Misplaced Sympathies (Official Week 3 Posting)

In our last discussion, the argument was advanced that the student populous must have neglected their assignment, a notion founded in an attempt, no doubt, to explain the seemingly unanimous mutiny of Mina Shaughnessy's article and ideology, and the resulting objections that were mounted against her empathy for the ill-prepared college freshmen at CUNY in 1970. Having reread this article three times in less than two weeks, as I am certain my colleagues have also done, I will not recount its particulars, but rather, I will advance a rebuttal argument, or explanation. My, and our, lack of blinded acceptance and adoption of her guiding principles is not the product of a collective laissez-faire reading attempt, but is, on the other hand, the rudimentary representation of her most underlying conclusion- damage "has been done to students in the name of correct writing" (393). Admittedly, she was referring to the damaged BWs; however, I strongly assert, and do so with her own writings, that we, the traditionally educated Flower-Powers and Gen-Xers, are also "damaged."

Most composition teachers of the 1970's taught and evaluated student freshmen based on the "traditional standards" (387) of college preparedness or unpreparedness, which is to say those lacking a workable understanding of the "code" (395). By Shaughnessy's own concatenations, and by her fierce call for change, one can deduct that most faculty were not as forgiving as she and maintained a higher level of grammatical protocol. Hence, most budding English and composition professors, "bonehead" or scholarly, were academically raised with the same convictions. The domino effect, in most cases, explains the continued policy in our grammar, secondary, and college educators. Therefore, by default, most of us have developed with a Darwinian fear of the "error" and an evolutionary predisposition to avoid such a creature! Shaughnessy herself admits to devoting her book to the "orientations and perceptions" (390) of those teachers. In short, our belief in the non-negotiable respectibility of properly formatted grammar does not stem from mediocracy in effort, but from the "prescriptive teaching" (392) instilled in us by Mina's adversaries and their academic offspring.

Secondly, Shaughnessy constructed a logic argument and, incidentally, has done so without context or grammatical error. Perhaps she herself felt that to include the very errors she advocates for would decrease the perceived value of her message, the volume of her readership, or the importance of her message. She seems to have waged her own self-described "bargaining" for "goods" with the reader (i.e. us), where "errors ... are ... unprofitable intrusions" (395). Perhaps her traditional educational up-bringing, like ours, forced an obligatory, and habitual, desire to "communicate within the code" (Shaughnessy 395).

Inarguably, she is not a BW, but the exact qualifications for that designation, and the lax grammatical requirements that are afforded to those in that category, are only loosely defined and do not include a 'promotional' criteria, whereby the proverbial gloves come off in the form of a well-used red pen! Such a tipping point, an unequivocal time, must be established to both reward the work of the BW and to advance his or her skill-set. Like it or not, we, the grammar police, are the "buyer[s] in a buyer's market" (395), and much like Shaughnessy concedes her path to us and the rules of proper grammar and composition in this article, so to must her evolved BWs yield to us, the damaged, and former, students of tradition. My only explanation, although it is one better presented on stage, would not argue with Shaughnessy, but rather agree with her, "Perhaps, as some would say, the propaganda of a long line of grammar teachers took" (394)-we are who we are!

RB