I'm not saying it's a good thing to have grammar mistakes in a blog post -- I just think it's almost comically unimportant. My posts are usually free of such mistakes because I was raised by a college English teacher and therefore write that way naturally, not because I have the time or the patience to proofread a blog the way I'd proofread a scholarly paper.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Nope, you're not a nit-picking crank. If you told her you'd never speak to her again because she said "lol" to you a couple times in a text message, then you'd be a nit-picking crank.
I have instructed my 15 year-old daughter that when she and I exchange text messages, she must always use the English language. No "lol"s. No "cuz"s. I tell her to just write out English the same way she speaks it to the best of her ability, otherwise she will get no message back from me.
Does this make me a "nitpicking crank?" Maybe. But I do this because I'm afraid that "text message-speak" and other forms of horrible spelling are going to bleed into her formal writing for school without her even knowing it.
The same thing applies here.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Heh.
Manan Ahmed -
1/10/2009
What'd I say...
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
As this thread indicates, there's room for self-consciously bad (in your terms, non-grammatical, writing). Two uses of "alot" in the same post means that the author commonly writes that way -- not that it is a one-off error or a jesting self-conscious posture. I quit reading a book manuscript half-way through it last month because the writing was so wretched. Exercising wretched prose in blogs only re-enforces bad habits. I proof-read what I post at Cliopatria and am occasionally corrected by my readers. I'd be deeply embarrassed if it were otherwise. I regret your apologetics for low standards. Your attitude won't help your students one bit.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Good writing is not the same thing as polished or grammatical writing. I dare you to find a single Cliopatria Award winner whose writing is perfectly grammatical all the time -- as opposed to article submissions to journals, which should be perfectly grammatical all the time. If you consider non-perfectly-grammatical writing to be "bad writing," do not pass Go, do not collect $200, then I'm sorry to say you probably shouldn't read any blogs, including your own.
T F Smith -
1/10/2009
I love this blog...
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
Speak for yourself, Jeremy, when you pronounce on how slapdash history blogging is. Why would there be awards for best writer, when good writing is not valued in this form. I had to read quite enough bad writing when I was being paid to do so. I'm *not* doing that voluntarily in retirement. That's not ignorance on my part. It's a decision about how I will spend my time. If someone doesn't care to put their ideas in the best form, I can't any longer be bothered to read them. That's that.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Also, I seem to have gotten your goat by using the word "ignorance." I want to clarify that I think your decision to stop reading Andrew's work because of a grammar mistake is ignorant, not you yourself -- just as I think Andrew's use of the word "alot" is ignorant, not Andrew himself.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
I understand your larger point, Ralph, but I think it goes completely against the point of the blogging format. Nothing we write in this format is "put in the best possible form" -- we're all writing slapdash and on the fly as it is. Our Blogging is necessarily a picture of our half-formed and half-considered thoughts; as such, I hold it to a much lower grammatical standard than I do other kinds of professional writing. (There's also an elitism issue here which I'm sure you're aware of. Isn't half the point of blogging to reach out to ordinary people? And doesn't fulminating about grammar precisely contradict that mission?)
To be clear, of course you're not paid to correct Andrew's writing; I merely suggested that you might want to since it so upset you.
I also appreciate that you made your complaint anonymous and about a broader point. But when you're declaring that you'll never read anything again by one of my authors because of a grammar mistake, I feel compelled to respond to that. I imagine you'd feel the same way if I posted a diatribe about how I won't read Manan's stuff any more because he once wrote an incomplete sentence.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
Not offen. No.
Andrew McMichael -
1/10/2009
Alot, yes.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
You've correct.
Andrew McMichael -
1/10/2009
Ralph,
I regret that you have proven that you have no sense of humor. None whatsoever. Keep it up.
By the way, in your above response you typed:
"You've building a case for professional incompetence."
You've misspelled "you're."
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
Professor McMichael, I regret that you've just proven that -- not only do you use "alot" a lot -- but you haven't the faintest idea what a split infinitive is. Keep it up. You've building a case for professional incompetence.
Andrew McMichael -
1/10/2009
I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised to find a critique of a casual blog post that I made in an entirely different forum. I’ve been using the Internet since 1990 (starting, ironically, at George Mason University, where I helped start the history web presence with Roy and Mike O’Malley), and am well aware that alot of the time people don’t like to directly respond to the larger issues in a post that you make, instead choosing to focus on minor details, and then doing so elsewhere.
I’m sure Luker has substantive things to say, but I haven’t read anything he’s written since he used the informal “gotta,” as well as the split infinitive “their names are nowhere mentioned” in a post three years ago (http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/12458.html). Such egregious grammatical transgressions are simply unforgivable and of course render anything substantive he might say moot.
Alot of the post in question was me “Rambling” about the Job Register at the American Historical Association--in other words a casual piece, not an academic standard. Alot of time and effort goes into to really making that Job Register successful, and yet alot of people find that Job Register demeaning and an ordeal. I confess to writing alot of the piece quickly, and under the haze of a five-drug combination meant to assuage the effects of adult chickenpox.
So, I’m sure there were alot of mistakes in that post--both grammatical and intellectual. There was also alot to disagree with, yet Ralph Luker chose to focus not on the larger issue, but on the use of a single word. It reminded me, alot, of my dissertation defense years ago, where two historians on my committee, got into an argument about whether Father Hidalgo (to whom I had devoted two paragraphs as a side note) was from Central Mexico, or North Central Mexico. It is that kind of attention to the important details that makes our profession great, and alot of historians would do well to emulate this practice.
I applaud Luker’s decision not to read anything else I write ever write. Ralph does a great service to alot of the blogging community by setting the example of making sure that we all take ourselves as seriously as we deserve. His continued efforts in that area will certainly keep all of us on our toes. Alot.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
My larger point would be that if an author doesn't care enough or think what he or she has to say is important enough to put what he or she has to say in the best possible form, I'm not obliged to read it. That's not ignorance, Brother Young, that's wise use of my time.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/10/2009
I'll write off your lack of restraint here as due to your ignorance, Jeremy. Do I have to point out that I'm not paid to correct a tenured professor's illiteracy, as I was in dealing with my students? Nor am I paid an honorarium to correct his manuscript. To correct his grammar at his post would have disrupted his conversation about his subject. Referring to it here with no identifiers honored his pseudonymity, which he ought to maintain at least until he learns the elements of English prose. Regardless of his publication record, the spontaneity of blog posting has exposed your friend's lack of education.
Jeremy Young -
1/10/2009
Objecting to the use of "alot" does not make you a nit-picking crank. Stating that the misuse of two words constitutes an offense worthy of not reading anything the author has written does make you a nit-picking crank.
I'll be honest and own up to the fact that the offending blog was my own, though the offending post was not by me. The author of the post, who blogs semi-pseudonymously, is a tenured professor who has written two scholarly books, one of them on digital history. He has been involved with promoting history online since at least 1994 and has been published in AHA's Perspectives and elsewhere. Declaring that his use of "alot" renders the totality of his thought unworthy of reading is, frankly, more ignorant than his ungrammatical usage was in the first place.
But hey -- instead of fulminating pointlessly over here, why don't you head on over and confront him directly in comments? That would be more sporting, I think.
