It’s great that kids will learn grammar again! Now to like, literally, fix other bad habits

I’m a big fan of grammar and punctuation. The comely comma. The handsome hyphen. When I proposed to my wife I paid the skywriter extra to include the question mark.

It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. Every September in the USA, sorry, the U.S.A., they celebrate National Punctuation Day. Its official website bills the pedants’ party (assuming there is more than one pedant) as “a chance to remind America that a semicolon is not a surgical procedure”. This is both ironic and timely given these days punctuation is often considered a pain in the arse.

I, you, he, she, it and they are delighted with the news. I hope. Credit: iStock

Even more reassuring is the news we’ve finally realised good grammar goes beyond mere sentence snobbery and has an important role to play in a child’s literacy standards, with the NSW government announcing a timely overhaul to the way high school students are taught grammar, punctuation and sentence structure after a decade-long decline in writing standards.

As time passed and language evolved it seemed that grammar and punctuation became less important, more a chance for Gen X to tut-tut at Gens Y and Z. But while there are clear signs of decline, it’s short-sighted to view poor literacy as the preserve of younger folk, even if the social platforms they populate lend themselves to abbreviation and rule-breaking.

I saw a Twitter lament which read: “I spend two minutes putting together a grammatically sound tweet, only to spend the next 20 minutes working out which crimes against language I must commit to reduce it to 140 characters.”

A purist would argue you can still adhere to the principles of grammar in the search for concision. (Please note the “search for concision” is neither a Star Trek film nor a surgical procedure performed on infant boys.) I know people my parents’ age whose proficiency in written and spoken English is poor, just as I know people younger than me who are highly skilled with our difficult tongue.

The famous fox that jumped over the famous dog, who was too lazy to turn up for the photo shoot. Credit: iStock

And it is a difficult tongue. I taught it for years and counselled students who thought it a mountain they’d never climb. One Spanish student in London tried to buy a tube ticket to Mind The Gap. A Japanese man said he was late because his house was buggered (burgled), and a South Korean woman said there were six people in her arsehole (household).

The best way to dry their tears was to tell them that even native speakers struggle with the intricacies of English. Take, for example, the sign near my bus stop which spruiks a breakfast special of bacon, eggs, toast and tomato’s. To my arguably sad mind, the author of this sign might as well have scratched their fingernails down a blackboard.

But I’m a firm believer in “everyone makes mistakes” (I’ve probably made some here) and so I refrain from doing what some of my former teaching colleagues might have done: storm into the shop to make the owners aware of their error, or, worse still, pull an indelible marker from my pocket and correct the sign like some spelling superhero paid by the council to safeguard the grammatical virtue of the community.

Does it really matter that the apostrophe in “tomato’s” shouldn’t be there? It’s a regular old plural rather than the possessive. (Well, I’m assuming it’s plural. The breakfast special is only $10.50, so perhaps it’s singular.) But that’s not the point. The meaning of the sign is clear regardless of the fact that the only thing a tomato can possess is seeds and a little green umbilical cord that attaches it to the vine.

Context almost always makes the meaning clear, at least in regard to apostrophes, whether it’s the most common you’re/your lapse or its/it’s, which, let’s face it, when we’re firing off emails or text messages at the speed of sound we can all be guilty of from time to time. So then why must we police apostrophes if we can survive perfectly well without them? And will teaching grammar in schools really make a difference to declining literacy standards?

Yes. And better still, it will empower purist parents who are close to throwing in the towel. I’m constantly correcting my kids’ grammar, and they constantly don’t give a toss. I’m delighted their school will now be backing me up that it’s important for them to know the rules of the language they read and write. Because without rules there is chaos, and possibly more tomatoes than you bargained for.

Now we just need to like literally fix a few other issues and the world will be spinning on its correct axis again.

Chris Harrison is opinion editor.

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