Curmudgeon speaks on decline of grammar, civilization

Deteriorating grammar and style conventions signal the crumbling of western civilization.

I'm a grammar-and-style curmudgeon, so take my declaration with a grain of salt. Still, I feel pretty confident about it.

When I was in journalism school, in what was then still called the "print" program, I and my cohort were allowed to make one technical mistake in a story without penalty. 

A freebie. One. Of whatever kind: spelling, grammar, style. After that, the grade plummeted precipitously. I tested the system with carelessness just once, and it was damage enough to deprive me of an A for the semester.

Nowadays I find I have to give student papers separate reads for technical and substance. There are so many technical problems in the average draft that I can't focus on the substance at the same time. I give separate grades for tech and substance, too, before I combine them in a formula weighted in favor of substance.

In fairness, most of my students did not go to journalism school. As American legal education is open to all majors, some students have not written since grade school. Our ranks include accounting majors who took only math-oriented tests in non-liberal arts bachelor's programs. (How is that even a thing?) Where they are on tech is not their fault, but a failure of American K16 education. My foreign students who speak English as a second language usually exhibit better tech skills than the average American 1L—notwithstanding telltale struggle with the confounding rules of definite and indefinite articles.

I'm proud of my daughter, who went to a public school that, exceptionally, emphasized writing. We chose where we live for the school. She didn't love the heavy writing emphasis at the time, and fair enough. But when she went to arts school for university, she was shocked by how poorly prepared her peers were in writing, including those who wished to build careers writing creatively for TV and film. Her skill in writing set her apart, as it continues to in the workforce.

Many students who struggle initially, to their credit, embrace my feedback, readily extrapolate appropriate rules, and greatly improve their writing. Some students masochistically seek out my writing tutelage because they know they've been cheated in their education and want to improve. Of course, a few resent and resist the feedback. The quality of legal writing in the everyday practice of law suggests that they're not wrong about where the norm falls. 

Just spend a few hours in the briefs at any courthouse, and you'll see what I mean. When I started teaching legal writing in 1998, I went to the courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, to compile some model practice documents for my students' reference. I found almost nothing I could hold up as exemplary. That was disappointing but educational.

As my reputation precedes me, my 1L students sometimes worry over whether I'll knock them down for grammar on final exams. I won't, I tell them, unless a misusage creates ambiguity or otherwise impedes the reader's understanding. That does happen. But even I have now and then mistyped a "your" instead of "you're" when writing under time pressure, phonetic ideation direct to fingers. Timed exams are not research papers or practice documents.

UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote ably for Reason earlier this week on the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. Like his academic legal writing, his Academic Legal Writing is superb, and I routinely recommend it. Like he, apparently, I have long counseled students on ways to avoid singular constructions that invite the problem of generic gendered pronouns. When working over the text doesn't work—sometimes, the difference between singular and plural is required by legal precision—I recommend "he or she," however cumbersome.

Nowadays the problem of singular "they" bleeds into the issue of gender identity. I am sympathetic with how that "they" emerged amid the failure of "ze" or another creative alternative. When that "they" is used, it is treated grammatically as a plural, even if the person is singular. I'm not here opining on that issue. Professor Volokh gave the best advice, anyway: essentially, know your audience.

I give students the same advice generally. Maybe the judge in your case was an accounting major and will be satisfied as long as you can string sentences together into recognizable paragraphs. But maybe your judge is a curmudgeon. If a student needs a better reason to know the rules than because they're the rules, then it serves to know that it might pay, literally, to be highly fluent in the lingua franca.

I've been thinking about this not only because of Professor Volokh's item, but because I returned to my home state of Rhode Island last week to be confronted with two curiosities on newspaper fronts at my local grocery store.  Here's the Barrington Times of August 13:

Barrington Times, Aug. 16,  2023: "'None of these fields are getting rest.'"

This headline is not necessarily wrong, for a couple of reasons. But it gave me pause, frozen for a time in the grocery store portico.

The conventional wisdom is that the word "none" is a contraction of "not one." So, like "one," usually, "none" should take a singular subject. The line should be, then, "None of these fields is getting rest."

At the same time, what we might call "linguistic originalists" point to a long history of English-language usage tolerating both singular and plural treatment of "none." The rule oft recited today is that "none" should be treated as a plural when it reads as "not any," or when the range of things to which it refers is plural. So if the subject of the headline is "not any of these fields," then "are" is suitable.

I find that rule profoundly unhelpful, because there is no real difference between "not one" and "not any."  "Not one" almost invariably refers to a range of multiple candidates. Many sources on grammar give examples in which plural usage pertains to the subject structure "none of [them/these/etc.]," but that's not a sensible distinction either. The headline statement here is wholly equivalent to "none is getting rest," were the line to appear in a context in which the adjectival phrase "of these fields" were unnecessary for clarity.

Other sources use a flexible rule in which the writer chooses based on emphasis. Treating the subject as singular emphasizes the singularity. That's hardly a rule. But if it pertained, I would contend that the above usage is wrong. For if one field were rested at any given time, there would be no newsworthy assertion that a new field is needed.

I recognize, too, by the way, that the headline is a quote. According to my old-school journalistic rules, a quote can be changed to make it grammatically correct, as long as the grammatical error is not salient to the story. The theory behind the rule is that the ethic of truthfulness yields to the principle of doing no harm (embarrassment) to persons identified in stories. At some point, that approach presents policy challenges around dialect, cultural vernacular, and education policy. But none of those reasons here would preclude changing the quote.

Regardless of where one comes down on the Barrington Times headline, I contend that the treatment of "none" as plural is now widely reflexive. And legal writers do themselves a forensic disservice by failing to consider the choice. If "not one" is the salient concept, then the treatment should be singular. A writer in argument, especially, might be served best by the singular, or even by regressing "none" to its ancestor: for example, "Not one of the bystanders was capable of aiding the plaintiff" is a more potent declaration than "none were," because the former usage emphasizes the existence of multiple counterfactuals.

Here's another front page, from The Rhode Island Wave:

The Rhode Island Wave, Aug. 2023: "Liquor World: Now Open In It's Newest Location."

The subhede on this ad reads: "Now Open / In It's Newest Location."

This is an easy one, and it's definitely wrong. "It's" is a contraction for "it is." The headline does not say, "In It Is Newest Location." The "it's" is rather a possessive and should be "its."

I recognize that the Wave is a free advertiser, and the copy in question appears (horrifically, atop the front page) in an ad. In my book, which, we've established, is unrelentingly curmudgeonly, that doesn't let the editor off the hook. (Just ask The New York Times.) The fact that the Wave is a free advertiser might, though, explain the quality of the journalistic editing.

I see "its"/"it's" errors all the time. It's disheartening. I get that "it's" is initially confusing, because, especially in formal writing, we are accustomed to apostrophes appearing in possessives more often than in contractions. But then you learn the rule, you turn six, and life moves on.

At risk of exceptionalism, I believe that the American model of law as graduate education, open to a full range of undergraduate majors, is a strength of the American legal system. Our bar is populated by a gratifying diversity of knowledge bases, skill sets, and life experiences that are little known in the five-year LL.B. model.

At the same time, and as long as our four-year higher ed system permits disciplinary focus to the exclusion of liberal arts, we in legal education bear a burden to teach American law students how to speak and write in what is for most of them their native tongue.