Eats, shoots and blogs

I had the chance recently to read the book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." It's an international best-seller and as a newspaper editor, I was supposed to love it. Beyond the cute panda art and the initial ha-ha pun title, I found the book annoying. It is accurate and complete in its assessment of grammar and punctuation, but it is bothersome because its secondary message beyond accuracy and clarity (top priorities, I grant!) is oppression.

What? How can the author so hung up on commas and semicolons be an oppressor? A word Nazi? Easily. She uses language as a class weapon, as a tool to beat students so they hate writing and reading from middle school through their adult lives.

First, understand that clarity and communication are the top issues and beyond debate, but how you reach that clarity and communication is not.

So, we all know a panda would not belly up to the bar, have a snack (eats), pull a gun and fire (shoots) then exit (leaves), as the book's title chides us. In the context of a talk on eating habits, we understand the sentence just fine. But take this sentence in a five page report on pandas that an eighth-grader writes and mark it in red and you probably have an eighth-grader who is going to hate writing.

No, we shouldn't pass students who give innacurate answers, but should realize that we are always learning and that humiliation and ridicule don't help.

So, how does this lead to class oppression? People who don't write or speak the way of the ruling class ("proper" commas, for example) become outsiders, we call them "stupid" or "uneducated," when, in fact, in their communities, they are just the opposite.

I'm part of that oppression, by the way. As a newspaper editor, I enforce antiquated grammar rules and play games with word minutia to show reporters that I'm "better" than they are.

Don't fret, though. Some readers enjoy my many mistakes as well. Little people with little minds like to clip my mistakes and send them to me and tell me how stupid I am.

It's a shame that language that can create beautiful poetry and images has to be used as a club to belittle and stomp on people's lives.

Thought: Huh?