"Tense Present" - In Defense of Standard Written English

Eleven years ago David Foster Wallace wrote “TensePresent,” an essay defending Standard Written English (SWE).  The essay is brilliant, a descriptor I use sparingly and reserve for the truly magnificent things in life. [FN1]  It is one of those things you read and, when through, get a wobbly shocked-and-awed sensation and feel the need to share it, immediately, with everyone you care about and respect. 

The essay fronts as a book review of a dictionary but ultimately explores salvaging Standard Written English as our common and unfailing means of communication.  DFW was a prescriptivist, arguing in favor of preserving the rules of language rather than bending to a relativistic acceptance of usage-is-as-usage-does.  Just because people are butchering the language regularly, it does not follow that the rules have been butchered and served raw to the ghosts of snobbery past.  [FN2] Mass misusage does not dictate surrender for usage proper.   Otherwise, ham-fingered text messages and choppy “sent from my iPad” emails become the norm.  Is that what we want?  Are we willing to absorb the loss of clarity and precision that follows?   

    

Many English teachers use the article as a stage setter in their comp and rhetoric classes.   The rules of the English language can be archaic and untidy;  DFW realized this;  hence, students need to learn the “why” – the function, the beauty of SWE -- before they learn to accept it and love it and use it (and then become evangelical and spread it).  I super-highly recommend this article to our English instructors.  I highly recommend it to all others.

As caretakers of the SPS educational product, the duty is ours – all instructors, whether we teach English or philosophy or science or, dare I say it, math! –  to ensure all SPS graduates can communicate clearly, concisely, and precisely.

Our students must be able to write and present their ideas clearly.  And that will not happen by means of one great English class.  Communication must be taught and reinforced, class by class.

 

I know, I know.   You’re not an English teacher so how can you be entrusted to teach writing?  Consider each discipline as a separate dialect, a variation on Standard Written English, with special rules and unique words and particularized formats.  Start with that because that you know.   Law instructors can teach students to communicate as lawyers (and no, that doesn’t mean teaching them to lie; don’t be cute).  Quantitative instructors can teach students how to talk in statistics (if you are fluent in Excel are you bilingual?).  You know more than you think about writing and communicating. 

Writing-across-the-curriculum is an institutional and departmental goal.  We should make it part of our individual goals too.   

We will be holding a workshop on this topic in the fall and providing resources and materials throughout the year.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, please read TensePresent.  It is worth your time. [FN3]

[FN1] For illustrations of what qualifies as truly magnificent consider Bill Murray in Wes Anderson movies, Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks, anything with a Werner Herzog voiceover, Breakfast Stout, or placing pork cheek on top of French Fries (bless you, Jennifer Jasinski, of Euclid Hall and Rioja).

[FN2] The beautiful thing about DFW as an advocate for SWE is that he was not a George Will-ish type adorned with bow-ties and crisply parted hair.  This was a scruffy, long-haired, occasionally doo-ragged writer preserving snooty, conservative ground. 

  

[FN3] This footnote simply is a nod to the greatness that is DFW’s use of footnotes.  He once wrote a 67-page letter, replete with footnotes, to break up with his girlfriend.