Improper English - the "new" English Language

Improper English-The "New" English Language

What is improper English one might ask? Improper English is heard in our everyday conversations and written in high school and college classes across America. It is spoken and written not only by "students of color", but by all of us. "I ain't gotta do no listenin' to what you is sayin' to me," would be an extreme example of how English language and grammar is misused in everyday circumstances. A couple of more realistic examples provided by David Foster Wallace in his essay, "Authority and American Usage", would be as follows: "People who eat that kind of mushroom often get sick" (Wallace 636) and "She's the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day" (Wallace 638). Not everybody who sees those two sentences would necessarily notice the improper use of grammar and the confusion they cause. This is exactly the point that David Foster Wallace is highlighting in his essay. He tells a story of having to teach an "Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV protection to intravenous-drug users" every single fall. (Wallace 624) In other words, Wallace is showing us that even the smartest of college students are not being taught the basics of grammar. Instead, English today is an art form of its own open to stylistic interpretation. Therefore, the improper use of English is prevalent among all of us. This everyday use of improper English puts college students' grades at risk. If they are not being taught grammatical correctness during high school, then how are they expected to pass college level English classes in which grammatical correctness is the primary focus being examined by the professor? Then again, how are they to know right from wrong when there really is no constant standard of language and grammar usage to follow?

Since the English language is always changing, it is hard for a student to decipher whether they are using improper English or not when writing and speaking. "Language itself changes over time", according to Wallace (627). This is a statement that is hard to disagree with. Way back in time, the English language was composed of words such as "thou and art". If we spoke in such a way today, we would be stared at, judged, and perhaps submitted to an insane asylum. Today when writing, we chose to use language that is familiar to us because we are comfortable with it. A danger in using that language that is familiar to us is the heavy use of the dialect of "text message" lingo. This is a major factor in the mistakes being seen in college level writing today, and can be named the center of attention perhaps for the necessity of remedial grammar usage classes once beginning a college level English class.

Students are not being taught grammar skills in their high school English classes, they are being told to use "Descriptivism via "free-writing, brainstorming, and journaling" (Wallace 632). Students today are taught that writing is a form of "self-exploration and expressive rather than communicative (Wallace 632). I find this to be very true of myself and other students in my high school English and Composition classes. When I was a Junior, I took a class offered at my school entitled "Advanced Grammar" thinking it would dive deep into the English language and be an extremely difficult class for me. I could not have been more wrong. It was challenging, but in ways that I had imagined. I had never learned the importance of a prepositional phrase, participles, conjunctions, and the simple misplacement of descriptive nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. My mind was blown to say the least. It made me wonder why none of these points had been stressed in any of my other English classes. I never received a paper back in my AP Composition class with grade marks highlighting grammar mistakes as complicated as these. English teachers were more concerned with meaning, and interpretation rather than grammar and word usage. Did the student understand the reading? How did they apply it to themselves? Those were the types of questions and points we were encouraged to follow, and those were the grade marks that would show on our papers.

On a completely different note, David Foster Wallace makes an extremely valid but seemingly racist point that I was never personally aware of until now. In his essay, Wallace states the following:

I do not know whether anybody told you this or not, but when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is Standard Written English...In my class, you have to learn to write in Standard Written English. If you want to study your own primary dialect and its rules and history and how it's different from Standard