Why Trolls Attack!

For many years, I’ve worked as a technical editor and writer. As a result, I’ve had the privilege of proofreading the work of some truly brilliant, highly educated people. I’ve also had to write highly technical material that was then reviewed by experts. The review process is usually cordial and intellectually stimulating. Educated people are generally grateful when you fix their typos and their dangling participles. They tend to be tough but fair when criticizing your writing. They generally stick to a rational discussion of facts. So I was unprepared for the kind of comments I got from the general public after I started blogging. Occasionally, someone would say something like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” But most of the comments are nothing more than poison pen letters: abusive nonsense intended to serve no other purpose than to provoke an emotional response. In short, I often get attacked by Internet trolls.

I have a Web site (www.gorillaprotein.com) and a blog (www.wheredogorillasgettheirprotein.blogspot.com) that explain scientific research about human nutrition. Reactions to my Web site and blog are mixed. People who have actually studied nutrition or dietetics in college or graduate school love my work. However, many people who have no training in nutrition or dietetics hate my work, simply because I tell them things that they do not want to hear. They want to hear that fatty foods are good for them. As a result, they worship the self-appointed nutrition gurus who tell them to eat meat and fish instead of potatoes. They heap scorn on me for pointing out that people who eat a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables are generally slim and have a low risk of chronic degenerative diseases. As a result, I get a lot of hostile comments on my blog and even some hostile e-mail.

I’m disappointed that nobody seems to post serious comments about the scientific issues I discuss. Instead, the feedback is filled with nonsense, insults, and wild accusations from people who are obviously uneducated. Commenters have told me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t care about human health, that I’m in league with some organization whose work I actually oppose, or even that I hate women (because one of several persons whose work I criticized was female). Such comments are not only obnoxious, they are stupid.

The troll metaphor is appropriate for two reasons. First, the trolls of mythology were stupid, ugly, and potentially dangerous (though perhaps slow-moving). Second, the trolls of mythology could operate only under the cover of darkness. They turned to stone in the light of day. Likewise, Internet trolls sit alone with their computers, thrilled by the opportunity to annoy people who would never socialize with them in person.

The first rule of Internet etiquette is “Don’t be a troll.”The second is “Don’t feed the trolls.” The Internet creates an environment where bad behavior is often rewarded but never punished. As any dog trainer can tell you, that’s a recipe for disaster. Never reward a dog for doing something that you dislike. Otherwise, you will essentially be training the dog to misbehave. Similarly, if you respond to Internet trolls in any way other than by deleting stupid comments and blocking repeat offenders, you are rewarding them with attention for behavior that should be discouraged.

I usually delete stupid comments from my blog, unless the stupid comment offers a useful “teachable moment.” Likewise, I generally ignore abusive e-mail, unless I want to get a better understanding of troll psychology. Such correspondence has allowed me to test a theory about trolls. Some trolls are just jerks. They just want to annoy other people. However, some trolls genuinely believe that they are participating in genuine intellectual exchange. These sincere trolls think that what they are saying is true and important. They think that they are dazzling you with their brilliance. If you break off the discussion with them, they imagine that they have “won.” They genuinely don’t realize that they are making fools of themselves.

The sincere trolls are suffering from a problem called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people with poor intellectual and social skills typically don’t realize that their skills are poor. Because of their lack of skill, they can’t notice their own mistakes. Nor does anyone in their daily life bring those mistakes to their attention. As a result, people with poor skills end up thinking that their skills are above average. In other words, ignorance and incompetence beget overconfidence. Fortunately, this problem can be solved through training. As the unskilled people’s skills improve, their overconfidence melts away.

There seems to be a distressingly large number of sincere trolls in the United States. I think that the problem stems from failures in our educational system, which I’ve explained in my book Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free (www.not-trivial.com). In the early 20th century, powerful people within our educational establishment decided to promote a method of reading instruction that slows down the rate at which people learn to read and leaves many people functionally illiterate. The rate of learning is so slow that many adults “don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology.” Our educational system also deliberately suppresses the formal teaching of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yet those are the disciplines that you must learn if you want to go on to have real intellectual dialogues with other people, about any subject.

The sincere trolls have never learned how to parse or reason. Thus, they cannot be persuaded by facts. Nor can they recognize the flaws in their own reasoning, even when those flaws are pointed out to them. As a result, they will be unwilling to learn anything until they discover that they have a lot to learn. Yet they will not make that discovery until after they have already learned a lot. So pity the trolls. Just don’t feed them.

What I Learned From the McGuffey Readers

When I was a child, my parents bought a set of reprints of the old McGuffey Readers, which had been widely used as elementary school textbooks in the United States until the mid 20th century. When I read them, I was shocked. Mr. McGuffey had obviously expected that most children would learn to read as quickly and easily as I had. I taught myself to read at age four, by analyzing the spelling of the rhyming words in my Dr. Seuss books. (“Sam. I am Sam. Sam I am. Do you like green eggs and ham?”) McGuffey didn’t wait for children to figure out those letter-sound relationships on their own. Instead, the first volume of the McGuffey Readers taught children the letter-sound relationships directly. Once children knew how to sound words out, they could read just about any word they saw in print. As a result, the students quickly progressed to reading real literature.

The reading textbooks that I had in school were a lot different from the McGuffey Readers. The authors of our textbooks didn’t teach us how to sound words out. Instead, they wanted us to memorize a small set of common words, without paying much attention to the sounds of the letters. The authors then repeated those words endlessly to drill them into our memory. Because of this need for endless repetition of a tiny vocabulary, our schoolbooks contained dull, maddeningly repetitive “stories” of the “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” variety.

Because I could already read, I spent my first few school years staring at the walls, bored out of my mind, while the rest of the class struggled to memorize “sight words.” Even though our reading textbooks had few if any rhymes, most of my classmates eventually figured out the letter-sound relationships on their own, as I had. A few did not.

One of the girls in my neighborhood still could not read at the end of sixth grade. Then, through sheer dumb luck, she ended up babysitting a child who was getting private tutoring in phonics after having failed to learn to read by the end of second grade. The babysitter ended up learning phonics from the younger child. Thus, both girls suddenly became fluent readers. The older girl told me that she had never been taught phonics in school. Neither had the child she was babysitting. So it was no wonder that neither of them had learned to read in school! Everyone in the neighborhood knew that school had made life miserable for both girls. Their teachers had punished and even mocked them for failing to learn to read. In that light, the school’s failure to teach phonics seemed to me to be sickeningly cruel.

When I first read the McGuffey Readers, they filled me with an odd mixture of relief and horror. I was relieved to realize that there was nothing strange about me. I was horrified by the realization that there was something seriously wrong with my school. Since I learned to read before I started school, I was way ahead of my classmates at the beginning of first grade. But if my class had used the McGuffey Readers, most of them would have caught up to me by Christmas. Instead, they ended up wasting several years in learning to read, while I started reading to learn. As a result, I pulled further and further ahead academically.

The school’s failure to use an efficient method for teaching reading created a widening social gulf between me and my classmates in school, even though I got along fine with other children outside of school. My classmates started to sneer at me for being “smart.” One of my teachers even egged them on, mocking me for knowing things that I hadn’t learned in school.

From what I could see, schoolchildren quickly learned that they must put forth at least some minimal effort in school to keep from being punished for failure. Yet most children quickly learned not to embrace learning for its own sake, and not to get too far ahead of the other children, for fear of being shunned socially. The goal of the educational system seemed to be to keep all of the children learning at the same pace, a pace that was slow by historical standards.

The McGuffey Readers taught me that I hadn’t learned abnormally fast, not when compared with my grandparents’ generation. My classmates were learning abnormally slowly, not because there was anything wrong with them but because our school was using bad teaching methods, which had been built into our textbooks. I was not the first person to notice this problem. Rudolf Flesch’s book Why Johnny Can’t Read was a bestseller several years before I was born. That book explained that millions of children in the United States were failing to learn to read because schools were teaching sight words instead of phonics. This problem should have been solved even before I was born.

Today, prominent members of the educational establishment still oppose direct instruction in intensive phonics for teaching reading. They complain that phonics is “drill and kill.” Yet their method of having children memorize sight words requires far more drill and leaves many children unable to read at all. The solution to this problem is so obvious that I figured it out before I finished elementary school in the early 1970s. So why don’t the college graduates who are running our educational system solve this problem today?

Why Not Let a Child Escape From a Bad Teacher?

To a child, having a bad teacher is like serving a long, undeserved prison sentence. And the sentence is long. A school year represents a huge proportion of a young child’s life. Unfortunately, the child is generally condemned to serve the entire sentence, without hope of parole or time off for good behavior. Who among us has not seen a bright, happy child become a miserable, underperforming student simply because he or she was assigned to a dysfunctional teacher who was making that child’s life a living hell?

There are several ways in which a teacher can make a child’s life miserable. One is by bullying the child directly. Another is by allowing or even encouraging others to bully the child. In a naturalistic setting, children can simply run away from a tormenter or turn to their parents or older siblings for help. But in an institutional setting, the child has no escape. Anything that the child does in self-defense will be interpreted as misbehavior and punished. As an institution, a school has a natural tendency to protect itself, and by extension the child’s tormenter, instead of protecting the child.

If parents notice that something is wrong, they may try to solve the problem by talking with the teacher. Unfortunately, bullies are unlikely to mend their evil ways just because some powerless person tries to reason with them. In fact, the parent-teacher conference may simply give a dysfunctional teacher the pleasure of bullying not just the child but the parents as well.

Theoretically, a parent could solve this problem by appealing to the principal. But in many cases, the principal automatically sides with the teacher. A principal’s failure to correct a teacher’s misbehavior can make the problem worse. When bullies realize that they face no consequences, their misbehavior can escalate to an appalling level.

A recent case shows how bad this problem can get. Stuart Chaifetz’s 10-year-old autistic son Akian had always been sweet and nonviolent. Then, his teacher started complaining that Akian was hitting teachers and throwing chairs around in class. Yet a behavior specialist who was called in to observe the classroom never saw Akian misbehave and couldn’t even provoke him into misbehavior. As a result, Chaifetz started to suspect that the real problem was the teacher.

To find out what was really going on in Akian’s classroom, Chaiftez wired Akian for sound. The recording revealed shockingly cruel and unprofessional behavior from Akian’s teacher and a teacher aide. As Chaifetz explained, “The six and a half hours of audio I had proved that my son wasn’t hitting staff because there was something wrong with him—he was lashing out because he was being mocked, mistreated and humiliated. His outbursts were his way of expressing that he was being emotionally hurt at school.” After Chaifetz played this recording for the principal, one teacher’s aide was fired immediately. However, Chaifetz eventually discovered that the teacher was merely transferred to another school. He then published portions of the videotape on Youtube. He started a Facebook page called No More Teacher Bullies. Its motto: “When a teacher bullies a child, especially one with Special Needs, they need to be immediately fired, and their actions made public.”

Of course, not every child who is miserable in school is being bullied. Sometimes, the problem is ineffective teaching. If, for whatever reason, a teacher is not getting through to a particular child, why should that child have to serve out an entire year in that teacher’s classroom? Why should a child have to suffer potentially lifelong damage because of the failure of an adult?

I had some really good teachers when I was in school. I’ve also seen first-hand the damage that the occasional bad teacher can do to a child. What I never understood, even as a child, was why children had to stay in a classroom that was destroying them. Why does the school administration insist upon it, and why do parents tolerate it? How can the parents or the school administrators expect the child to trust any adult after such an experience? How many cases of “oppositional defiant disorder” could have been prevented by taking a child out of an inhumane or ineffective classroom right away?

The simplest solution to this problem is to make it routine for children to be transferred out of classrooms that, for whatever reason, aren’t working for them. If a child’s grades or behavior are poor or the child simply starts hating school, or if the teacher shows disrespect to the parents, why not just transfer the child to a different classroom? The transaction can be like an amicable, no-fault divorce: no questions asked and no hard feelings. The reason for the transfer can be simple incompatibility. Transfers can occur for reasons other than bullying, but they are particularly important in bullying cases. The child is immediately delivered from torment, and the teacher learns a lesson about boundaries.

Keeping the child in a toxic classroom is not only harmful to the child, it obscures the cause of the problem. If a child starts to improve in the next school year, after summer vacation, the improvement could be due to maturation. But if the child starts to improve immediately after being transferred, the problem was obviously in the classroom.

 

 

You Can Fix Stupid!

Comedian Ron White warns people not to marry somebody who is beautiful but stupid. He explains that a plastic surgeon can fix ugly, but “you can’t fix stupid.” The audience laughs. Who hasn’t had a painfully frustrating experience with a relentlessly stupid person? However, I think that Ron is wrong. You can fix stupid. The problem is that stupid doesn’t fix itself. Philosophy and education were developed specifically for the purpose of fixing stupid. If people are still stupid even though they’ve been through school, then their school needs to be fixed.

What is stupidity, and how can it be fixed? In the dictionary, stupid has several definitions. The first three refer to stupid people. According to the first definition, a stupid person is “slow of mind.” However, slowness by itself isn’t necessarily a problem. Slow but steady sometimes wins the race. A person who is slow of mind may simply need a bit more time to think things through or a bit more coaching and practice to develop a particular skill. Coaching and practice are particularly important for developing skills in mathematics or music.

The second definition of stupid links stupidity to carelessness: “given to unintelligent decisions or acts : acting in an unintelligent or careless manner.” That kind of stupidity could result from a character flaw, rather than from a defective brain.

The third definition of stupid is “lacking intelligence or reason.” What is reason? The dictionary says that reason is “(1) the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence (2) : proper exercise of the mind.” Thus, stupidity can be the result of a lack of mental discipline. If so, then education can “fix stupid” by helping people develop the proper kinds of mental discipline. I believe that “fixing stupid” ought to be the main purpose of schooling.

Stupidity is an age-old problem. To solve it, human societies developed philosophy, which means love of wisdom. The ancient Athenians developed a seven-course curriculum for teaching wisdom: grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. The purpose of Athenian education was to develop a boy’s mind and character so that he would become a good citizen of the Athenian democracy in peace as well as war. The ancient Romans embraced this Athenian curriculum. The Romans called these studies the liberal arts because they considered them appropriate for freeborn men, as opposed to slaves.

The liberal arts have always been valued in societies with a democratic or republican form of government. These arts have always been taught to children who were expected to grow up to be somebody. They have always been withheld from children whose participation in political decision-making was unwanted. That explains why white girls and black boys and girls in the United States weren’t allowed to go to the schools for the rich white boys.

Interest in the liberal arts waned during the Dark Ages but was revived during the High Middle Ages, with the rise of the first universities in Europe. In Northern Italy during the Renaissance, wealthy families also cultivated a curriculum that they called the humanities. It included such subjects as literature, philosophy, and history. Like the liberal arts, these studies were intended to promote pleasant and productive political discussions among the ruling class. Nowadays, people must also understand a lot about science before they can play a productive role in politics.

The liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences provide the kinds of skills and knowledge that one needs in order to participate meaningfully in a democracy. In fact, the word civility, which most people use to mean good manners, originally meant training in the liberal arts. Unfortunately, the liberal arts have been deliberately suppressed in public schools in the United States. In particular, language arts teachers have been pressured to stop teaching grammar. Yet grammar provides the basic concepts that you need in order to start studying logic. Without skills in logic, you cannot reason. If you cannot reason, you are unreasonable.

Stupid doesn’t fix itself because people who have poor thinking skills are unaware that their thinking skills are poor (a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect). People with poor thinking skills don’t notice that they make mistakes in thinking. After their thinking skills improve, they develop the ability to judge their level of skill; but by that point, they are no longer stupid.

Stupidity can be fixed through an education that places a heavy emphasis on literacy, the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences. Unfortunately, “progressive” educators such as John Dewey promoted ineffective methods of reading instruction and then deliberately suppressed training in the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences. As a result, even many people who have been to college “don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology.” Worse yet, their lack of training in the liberal arts has left them unable to reason and unable to notice that they are unreasonable. The solution to this problem is simple. First, we must teach reading; then, we must teach the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences.

"Dirty Words" and Tourette Syndrome

Here's Steven Pinker's fascinating lecture The Stuff of Thought. He explains how the way we use language sheds light onto how we think and feel. In particular, he explains why certain kinds of words evoke such strong emotions that you can't say them on television or over the radio.





The idea that the basal ganglia of the brain is involved in processing "swear words" also helps to explain why some people with Tourette syndrome can't help but say bad words. As Brendan Stack and Anthony Sims have demonstrated, Tourette syndrome is often due to a pinched nerve in the face, either in the jaw (temporomandibular joint, TMJ) or in the sinuses. If you watch people with Tourette syndrome, you'll see that the neurologic signs that make up Tourette syndrome all represent some attempt to remove an unpleasant stimulus: eye-blinking, throat-clearing, twitching, and gestures with the hands. Likewise, the swear words are an attempt to deal with the unpleasant stimulus. It's the brain's way of telling whatever is causing the problem to "piss off!" Removing the unpleasant stimulus, often simply by using a mouthpiece to realign the jaw, can relieve all of the signs of Tourette syndrome, often instantaneously. This kind of treatment can also cure many mysterious cases of pain and movement disorder that have been mistaken for psychosomatic problems.

To Promote Reason, Teach Grammar

Many Americans believe that apes can be taught to speak in sign language. In the movie the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an orangutan that had been a “circus ape” could converse in American Sign Language, even though he had not yet undergone the intelligence-boosting transformation. In reality, Homo sapiens is the only living species that can really talk, whether in an oral language or in ASL. You can train some animals, such as apes or parrots, to give certain kinds of gestures or vocalizations in response to certain prompts. Yet unlike practically any human toddler, apes and parrots can never hold real conversations. Why can children converse whereas chimpanzees and orangutans and parrots cannot? It all boils down to grammar. Human beings can grasp it, and other animals cannot.

The ability to learn grammatical concepts seems to be hard-wired into the human nervous system. Nearly all young children can grasp grammatical principles and use them to generate meaningful sentences in the language that is being spoken around them and to them. In the 1960s, some educators interpreted that fact to mean that we need not teach grammar in school. Unfortunately, their efforts to suppress the teaching of grammar have had disastrous consequences that have extended beyond the obvious decline in verbal SAT scores. That’s because the study of grammar lays the groundwork for the disciplines that make civilized discussions possible. Humanism and the Enlightenment grew out of these disciplines. If we really want to promote humanism or even just democracy, we’ll have to put the grammar back in grammar school.

Grammar is one of the studies that were included in the ancient liberal arts curriculum. The Roman philosopher Seneca explained that these studies were called liberal because they were considered appropriate for free men (as opposed to slaves). The classical liberal arts curriculum consisted of seven subjects. The three verbal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) were called the trivium. That word gave rise to the word trivial, which originally referred to things that needed no explanation because any educated person would know them. The four arts of number (mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music) were called the quadrivium.

Grammar is the prerequisite for the study of logic, which in turn is the prerequisite for the study of rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. Logic and rhetoric are the disciplines that make it possible for human beings to reason with each other. The ability to use words and logic for the purpose of persuasion is uniquely human, which is probably why Aristotle defined man as the rational animal. When human beings cannot reason with each other, their disagreements tend to degenerate into name-calling and hair-pulling rather than leading to enlightenment or productive problem-solving.

The liberal arts were cultivated in ancient Athens because they facilitate a form of government that the Athenians called democracy, which meant rule by the people. Since then, the liberal arts have generally been valued in societies with a democratic or republican form of government. They have generally been withheld from people whose participation in political decision-making was unwanted.

In Northern Italy during the Renaissance, the liberal arts were supplemented by the humanities (studia humanitatis), including poetry, history, and philosophy. Like the liberal arts, the humanities were cultivated because they promoted pleasant and productive conversations among the people who were expected to take part in political decision-making. Today, one would also need some grounding in the natural and social sciences to participate meaningfully in political decision-making.

The word humanism originally meant devotion to the humanities and literary culture. Humanism as embraced by the modern humanist movement is a philosophy that is based on reason, which means that it depends heavily on the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences. If you want to promote humanism, you must support the teaching of the liberal arts, starting with grammar.

To understand why grammar is so important, you must first understand what grammar is. Grammar is the study of how words and their component parts are combined to form sentences. Words can be classified into eight categories called the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. A word can also be described by the role that it is playing within a particular sentence. For example, a noun may be the subject of a verb or a direct or indirect object of the verb.

Logic is the study of arguments, which in turn are made up of propositions, which are sentences of a particular kind. To analyze arguments—and even just to recognize that an argument is being made—you must be able to parse, which means to analyze the parts of speech and grammatical relationships of the words within a sentence. In other words, you must have already mastered some of the basic principles of grammar.

When I say that chimpanzees can’t use grammar, I don’t mean that the chimpanzees say “he don’t” instead of “he doesn’t.” That sort of thing is a difference in dialect, which is largely a matter of geography and ethnicity. When I say that chimpanzees cannot use grammar, I mean that they have no way of expressing subject-verb-object relationships. They have no way of indicating which noun is the subject of a verb, and which noun is the direct or indirect object. For example, if I befriended Tarzan’s friend Cheeta the chimpanzee, I might be able to teach him signs for Laurie, Cheeta, and banana. If I did so, I could probably get him to generate strings of signs such as the following: “Banana, Cheeta, Laurie, banana, give.” From context, I would probably interpret those gestures to mean “Laurie, please give Cheeta a banana.” Yet no chimpanzee has ever shown the ability to express grammatical case. Thus, they have no way to express the difference between “Laurie gave Cheeta a banana” and “Cheeta gave Laurie a banana.”

If Cheeta does make signs such as “banana banana Cheeta give,” I might guess that he wants me to give him a banana. Likewise, if a dog paws at her feed bowl, she probably wants her dinner. Both animals may be communicating with me, or at least trying to influence my behavior, but I don’t believe that either is truly using language. In one of his The Far Side cartoons, Gary Larson showed a scientist who had created a dog-to-English translator. It showed that a dog’s barks really meant “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” Thus, all of a dog’s “words” are all the same part of speech: interjections, which are utterances that have no grammatical connection to the rest of the sentence.

Nouns refer to persons, places, things, or ideas. Verbs refer to actions or states of being. Grammatical case deals with the relationship that a noun has with a particular verb in a particular sentence, such as whether the noun is the subject, direct object, or indirect object of the verb. In the sentence “Laurie gave Cheeta a banana,” Laurie is the subject, Cheeta is the indirect object, and the banana is the direct object. All human languages, including sign languages, have ways of expressing which noun is the subject, which is the indirect object, and which is the direct object. In English, we usually use word order and function words like to. Other languages, such as Latin, use word endings. No modern apes or parrots have ever figured out a way to express subject-verb-object relationships.

Nor have apes or parrots ever figured out how to express the tense or aspect of a verb. Tense refers to whether the action or state of being is in the past, present, or future. Grammatical aspect deals with other kinds of timing, such as whether the action is continuous or intermittent, and whether it is completed or ongoing as of a certain point in time. For example, Cheeta would have no way of saying that I used to give him bananas but that I don’t give him bananas any more.

Chimpanzees have no way of expressing the mood of a verb. If Cheeta made signs for Laurie, give, Cheeta, and banana, I’d naturally assume that he meant, “Laurie, please give Cheeta a banana.” In that sentence, the verb is in the imperative mood. In contrast, the verb in “Laurie gives Cheeta bananas” is in the indicative mood, as well as being in the simple present tense. In the sentence “I would gladly pay you Tuesday if you gave me a banana today,” pay is in the conditional mood (as indicated by the modal auxiliary would) and gave is in the subjunctive.

No chimpanzee has ever been able to use pronouns, and Tarzan himself seemed to have trouble with them. When Tarzan first meets Jane in the movie Tarzan of the Apes, Jane says “Thank you for saving me!” and points to herself. Tarzan then points at Jane and says, “Me!” Tarzan has trouble figuring out why “me” means Jane when Jane is speaking but “me” means Tarzan when Tarzan is speaking. Pronouns are function words that stand in for another noun. Pronouns have no meaning of their own. They take their meaning from their context.

Modification is another important grammatical concept. To modify means to change, and a modifier changes the meaning of something else in the sentence. There are two main kinds of modifiers: adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives modify nouns. Adjectives answer such questions as which one? what kind? and how many? Adverbs can modify verbs (including infinitives and participles), adjectives, other adverbs, prepositions, phrases, clauses, or whole sentences. Adverbs answer questions like how, when, where, why, or how often?

Sometimes, a string of words can be used as a modifier. Often, this string consists of a noun phrase connected to some other element in the sentence by a function word called a preposition. Prepositional phrases can behave as adjectives or adverbs. Sometimes, they can change from adverbial to adjectival if they are in the wrong place in the sentence. I teach people to avoid putting a potentially adjectival prepositional phrase after a noun unless they really want it to modify that noun:

L  This product is available from Acme distributors in 1-gallon jugs.

The product, not the distributor, is in jugs:

J  This product is available in 1-gallon jugs from Acme distributors.

Sometimes, even a clearly adverbial phrase can end up modifying the wrong thing if you put it in the wrong place. Consider the following sentence, which I read in a newspaper article years ago:

L  She decided to stop having sex after going to church.

The writer meant that the woman had decided to abstain completely from sex because of a religious conversion experience. However, the sentence as it was written brought to my mind the song “Never on a Sunday,” in which a prostitute explains that Sunday is her day off. Moving the prepositional phrase “after going to church” into a different position in the sentence clarifies the meaning:

J  She decided, after going to church, to stop having sex.

J  After going to church, she decided to stop having sex.

The problem in that sentence stems from the fact that the adverbial prepositional phrase “after going to church” could potentially modify decided or having.

As a technical editor, I have had to deal with many manuscripts written by authors who seemed completely unaware that word order could have that kind of effect on meaning. Some modifiers were merely misplaced—i.e., in the wrong position in the sentence. Others were dangling, which means that the word that the modifier was intended to modify was missing from the sentence:

L  Walking to school today, my book fell into the mud.

The book was not walking. I was walking, but the word I is missing from the sentence. Also, the sentence doesn’t explain how or why the book fell. A good writer would clarify those issues, if they are important:

J  While I was walking to school today, I accidentally dropped my book into the mud.

I’ve already mentioned nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and interjections. I left conjunctions for last because they are the part of speech whose role in logic is most obvious. Most of the words that we think of as logical operators (and, or, but, if, then) are conjunctions. They are used to connect words, phrases, and clauses. Conjunctive adverbs (such as however and therefore) can also be used to connect clauses and sentences. Careful use of conjunctive adverbs helps you make your writing coherent.

Already in this essay, I’ve introduced the eight parts of speech and described a few of the most common problems that arise when writers don’t pay proper attention to sentence structure. The underlying principles are not hard. I learned them in seventh grade.

After working as a technical editor for several years, I realized that good writers understand these basic principles of sentence structure and that bad writers do not. People who do not understand these principles do not understand why their writing is bad. They may not even realize that their writing is bad. To help them improve their writing, I have to teach them the basic principles of grammar. I cannot imagine how anyone could teach writing without teaching these principles. Whenever I have taught these principles to people who couldn’t write particularly well, their writing improved dramatically. I suspect that their thinking skills also improved.

Bad writing is a serious problem for a scientist. When a bad writer writes about something commonplace, the readers can often use their common sense and preexisting knowledge to figure out what the writer meant. However, readers would find it far more difficult to decipher bad writing about a subject that is unfamiliar and hard to understand. Thus, they would find it hard to learn about a complicated scientific subject from something that is badly written. Yet a poor grasp of grammar causes problems that are even worse than bad writing. As one of my colleagues told me,

“In editing the work of scientists and physicians, I have often noted that the writers who do not have a command of English are the ones most likely to make logical errors in the design of their studies and in the interpretation of their results.”

Eventually, I got such a reputation for helping people improve their writing that I was asked to write a grammar column for the American Medical Writers Association Journal. While doing research for my grammar column, I found out why American schoolchildren have been receiving so little in the way of grammar instruction. Back in the 1960s, an influential faction within the teaching profession declared that formal instruction in grammar does not help children learn to write better and could actually have a harmful effect on their writing because it would take time away from instruction and practice in actual composition. So what happened after grammar was stripped from the curriculum? In 1963, the verbal SAT scores began a sharp, 16-year decline that was not explained by demographics. (Part of the decline was evidently due to the “dumbing down” of textbooks in the preceding years.)

I think that the decision to stop teaching grammar in grammar school was foolish. It was as foolish as the decision to have young children learn to read by memorizing whole words, rather than by learning to sound words out letter by letter. Some of the harms that have resulted from these foolish educational policies are easy to measure. As Rudolf Flesch explained in his 1955 bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read, the whole-word methods of reading instruction predictably led to severe epidemics of dyslexia and functional illiteracy. Later on, the decision to abandon grammar instruction predictably led to problems with reading comprehension and made it far more difficult for children to learn foreign languages. Yet I think that some of the worst effects are more subtle. They involve a breakdown of civility.

Many people seem to think that the word civility just means politeness. Thus, they would imagine that it means refusing to discuss politics or religion. In short, they think that it means a turning away from democracy. Yet the word civility originally meant training in the liberal arts. It meant training in the disciplines that enable one to have productive and even pleasant conversations about sensitive topics, such as religion and politics. It means a cultivation of the disciplines that are necessary for democracy.

I’ve been told that the ugliness of our current political climate results from a “cultural divide” between left and right. Yet from my perspective, the problem of irrationality and incivility does not seem to be limited to any particular segment of the political spectrum. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simple. It starts with grammar lessons.

 

George Carlin Explains Educational Policy

George Carlin explained it all, in plain but salty language.