Parsing My Way Through The English Language Jungle
When I was contemplating what path to pursue in college, I chose English as a major. What was I thinking?
Well, I was a good speller and read a lot of books in grade school. Shouldn’t that qualify me? I figured on becoming a teacher like everyone else in my family and decide that would be the easiest path. I was not interested in anything that involved math or science.
I thought the English courses I took would finally teach me how to parse a sentence, when to use who or whom correctly, and what a dangling participle is. Nope. All I remember is reading books and discussing famous authors and their books ad nauseam. So I looked forward to the English structure course where we would tear sentences apart (grammar). Nope again. The instructor assumed we all knew the parts of a sentence and how to parse them, so we didn’t cover any of that. I don’t even remember what we did in that class. Maybe we just read more books.
Now, I’m not against reading books. I practically live in a library because Catherine is a voracious book lover. I just think that everyone should read whatever they want. We shouldn’t be measured by the books we’ve read. Read newspapers, magazines, user manuals, jail rosters, anything. Just read and you will learn a lot. With the internet now, it’s hard to imagine not reading all sorts of things conveniently and looking up words you’re not familiar with. I read two to three newspapers each day, two of them online. I also look up a lot of words.
But I don’t read books much anymore for several reasons. I got burned out in college reading books that were almost tomes. Reading a dictionary would have been more interesting than some of them. We studied Shakespeare with his overbearing iambic pentameter. Henry James could write a whole page or more comprised of just one sentence. Some authors filled pages just describing a scene, a writing skill called “imagery.”
William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” nearly did me in. The book starts with a whole section of narration by an intellectually challenged person. It was mostly just disjointed words so made no sense to me. In another class we discussed at length what the word “it” means. We also discussed a passage which prompted the instructor to ask, “What is the cosmic significance of this?” During the long pause that followed, I kicked myself for taking this course in the summer.
Fortunately, I also majored in journalism because I was interested in news photography. When I started college I didn’t realize that Watergate, which was reaching its peak, would lead to a huge influx of students who wanted to become famous journalists like Woodward and Bernstein. Journalism was not labeled “fake news” back then.
I learned the most about the English language writing news stories. You know – who, what, where, when, why, and how, and the inverted pyramid (most important information first). News style is supposed to be concise to get to the point and save space. Ernest Hemingway wrote his books concisely, probably because he had been a journalist. So it can be done.
For awhile I was a copy editor at the Republican Eagle. I learned a lot about the AP style and local variations to it. I grew to like the challenge of trimming news stories without changing their meaning. Get to the point, no flowery language. Journalism is hard work. Get the facts straight and write so people can get the main points quickly. One thing about being immersed in journalism – you always know what’s going on.
But now I mentally edit everything I read so it takes me forever to read a book. I just can’t help it. My daughter gave me a T-shirt that says, “I’m silently correcting your grammar.” But grammar technically deals with sentence structure. I dealt more with usage, such as the correct use of apostrophes or their, there, and they’re. I’m not as good at grammar. I blame it on that English structure course.
Another reason I don’t read books is because all too often the author introduces about 100 people in excruciating detail over hundreds of pages when only a small number of them are relevant to the story. If you put the book down for a few days you forget who some of the characters are so when they are referenced, you have to look back to see who they are. I do like short stories, though, which are concise by design.
When I taught high school English for all of two years I learned in a hurry that a lot of kids don’t care about reading and writing. It takes too much time and effort. I had better luck teaching spelling. It must be a real challenge teaching English today with cell phones, social media and endless online sources to plagiarize. There probably isn’t a generic course called 10th grade English anymore. Courses are more likely to have “communication” or “media” in the title than the word “English.” Maybe there should be a community ed course for senior citizens that teaches texting so we can figure out what “U R gr8” means.
I sound cynical but I’m not trying to be. The best thing you can do to better yourself is to read and write as much as you can. It will make you better at everything. Reading introduces you to new words and different views of life. Writing forces you to organize your thoughts coherently.
Because of my views I wouldn’t be allowed to join Garrison Keillor’s Professional Organization of English Majors who sip flavored coffee and look for deep meaning in obscure prose and poetry. Nor would I want to.
Maybe I’ll just write a book.