7 Things Meme: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

[dumble]

As part of the 7 Things Meme, sandmantv asked me to write about Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism. But I really can't do any better than link to today's Slate article by Steven Pinker, which is an excellent debunking of common misunderstandings of these two viewpoints. It's long, but I highly recommend reading the whole first section (approximately the first

Comments

[ophblekuwufu]

What I've done in the past is to grade on the basis of content (organization and analysis of information), but also to include copious style suggestions. I think teaching students to write as well as possible within the conventions of SAE is one of the most important functions of a TA; I also agree with you that students should not be penalized for style as long as their writing is clear (and the class isn't specifically geared towards composition

[sandmantv]

My attitude is that good communication skills are so consistently and overly rewarded by every other class and aspect of life, that I really don't have any responsibility to add further fuel to that fire.

[dumble]

I realize this is a cop-out answer, but I think it depends on the goals of the class. Some undergraduate classes are explicitly writing-oriented--and I'm not just talking about Expos, but there are other classes that list "teach you to write better" among their goals, even as they are departmental classes that also have other content to teach. In those classes, it certainly makes sense to grade on prose

[corneredangel]

The key is to treat all language variants on an equal footing, making it clear that no variant is inherently better or worse than any other.

But some communities are inherently "better" or "worse" - or "more important" or "more valid", or, even though I generally hate the term, more privileged, than others...

[dumble]

I think "privileged" is exactly the right term here. The terms "better", "worse", and "valid" definitely do not apply. "Important" is subjective--on average, across all people in the US, SAE is the most important dialect. But to someone for whom AAVE is the language they use to communicate with their friends and family, I wouldn't presume to call SAE a more "important" dialect than AAVE.

[ophblekuwufu]

It appears to be standard in educational programs designed to raise school performance in high needs schools to demand that students speak exclusively in SAE in the classroom. I understand the rationale for this, but I worry about it for exactly this reason. I wonder whether I should also, as an incoming teacher, be expected to learn AAVE and use it with the students during recess, or with their parents. Are there AAVE classes offered anywhere? Would it be interpreted as cultural appropriation for me to try to speak AAVE? I suspect it would. The question then becomes: what might be a more appropriate way to express the sentiment you've expressed to students as I correct their SAE grammar in class?

[dumble]

What excellent questions. I wish I had answers. My knowledge of these issues is purely academic. It seems to me that, as a bare minimum, the first step is simply to understand the fact that no dialect is inherently better or worse than another. And specifically in the case of AAVE, it's important to understand that the differences between AAVE and SAE have nothing to do with laziness, stupidity, etc. They're perfectly valid variants, they're just non-standard.

Perhaps one concrete suggestion I can make (and this comes up with respect to all sorts of prescriptivist rules, not just standard vs non-standard dialects), is never to use the words "wrong" or "incorrect" when describing language. That's not just some sort of political correctness--the way people use and interpret those words in the context of language is often incoherent. I've written about this before: the summary is that any normative claims about language use need to be rooted in valid descriptive claims, and the way people often use terms like "wrong" blurs the

[sandmantv]

Thanks for writing this dumble! It reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace’s essay on the subject. http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html . All three of you seem to try to thread the needle to take the philosophical correctness of descriptivism, but then arrive at the tone of prescriptivism anyway

[dumble]

Response part 1:
I haven't read the Wallace essay; I'll have to do that.

Response part 2:

Your comment seems to be predicated on prescriptivism vs descriptivism as a dichotomy, whereas I am trying to argue that they are not incompatible, and that in fact the only reasonable position is to do some of both.

That said, I realize that a lot of background discourse, both among linguists and non-linguists, does in fact set them up a dichotomy. I suspect some of the tension you're noticing between "the philosophical correctness of descriptivism" and "the tone of prescriptivism" has to do with the fact that linguists are, by and large, opposed to most of the explicit prescriptivism out there in the world, but not opposed to prescriptivism in principle. When we hear the term "prescriptivism", the first thing many people think of is stupid rules about that vs. which or splitting infinitives, rather than the type of prescriptivism we're actually in favor of, like standardized spelling. So we bash "prescriptivist poppycock", but then feel the