Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write

I've been keeping up with the blogosphere, and there have been a couple of posts that have irked me enough to write a post about linguistics. And that's saying something.

A good example is from itsme, who wrote a blog post asking people to please learn how to write. And it received over a hundred uptoots.

I'm afraid I have to pull rank here and say I studied English at university, and although the majority of my classes were about reading books, I did also take classes on the meta-disciplinary understanding of how the pedagogy of English is taught, and that gets into what English actually is.

To ask someone to write properly is to assume there is a way to write proper. There isn't. There is no universal, static version of English. Or any other language, for that matter. Every dialect of English, including regional accents and non-standard forms, follows complex, systematic grammatical rules.

For example, should a writer avoid splitting infinitives, or avoid double negatives? These, like every other mechanic, are stylistic choices rather than absolute laws of human communication.

You probably don't realize it, but when you attempt to "correct" somebody's writing, you are invoking centuries of oppression and racism. Standard English is tied to institutional power and formal education, and this does not make other dialects inferior or broken. Standard form has always belonged to people with historical social, economic, and political power. The idea of strict "correctness" was largely created in the 18th century by grammarians, who wanted to stabilize and control a constantly changing language.

Somebody who comes from a computer science background might understand the desire to stabilize language—programming languages are deterministic and set (though they, too, get updated and changed between version numbers). The syntax of coding needs to stay the same so the program runs the same each time. But this is not how spoken word, writing, and communication works.

English is always in a state of flux, it is as malleable and loose as the concept of symbols can be. Treating other forms of language as "wrong" ignores the cultural and historical context of how people communicate. My friend Agnes wrote an excellent post about this topic as well. I recommend you give it a read, she's a great writer!

Do not try to police how other people write or speak. Unsolicited corrections are microaggressions, and they signal to marginalized speakers that their native or community language is inferior.

This isn't a fringe position. Non-standard English is everywhere. People assume Pidgin languages, for example, are some kind of broken, half-formed communication. Let me give you an example, this is Genesis 1:1 from the Hawaii Pidgin Bible:

God Make Da World
Da time wen eryting wen start, God make da sky an da world. Da world come so no mo notting inside, no mo shape notting. On top da wild ocean dat cova eryting, neva had light notting. Ony had God Spirit dea, moving aroun ova da watta.

Linguists have demonstrated pidgins follow predictable developmental patterns of their own rather than being unintelligent misunderstandings of a "real" language's grammar.

Let's look at what's taught in schools, where so-called standard English is assumed. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is commonly taught, full of regional vernacular.

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

Or, take the seminal novel The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, also taught across classrooms:

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is taught in universities, colleges, and secondary schools as a key text of American literature:

"If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all."

Louise Bennett is one of Jamaica's most celebrated cultural figures, for poetry written and performed entirely in Jamaican Patois. From "Colonization in Reverse":

"Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse."

Dohra Ahmad edited an anthology of vernacular literature called Rotten English, collecting work written in pidgins, creoles, and dialects from around the world.

There are so many assumptions you're making when you view writing as incorrect and needing to be fixed. As itsme assumes, it's simply because the writer was being careless and sprinting to get a blog post out into the world, saying that "haste makes waste." But there are countless other reasons why, to start, it could be a reading comprehension disability, it could be a vision impairment, it could be the way they've grown up and understood how a specific mechanic works.

William Labov spent decades documenting AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) has its own systematic grammatical principles. Taglish, the blend of Tagalog and English spoken across the Philippines, was initially dismissed as a corruption of both languages before linguists realized better. And it wasn't until William Stokoe's research in the 1960s that American Sign Language was recognized as having syntax and morphology, rather than a mimicry of spoken English.

Words like "nice," "jazz," and "crestfallen" all started out as slang or informal coinages. Whatever gets waved off as "incorrect" right now is tomorrow's dictionary entry. We're all making it up as we go along. The "mistakes" generations of teachers mark up in red pen were never mistakes.

The best thing you can do is focus on meaning. Prioritize understanding the message over policing the specific mechanics. If somebody writes a blog post and you feel as though you don't understand what they're trying to convey, guess what? That gives you an excellent excuse to email them and start a dialogue and conversation, instead of vaguely chastising them from your own blog at a distance.

We're all trying to do the same thing, here. We're all trying to share ourselves and our thoughts. There is no right way to do that, and there definitely is no wrong way, either. Even if there was some sort of rigid, "correct" standard English, who cares? (Which I've clearly established there isn't) Guess what? This is blogging! Let loose, have fun a little. We should be enjoying each other rather than trying to police. Everyone is welcome here, regardless of how they type.

I want to end this with a stanza from a poem I've seen in my poetry textbooks and anthologies alike that's a bit of a favourite of mine, Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too by James Hall.

"All my pwoblems
who knows, maybe evwybody’s pwoblems
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth
dat I am SPIDERMAN.
I know. I know. All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all
doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat’s funny yeah.
But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead."