You find yourself struggling to understand the English being used by your new classmate. Have you ever wondered why people speak English differently, and who has established what is correct or incorrect? In David F. Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage (2001)” published in Harper’s Magazine, he is able to explore the answers behind these issues and uncover the “Usage Wars”.
Author David F. Wallace loosely reviews Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, while addressing problems in lexicography, explicating the Descriptivist and Prescriptivist theory and revealing the lack of cultivating a “dialectal talent” (413) within U.S. English classes. The author begins to describe the complexity surrounding English correctness and …show more content…
Wallace acknowledges the audience he is writing to when he states “the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are at least going to need it” (389). He employs a diction that suits his targeted audience since they are well educated and capable of understanding the meaning of complex words such as polemical and lexicography, without glancing at a dictionary, something that would be difficult for the average reader. The varying sentence structure is successful in keeping the reader engaged throughout the essay. The complexity of the diction and issues being described make it challenging for the reader to sometimes understand what the author is trying to convey, but with the help of footnotes, the ideas become clearer, allowing the writing to appeal to our …show more content…
I never thought about language as a means of acceptance, but now looking at Wallace’s essay it makes sense, because it establishes whether or not we fit into a certain group. He ridicules the teacher who blames her students for ostracizing a “SNOOT”, but he fails to provide us with the answer of how she can facilitate the process of making the “SNOOT” adapt to discourse communities, which would be vital to his own linguistic development. Wallace, because he is a “SNOOT” is unable to draw a variety of more parallels to different students who may suffer from the lack of a “dialectal talent”. I failed to realize as well, how an educated and poorly educated student could suffer from the same inability, despite their intellectual
Author David F. Wallace loosely reviews Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, while addressing problems in lexicography, explicating the Descriptivist and Prescriptivist theory and revealing the lack of cultivating a “dialectal talent” (413) within U.S. English classes. The author begins to describe the complexity surrounding English correctness and …show more content…
Wallace acknowledges the audience he is writing to when he states “the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are at least going to need it” (389). He employs a diction that suits his targeted audience since they are well educated and capable of understanding the meaning of complex words such as polemical and lexicography, without glancing at a dictionary, something that would be difficult for the average reader. The varying sentence structure is successful in keeping the reader engaged throughout the essay. The complexity of the diction and issues being described make it challenging for the reader to sometimes understand what the author is trying to convey, but with the help of footnotes, the ideas become clearer, allowing the writing to appeal to our …show more content…
I never thought about language as a means of acceptance, but now looking at Wallace’s essay it makes sense, because it establishes whether or not we fit into a certain group. He ridicules the teacher who blames her students for ostracizing a “SNOOT”, but he fails to provide us with the answer of how she can facilitate the process of making the “SNOOT” adapt to discourse communities, which would be vital to his own linguistic development. Wallace, because he is a “SNOOT” is unable to draw a variety of more parallels to different students who may suffer from the lack of a “dialectal talent”. I failed to realize as well, how an educated and poorly educated student could suffer from the same inability, despite their intellectual