Submitted 1 day ago by OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a093f5c0-5498-4c24-afc9-39feaff23522.jpeg
Given Lemmy’s demographic we can put it like this:
If you invent an entire programming language from first principles, you’re probably pretty smart.
If you’re in a a class at uni learning C++ and you submit code written in your new language, then you’re going to fail
You need to learn the fundamentals first before you break them.
English prof up on a soapbox here.
Comments like “you have to learn the rules before you break them” are kind of off the mark. For the most part, those of use who teach English aren’t particularly concerned with enforcing “rules” (with the exception maybe of English as a second or foreign language, where conventions/rules are used to scaffold learning rather than as universal truths). English teachers are familiar with linguistics and the fluid, messy nature of language and all the fun things we can do with it. In short, the grammar Nazis you encounter online are VERY unlikely to be English teachers, who are often the first to point out that language is constantly changing and that what’s considered “correct” depends heavily on … everything, really.
But we’re talking here, ostensibly, about a “class.” And if we’re talking about a class, we’re talking about a syllabus. Specific outcomes on which a course is responsible for improving and checking proficiency. Your English class isn’t a place for you to learn English, especially if English is your first language. It’s a place for you to become proficient at doing a specific selection of specific things with your language. Very often these things aren’t even about rules or grammar, but that doesn’t mean the expectations aren’t strict- and what most people read as strictness is usually just specificity.
It’s damn near impossible to know whether a curriculum, teacher, method, or activity is successful without an outcome to measure. Lack of specificity makes measurement difficult and potentially unfair. If you’re told to “write a persuasive essay,” what exactly does that mean? What separates an A from a C? How does the teacher justify that distinction, and how does the student know what they need to improve? Without very specific target structures or a “can do” inventory, assessment becomes messier and we leave students guessing about what an given teacher might want from them, which isn’t especially fair (or useful, from a pedagogical POV).
A teacher can understand perfectly well that language is flexible, that different contexts call for different kinds of language, and that conventions change over time, while still expecting students to demonstrate a particular skill according to given criteria. There isn’t one correct way to use English, but a class DOES needs to establish what it’s trying to do, what students are expected to be able to do, and how anyone can tell whether they’ve been successful. That’s not necessarily prescriptivism. That’s just how a curriculum works.
And this is why I taught math…
Math teachers also didn’t like how I arrived at my answers. I made little games and rules to try and predict the solution in a roundabout way rather than just doing the calculations “straight.”
And yeah it wasn’t as effective as the students following direction, but I was definitely having the most fun.
The “grammar Nazis” you encounter online are VERY unlikely to be English teachers
Still too many of them on the fediverse for my tastes, though the number has definitely dwindled since I first got on a few years back. I wish we had enough people interested in grammar (read: descriptivists) to make an active grammar comm here but it’s way too niche. I used to enjoy the discussions back on reddit but even over there it was still basically only a handful of people providing most of the answers that actually ended up leading to interesting conversations.
To break the rules you gotta first learn the rules.
That being said I remember in late high school feeling pretty frustrated because I had a good grip on the rules by now and wanted to try adding some zest to my writing.
But zest is difficult to grade, my teachers were not paid well enough to deal with ambiguity and to be honest most of them didn’t strike me as particularly imaginative in the first place.
Yea, it’s just that pedants deep down believe that good grammar is good writing; they don’t understand the difference. Therefore, they’re going to struggle to recognize good writing, and be incapable of producing it.
It doesn’t take a chef to spot a bad meal.
I was going to ask if that went for lawyers as well, But then I realized it was obvious.
That’s why I always read the applicable statute(s) before I run red lights and stop signs and ignore speed limits.
I know the rules, which means I get to break them, right?
no that’s not what that proverb means at all… but you know what you will get when you are caught.
The rules and norms of writing are not the same as laws. Either contribute something meaningful or fuck off.
Bullshit. If ignorance of the rules is no excuse to avoid punishment, then knowledge of them cannot be either, because you should’ve known better.
This whole charade is merely a loophole to allow people to avoid saying “wow, this writer is really hot, therefore they are allowed to break the rules whenever they want to.”
Artistic rules are quite different from rules of law.
When making art, you should know the rules (and especially why they exist) before breaking them because the reason why each rule exist is that we figured out along the way that most ways of breaking it lead to worse art.
Of course, tastes are different, but the basic aesthetic sensibilities of humans living in the same culture have a lot of overlap.
Knowing the rules leaves you much better equipped to achieve your desired effect on the consumers of your art. If you don’t know the rules of grammar, your text will likely be quite difficult to parse and, unless that was your intention or a worthwhile trade for some other effect you’re going for, this is probably sabotaging your writing.
When you break the rules, you introduce friction. If you don’t know why they exist, the “punishment” is that your art is not perceived as you intended.
As a jazz musician once said, you’ve gotta know the rules to break them.
A young man asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t ask how to do it.”
TLDR;; if you’re a student then you’re a student, if you disagree, don’t ask, just do it and you will be recognized if your aim is true.
Yeah, you’re not good enough at it to do that.
99.99% of all MF’s that say some shit like “Yeah I got bad grades, but if they tested critical thinking then I would have cum loud or whatever”
Yeah ok brother. You couldn’t critically think your way through a 3 page structured essay but I’m sure you were just holding back.
It’s almost like English teachers are supposed to teach traditional writing norms. You know, like, as their jobs or something …
When saying the second why use a comma at all?
I always preferred the “Strippers, JFK and Stalin” version that I’m too lazy to find an image for
I think you kinda have to learn the rules and prove you know them before you go wild breaking them.
That’s not always the case. Sometimes a writer is like Jimi Hendrix where there’s no need for elaborate theory backing them because they can just straight up fucking play. But it’s usually the case, and the overwhelming majority of teachers are teaching extremely usual people.
I remember in my one college-level creative writing class I had to read other people’s work and it read like an eight year old wrote it.
Novels are art. English teachers are not teaching you how to write as an art form. This is because our schools are designed to make good little worker bees. They are teaching you language so that you can then go on to learn technical writing. Now, I do think they should split the two apart, and let kids experiment and have fun with writing. That does not mean that they are wrong. Technical writing requires precision and a strict adherance to rules. It is the same concept as it being entirely fine to have a bit of fun when painting a mural, but not when you’ve been hired to paint someones house.
Also:
English Teachers: “Lets now analyze and decode the deeper meaning the author meant in chapter 23 paragraph 6” Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
Being able to analyze a piece of writing for authorial intent, conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, is a good skill to have.
That’s not even getting into understanding metaphor, simile, and symbolism in writing which can also show the author’s intent and how the author views topics.
I was velociraptoring around the kitchen at 2am. The cheese cried out, but it’s pleas fell on deaf ears.
There’s a lot that can be interpreted from those 2 sentences. Why was it written? What does it describe? What metaphors are deployed and why? What symbolism is used? Why was symbolism used? How does the writing make you feel? What was the author doing in their kitchen at 2am? How does the author view their actions at 2am? And on, and on, and on the analysis can go. And it only stops when you choose to get off of Mr Bone’s Wild Ride.
Now a less fun example is the kind of language someone might deploy when describing a group of people they do not like. How would a fascist report on a crime? A new food bank? The results of a sporting event? The release of a new video game? A new movie? Etc, etc, etc.
Being able to parse media is the biggest defense against being manipulated by propaganda.
So take the time to take a proper gander at the media you see and consume.
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Salman Rushdie: “I know that was figurative, but it still hurts!”
English teacher: Omae wa mou shindeiru
Authors: Nani?!
Sometimes the curtains are just blue
And sometimes they’re not. The point is to know how to recognize when there’s a difference.
Death of the Author is real and the creator doesn’t really matter once the art is finished.
I got smacked down so hard when I suggested that instead of identifying symbolism and metaphors in the writing we should be looking at the author’s intent in the context of their time.
Author intent stops meaning anything outside the head of the author anyways. Individual perception is the only source of meaning. No one can understand a subject without the context of their culture and personal experiences. Hence why two people can interpret the same subject in different ways that are both valid.
That may sound overly reductionist, but that’s genuinely what it boils down to. Someone’s artistic intent could be pretending to be stupid to prove a point, but if the audience only sees a stupid person, the author has no control of the message.
That’s because you can never know the author’s intent. That’s a very outdated (and very overdone) way of thinking about literature. It’s also one that we have realized isn’t actually very useful for the purposes of most literary analysis. While it can be useful to look at the historical conditions under which the text was produced (New Historicism), there is much more insight into what literature “means” when we look at aspects of the text itself such as symbolism and metaphor, because these aspects can evolve with the text and with time and with the reader, and this unfolds many more possibilities about ourselves and the work of art. There is certainly a place for combing New Historicism with other forms of literary analysis to use knowledge about the historical conditions to inform the interpretations of things like symbolism and allegory, but attempting to ascertain the author’s intentions is a futile endeavor that usually makes for a lackluster analysis.
Well that, at least, makes sense in that it’s really just an exercise in finding evidence for your argument.
You have to know the rules, why they exist, and what breaking them implies.
If you are in a class designed to teach the rules, it doesn’t even matter if you already did all 3 steps. You’ll fail the class because the class is testing if you CAN follow the rules.
But I signed up for a writing class not a following the rules class. Basically all classes are follow the rules classes if we are going to look at it like that
I guarantee your writing class has a syllabus. The problem here is a disconnect between what you think the syllabus says and what it actually says.
Students when English teacher get pregnant and she’s off for this year. Again.
now do music teachers
music teachers when you make a wrong note: 😡
Music teachers when jazz: 😍
That’s actually a great example.
Back in the day, jazz records would have the jazz version of the song on Side A, and a non-jazz version on Side B.
To the people hearing jazz for the first time it sounded terrible, but after they realized the musicians knew what they were doing, many were won over.
no thanks they’re not my type
you don’t have to do all of them
I’m gonna say it: Jack Kerouac sucks. I’ve read many different authors, but none have been as annoyingly unreadable as him. You’re supposed to “ride the wave of his thoughts?”. No thanks. To me, that just sounds like a vain excuse for bad writing.
Get your homework published and fight your teacher.
If you’re going to the trouble of writing something, my assumption is that you want to communicate. We can only communicate clearly with each other, if we all agree on and use the same word spellings and grammar rules. Otherwise, why bother?
One of the more frustrating things I see daily is titles that don’t make it clear whether OP is asking a question, or about to present an explanation.
“Why my dogs throw up in the house” instead of “Why do my dogs throw up in the house*?*”
If your essay has a line of reasoning that requires more than a room temperature IQ to follow, you get a C. If a text analyzed by the class requires a whole unit, lectures, and discussions to get a line of reasoning it is genius.
almost every english teacher in a university/CC, has thier own english writing pet peeve, it annoys the hell out of the students, when there is nothing standardized. One could want you to have a flair in writing fiction thrillers,etc and another wants a “literary circle”
it will be funny if i become a renowned artist and teachers around the world be talking how deep my lines are when it’s stuff like “it didn’t took an Hour not a minute not a Second but a microsecond and 10 people were already dead gone reduced to piles of blood and organ on the ground”
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You need to know the rules to know how to break them with intention.
gastroglizzy@piefed.social 1 day ago
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use punctuation because he “doesn’t believe in it”. His books are terrible to read. They’re clunky, unclear, difficult to parse, and read like a middle-schoolers first try at story time. James Joyce, his inspiration, same story; I can’t even get through one chapter of anything he’s ever written.
I realize I’m in the minority when I say this, but grammar has rules for a reason. When you don’t follow the same rules as everyone else, when you don’t adhere to the reader’s expectations, that makes it more difficult for the reader, not less.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
If you were to take the list of all professional basketball players, and sort them by the number of free throws missed per game, you’d see the top of the list is dominated by Hall of famers.
That’s not because missing free throws makes for a good basketball player. Or even that it isn’t important in basketball to be able to make free throws. It still remains important at every level of the game! But some of the people who miss a lot of free throws were just so utterly dominant at other parts of the game that they had long successful basketball careers despite being bad at an important skill for basketball players.
Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce have a signature style, yes, but I’d argue that they’re successful despite that, rather than because of that.
NathanRanch@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
The Road is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It’s art like anything else. The lack of punctuation really made it feel raw and close to home.
mkwarman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I agree. I read The Road recently since it’s my wife’s favorite book and holy shit it was exhausting at times. I enjoyed the story to a degree, but the stream-of-thought writing style and unspecific grammar took me out of it. If it had been written in a more understandable prose I think I would have enjoyed it more; but would it have been as famous then I wonder
neidu4@piefed.social 1 day ago
I think you’re in the vast majority.
When it comes to the readers expectation, things become a lot more complex. I don’t remember the exact words, but Brandon Sanderson talked about promises to the reader, where it’s OK to do surprising things, but expectations must be carefully managed in that surprises must not feel like betrayal. Poor execution of this is why everyone hates the “…but it was all a dream” trope.
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok theres 2 replies about Cormac McCarthy, there’s clearly something I’m missing contextwise about understanding rules and how to break them.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
Image
Ariselas@piefed.ca 1 day ago
iMUVm05T0VgVrc6.jpg
Kowowow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
If anime taught me anything It’s that character development is just padding
paranoia@feddit.dk 1 day ago
This is the standard line, but a lot of the time I find it to be bullshit. Sure, Cormac McCarthy gets to look cool and modernist by not using quotation marks, but my view is you would spend less time trying to decipher narrator vs. character if he did use them, and you would have a better reading experience at the same time.
supernight52@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is not an inflammatory response, I am just curious- How do you feel about “House of Leaves?”
Generally considered to be a phenomenal work of art, but it DEFINITELY doesn’t follow the vast majority of standard grammar rules.
gastroglizzy@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yeah, you can break the law as long as you know what it says, right?
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fuck off, you bad faith shitstain.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes tbh, with the same reasoning too. The difference is if I do the right thing and break the law, the fun police (aka the actual police) will arrest me.