Grammar poll on a contentious subject-verb agreement issue

I would like to share with readers of this blog the recent exchange of e-mail below between me and a well-respected English professor and writer in the Philippines regarding the following sentence construction:

“Many people discover to their dismay that their many years of formal study of English has not given them the proficiency level demanded by the job market, by the various professions, or by higher academic studies.”

It is the first sentence of an online ad for my third English-usage book, Give Your English the Winning Edge.

The English professor, whose identity I will keep in strict confidence here, e-mailed the following response to the circulation department of The Manila Times:

“Oops! Please correct the verb in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the ad!”

The e-mail was forwarded to me and I e-mailed this response to the English professor:

“The marketing group of The Manila Times has alerted me about your feedback to the first sentence of the online ad for my book Give Your English the Winning Edge.

“No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my use of the singular verb form ‘has’ in the following sentence:

“‘Many people discover to their dismay that their many years of formal study of English has not given them the proficiency level demanded by the job market, by the various professions, or by higher academic studies.”

“Since English-language experts like you and [name withheld] think otherwise and have called my attention to the seemingly wrong verb usage, I have made a full-length explanation on this page at Jose Carillo’s English Forum. Please click the link to read it and do let me know what you think. I’m willing to be overruled—and will rewrite the sentence in question if need be—if you and an overwhelming majority aren’t convinced by my explanation.

“Thanks and have a nice day!”

The English professor then e-mailed me this response:

“Sorry, but you’re not right. The word that can be removed in sentences of this sort. (I know you’re right = I know that you’re right.) If you remove that, you will see that your argument falls apart. The real direct object of discover is the entire clause ‘their many years of formal study of English have not given them etc.’ Years is the subject of the verb have in the clause.”

I responded by e-mail as follows:

“You seem to have a point when you convert my sentence into its ‘that’-less form, but look at this other sentence whose construction is every bit similar:

“‘She is convinced that her 20 years of teaching experience [is, are] a big plus to her credentials.’

“And see what happens when you convert that sentence into its ‘that’-less form:

“‘She is convinced her 20 years of teaching experience [is, are] a big plus to her credentials.’

“I wonder if you’d still insist on the plural ‘are’ for both constructions. I think it’s clearer here that the relative noun phrase ‘that her 20 years of teaching experience’ is, in fact, both grammatically and notionally singular, don’t you agree?”

His response:

“Not really. The linking verb has to agree with either or both subject and/or predicate. Example: Many years is one thing, but all your years is another. You used to have, which has to agree only with the subject.”

I have not yet answered this last e-mail by the English professor. Since the matter has remained contentious and has not had a satisfactory closure, I have decided to make this grammar poll among readers of this blog.

Please let me know whether you are in favor of the English professor’s contention or of mine, and provide a justification for your choice. To ensure confidentiality, please don’t post your response directly on this blog; send it to me by private e-mail at joecarilloforum @ gmail.com. I can then publish your response later in the blog without identifying you as its source and without embarrassing anybody in this academic exercise about English usage.

As I promised in my initial response to the English professor, I’m willing to be overruled—and will rewrite the sentence in question if need be—if you and an overwhelming majority disagree with my grammar usage in that sentence in question.

Thank you have a nice day!

Down to the Very Grassroots of English Grammar and Usage

Among the English grammar-and-usage reference books that have come out in the United States and the United Kingdom these past few years, hardly has there been one that simply promised good, old traditional instruction on how to achieve good English. Not a few of the titles seem to be more interested in bashing the traditional rules of English usage than in teaching them, like Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log and Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman’s Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. They debunk many of the traditional rules of English so gleefully and so mercilessly that it’s hard not to entertain the thought that their authors are actually playing to the gallery so their books can make it to the nonfiction bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

And why not? A book that—of all things!—dwells on the virtues on the comma and other punctuation marks, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, had made it to The New York Times nonfiction bestseller lists and had stayed there for so many weeks and had likewise been a runaway bestseller in the author’s homeland—England, the very place from which English had sprung to become the world’s global language! It’s therefore not surprising that there had been a dizzying rush—no, a stampede—of linguists and English professors and journalists wanting to capitalize on this sudden public euphoria in relearning the basics of English and avoiding its pitfalls.

One notable exception to this authorial stampede is, as I reported in Jose Carillo’s English Forum last week, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse by Ben Yagoda, an American English professor. Despite the vicious-sounding title of his book, Yagoda is no gleeful assassin of the English language unlike some authors in the genre; instead, as Publisher’s Weekly had so aptly put it, Yagoda uses the parts of speech as signposts as “he charts an amiable path between those critics for whom any alterations to established grammar are hateful and those who believe whatever people use in speech is by default acceptable.”

There’s actually another book that I was about to add to Ben Yagoda’s league as a congenial, forthright, and unpretentious body of instruction for navigating the fundamentals and niceties of the English language—Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. It caught my attention because, like Patricia T. O’Conner’s Woe is I and Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, it has the distinction of making it to The New York Times bestseller list for paperback advice books, reaching the No. 9 slot after its mid-2008 release. This was on the heels of Mignon Fogarty’s sensational free weekly “Grammar Girl” podcasts—reportedly downloaded over 20,000,000 times—on the most common mistakes people make when communicating in English.

Make no mistake about it: I think the supreme virtue of Mignon Fogarty’s book and the primary reason for its marketing success is its unabashed, unapologetic willingness to go down to the very grassroots of English grammar and usage—that stage where the learner of the language still has to grapple with the grammatical and semantic difference between the articles “a” and “an,” the verbs “bring” and “take,” or the expressions “feeling bad” and “feeling badly.”

Consider this passage—one of hundreds of what Mignon Fogarty calls “quick and dirty tips”—in the first chapter of the book:

“I FEEL BAD: BAD VERSUS BADLY

“Interviewers often ask if people are afraid to write to me, and the answer, sadly, is yes. I get a lot of e-mail messages in which people (even my mother!) include blanket requests for forgiveness for any unidentified grammar errors. I feel bad about that—my goal isn’t to make people self-conscious or afraid.

“In addition, I get skewered when I make an error (or perceived error) myself. So when I was quoted in an article saying, ‘I feel bad about that,’ a lot of readers saw a chance to send me a gotcha e-mail message about using bad to modify feel. They maintained that I should have said, ‘I feel badly about that.’ I’m not perfect, and I make lots of errors (especially in live interviews), but this isn’t one of them.

“The quick and dirty tip is that it is correct to say you feel bad when you are expressing an emotion. To say ‘I feel badly’ could imply that there’s something wrong with your sense of touch. Every time I hear people say, ‘I feel badly,’ I imagine them in a dark room having trouble feeling their way around with numb fingers.”

But, we may well ask, who could be the market for such very basic, almost rock-bottom instruction on English usage—instruction that seems more appropriate for entry-level learners of English than for those whose first language is English? Judging from the immense popularity of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips in the United States, this seems to be the answer: the typical or average American, whose English vocabulary reportedly runs to only about 14,000 words against the 20,000-25,000 words that a typical native-English-speaking college graduate needs to be functionally literate in English (a very sore point to educated Americans, I know, but there it is). This explains why the Oprah Winfrey Show had hailed Mignon Fogarty’s grammar podcasts as having “come up with clever ideas to help even the most grammatically challenged person remember the rules,” and why Newsday had gushed that the podcasts had “sparked what you might call a worldwide, syntax-driven fiesta.”

As to Mignon Fogarty’s book itself, however, I won’t argue against its well-deserved market success, but I’m not too sure now if I should put it in the same league as Ben Yagoda’s When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. It’s just that I find the level of English instruction of Grammar Girl much too basic; indeed, if you are comfortable with the level of English being used in this Forum, I don’t think you could stand more than a few pages of Mignon’s “quick and dirty tips.” For the seriously English-challenged, however, there’s no doubt in my mind that Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is a heaven-sent, eminently useful book that’s worth reading from cover to cover.

Read an excerpt from Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Read Literalminded’s review of Grammar Girl's Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Read Lisa Shea’s review of Grammar Girl's Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Have a look at Mignon Fogarty’s "Grammar Girl" website

Listen to the Grammar Girl podcast on “All Right” versus “Alright”

Things You Might Do If You’ve Already Mastered Your English

You are supremely confident that you have already mastered the English language all the way down to its deepest innards but (1) you find that you don’t have the talent to write a blockbuster novel or biography or history with it, or (2) you discover that you don’t have the personality or patience or the stage presence to continue teaching the hoary rules of English to rowdy and inattentive students, or, worse still, (3) you get too easily infuriated by bad English copy to hold on for long to a good-paying newspaper or magazine copyediting job.

I have a suspicion that any or all of the above might apply to the self-styled English grammar mavens who have been bashing the traditional rules of English grammar and usage lately, and that suspicion went several notches higher when I discovered that Prof. Geoffrey K. Pullum, the English linguist who has been skewering Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in the American media these past few weeks, himself had co-authored a slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners book on English usage three years ago with another linguist of apparently the same persuasion (they are both English grammar descriptivists as opposed to the prescriptivists).

That book is the 2006 paperback Far From the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log, which Prof. Pullum had co-written with Mark Liberman as lead author. Prof. Liberman, an American linguist, serves in twin capacities as trustee professor of phonetics and professor in the computer and information services department of the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Pullum, a Briton who became an American citizen in 1987, had worked in visiting positions at the University of Washington and Stanford University, taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and now works at the University of Edinburgh’s school of philosophy, psychology and language sciences.

Far from the Madding Gerund is actually a compilation of the linguistics duo’s irreverent essays on the English language in the popular website “Language Log,” where they are regular contributors. Just in case you are hearing it for the first time, “Language Log” is where professional linguists like Liberman and Pullum converge on the web to vent their spleen and poke fun at English misuse, and Far from the Madding Gerund was their well-meaning but, alas, too-hurried attempt to transport their language mayhem from web to print so non-netizens and laypeople can share in the merriment.

There’s little doubt that Far from the Madding Gerund is a rip-roaring read. It couldn’t be otherwise for a book that wickedly demonstrates that Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is bad grammar advice, that the College Board is incapable of identifying errors in its own SAT, and that Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons fame—he’s one of their favorite punching bags—is a bad English prose stylist who messes up the very first sentence of The Da Vinci Code. But the problem, as Lisa Shea points out in her review of Far from the Madding Gerund, is that perhaps the material in the book would have been better left online with the links intact.

Shea explains: “But the real problem I had with the book, while it’s a really cool concept, is that it is pretty much a verbatim dump of the blog. I’m talking straight to the book, with sentences such as: ‘Follow-ups in our pages and elsewhere (here, here, here, here, here) discussed many cases of developments of a different kind ...’ The five ‘heres’ are all in light grey text, meaning a little sidebar gives a one-line summary of that thread’s topic and then gives you a (I kid you not) 63 character long URL that you have to type in to see what the reference is. On a blog, this works fine—you hit the link and go read the reference. In a book?? You completely miss half the story…Maybe it was that the book was really just a way to make quick money without having to write any new content at all—they hit ‘print screen’, sent it to a publisher, and were done. Maybe they didn’t have time to actually edit and work on ‘a book’.”

To me, however, an even more important concern about Far from the Madding Gerund and books of that genre is this: Other than delicious fun, what do we get from all this savage bashing of the English language? Would it actually make us better learners and users of English, or wouldn’t it ultimately lead us to a barbaric, no-rules, no-holds-barred English-usage zone from which there might be no return?

Read two excerpts from Far from the Madding Gerund:
Max Liberman: “Phineas Gage gets an iron bar right through the PP”
Geoffrey Pullum: “Without Washington’s support... who??”
Read Lisa Shea’s review of Far from the Madding Gerund
Read Daniel Jolley’s review of Far from the Madding Gerund
Read “The Dowdbot challenge,” Max Liberman’s May 18, 2009 post on “Language Log”