Education: The Blank White Page

Wayne University’s Professor (of English) Donald J. Lloyd has long believed that Americans are too busy thinking about their grammar to learn how to write. They are possessed of a demon, “a mania for correctness,” writes Professor Lloyd in the current issue of the American Scholar. “Our spelling must be ‘correct’—even if the words are ill-chosen; our ‘usage’ must be ‘correct’—even though any possible substitute expression, however crude, would be perfectly clear; our punctuation must be ‘correct’—even though practices surge and change with the passing of years . . . The idea . . . rests like a soggy blanket on our brains and our hands whenever we try to write.

“Except for the professionals among us, we Americans are hell on the English language. [Our writing] is muddy, backward, convoluted and self-strangled . . . Furthermore, almost any college professor . . . will agree that [his students’] writing stinks to high heaven, too.

“To trace this monolithic concentration on usage is to pursue a vicious circle . . . The literate public seems to get it from the English teachers, and the teachers get it from the public . . . A phony standardization of usage appears in print, the work of editors unconscious of the ultimate meaning of what they do.

“The result of all this is that a wet hand of fear rests on the heart of every non-professional writer who merely has a lot of important knowledge to communicate … It is always a comfort to him if he can fit himself into some system, such as that of a business or governmental office . . . With what relief the pedagogues subside into pedagese!”

Professor Lloyd finds no such repressions hampering American speech. “The ordinary American is in conversation a confident, competent expressive being . . . But with the negative attitude that attends all our writing, those whose main interest lies elsewhere are inhibited . . . until the sight of a blank white page gives them the shakes . . . Not until we come to our senses—teachers, editors, writers and readers together—and stop riding each other’s backs, will the casual, brisk, colorful, amused, ironic and entertaining talk of Americans find its way into print.”