If most English grammar and usage handbooks turn you off because they sound so out of touch with how the language is actually used in everyday life, you’d probably find Frank Cioffi’s
One Day in the Life of the English Language: A Microcosmic Usage Handbook (Princeton University Press, 384 pages) like the proverbial whiff of fresh air when the windows of a fetid library are suddenly flung open.
Unlike usage handbooks that sanctimoniously foist grammar rules on learners, Cioffi’s “antihandbook” uses as teaching material some 300 sentences, warts and all, drawn from the printed works of a single, typical day in the life of the language (specifically December 29, 2008). The English professor at Baruch College in the City University of New York then casually, often humorously asks the learners to apply grammatical principles correctly and efficiently to those real-life sentences. Rather than exhort them to memorize loads and loads of rules about sentence structure, he chattily encourages learners to internalize instead how sentences work.
Cioffi makes it clear that while the goal of grammar mastery is not to make one a pedantic nitpicker, he argues that adherence to proper form is important because it “undergirds effective communication and ultimately even makes society work more smoothly, while nonstandard English often marginalizes or stigmatizes a writer.” He thus says that the aim of the book is to help hone the learner’s ability “to write English into an edged tool that, to borrow and modify a phrase from Washington Irving, will only grow sharper with frequent use.”
Read Kaitlin Mulhere’s review of Frank Cioffi’s One Day in the Life of the English Language in InsideHigherEd.com now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Frank L. Cioffi is professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, and has taught writing at Princeton and Indiana universities and at Bard and Scripps colleges. He is the author of
The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers (Princeton), among other books.
RELATED READING:In “Why American Students Can’t Write: Responding to the
Atlantic,” a blog reprinted by
InsideHigherEd.com from the October 23, 2012 issue of
The Atlantic, American novelist John Warner weighs in on the premise that American students can’t write. “This is not up for discussion,” Warner says, “and you’d be hard-pressed to find any opposition to the claim among America’s teachers of writing. There are exceptions, of course. Those of us working in selective universities often encounter students that can write, except that you will also hear a lot of discussion wondering why more of the students can’t write better at the time they arrive. As measured against the average, we’re talking about a fairly elite group of students, and yet it is far from a given that a successful high school student shows up in my Academic Writing course with the level of mastery one would expect.”
Read John Warner’s “Why American Students Can’t Write” in InsideHigherEd.com now!
