Speaking truth unto power...

...ful FOLLY.

Earlier this week, on Woman's Hour, I heard Sarah Vine being interviewed, and towards the end Jane Garvey [showing remarkable self-restraint] revealed that Ms Vine was married to Michael Gove. The interviewer (who no doubt knew that Gove and grammar were in the news) asked 'Does he correct your grammar'. And my hackles rose: what did she mean by correct; what did she mean by grammar? [She didn't use those words, but that was the gist. And that was the 'quote' that I chose to use as a peg to hang my outrage on. (I expect Gove would want me to say 'peg on which I chose to hang my outrage' –  )] I have ranted about this inhuman DISMEMBERMENT of phrasal verbs more than once; I think this is the UrRant.

Later I learnt the background. Gove had done a Churchill.

<digression theme="Doing a Churchill"> 

When Churchill first briefed the newly-set-up War Cabinet, he did something similar (but without so many obvious and trivial and self-evidently ridiculous bees in his bonnet). In a TES Resource that's been viewed well over once a day since I posted it four years ago I used Churchill's memo as input to the Text Analyser provided by UsingEnglish.com. As I say in the introduction for that resource: 

This handout looks at a memo written by Churchill to his wartime cabinet on the subject of plain writing. Opposite Churchill's original there is a parody breaking all the rules he mentions (and a few more). On the reverse, there is a textual analysis done by the tool available at http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php, showing the quantifiable effects of using woolly language. This could be a basis for web research into writing skills. 

(In fact the link is to a newer version of the Text Analyser.) 

The parody is not nearly complete. To make the two analyses comparable I wanted to have similar word-counts. (I also got bored.) I begin my introduction to the parody: 

This is a version of Churchill’s memo, using unnecessarily long and obscure words, redundancy,  deadwood…any bad writing practice. Sadly, it wasn’t difficult; bad writing isn’t.

</digression>

Many a commentator has commented on Mr Gove's FOLLY, notably David Crystal who started thus (on the very morning of the FOLLY, so immediate was his disgust – and I'm choosing my words carefully here: I expect Gove's FOLLY left a bad taste in Crystal‘s mouth; it did in mine. And I expect that's not the last of it. I look forward to Oliver Kamm's reaction in Saturday's The Times.

Here's the beginning of Crystal's piece:

On being a pedant with power'Michael Gove is instructing his civil servants on grammar' said the headline in today's Independent. And Mark Leftly went on to describe how instructions posted on the Ministry of Justice intranet, after Gove was appointed Lord Chancellor last month, warned officials about the kind of English they shouldn't be using. Nicholas Lezard in the Observer made a similar point. His headline read: 'Has Michael Gove dreamed up these grammar rules just for our entertainment?

I'm not going to make much of a contribution to the tsunami of ridicule; my views on  this sort of nonsense are well-known; here's one of my earlier posts on pedantry (and interestingly, the word's  origin). The word cloud on the right will guide you to others.

But one particularly silly nostrum leapt out; I can't conceive of Gove's reasons; is he satirising himself?

 ...the phrases best-placed and high-quality are joined with a dash, very few others are ...

Wha..? Where to begin? I could fight pedantry with pedantry and ask whether he means a hyphen – but that‘s the sort of quibble that springs too easily to the lips of an erstwhile Editorial Assistant.*

Rather than this I went to OneLook:

And I only got it down to 33 by selecting Common Words and Phrases. Without that filter there are well over 1,000. (I gave up after 10 pages.)

b

Update 2015,06,26.12.45 – Serendipitous PS

Tale from the Word Face

The importance of the hyphen was just underlined for me by an ad that appeared on my screen while I was  looking into the word "well-versed":

On a first reading I imagined a miracle cure  – showers that make the disabled walk. With a heavy heart I diagnosed the missing hyphen.

Update 2015,06,28.11.05 – Added footnote;

* Not to mention the comma splice. Gove seems to inhabit a string of glass houses.

Money down the drain - DRAIN?

My attention was grabbed today [to be honest, it didn't take that much grabbing] by this tweet:

She starts with an interesting piece of typical choplogic:

As a neuroscientist I am interested in how we can use insights from our basic research and apply those insights to understand contemporary life. The brain adapts exquisitely to the environment... 

By definition, if you use computers heavily, guess what? You are going to turn yourself effectively into a computer, because that is the environment you have adapted to. You will have certain skills, but not others.

More here 

Wow! 'By definition'; this is obviously clever stuff, only to be grasped by trained neuroscientists like Herself. I'm not sure I've got this, but it seems to me that 'if you use handtools heavily, guess what? [nice bit of vox poppery there; 'Don't be frightened by all this clever stuff, I'm talking your language'] you are going to turn yourself effectively into a handtool,  because that is the environment you have adapted to. You will have certain skills, but not others.' Scary. I obviously had a lucky escape when I spent only three weeks in a holiday job as a carpenter's mate's mate's mate. Much longer and I'd've been saying things like 'Sorry, I can't have a conversation right now; would a dovetail joint do instead?'

<rantette>
And I do wish people wouldn't brandish the phrase 'By definition' like some kind of omnipotent weapon at the beginning of sentences, with the general meaning 'It's obvious that...' but with no definition anywhere in the argument.
</rantette>

The insidious thing about her piece is that there are occasional shafts of sense:

... A while ago Michael Gove, when he was the education secretary, said that every child should learn a poem. My own view is that a parrot can learn a poem

The whole point is that the child should understand the poem. Facts on their own are pretty boring, whereas true knowledge is how you use those facts, relate them to each other and put them together in a framework.

Shame about that 'My own view' bit. Another bit of vox poppery. But there's no need for the assumed diffidence. A parrot can learn a poem (well.. a short one). And the word 'knowledge' is an odd choice. But her heart's in the right place (in this instance). It's when she embarks on simple-minded extrapolations from neuroscience to the-trouble-with-education-today that she comes unstuck:

If serious money is being spent on high-tech devices, we need to think whether that will really achieve the best ends. In a report commissioned by Nesta in 2012, Decoding Learning, it was concluded that, "in the last five years, UK schools have spent more than £1 billion on digital technology. From interactive whiteboards to tablets, there is more digital technology in schools than ever before. But so far there has been little evidence of substantial success in improving educational outcomes".

There is no issue here. An inspirational teacher is an inspirational teacher, using whatever media are appropriate, from traditional pen and paper at one end of the spectrum to the latest high-spec iPad at the other. 

<autobiographical_note theme="educational spending">
I must say, it seems to me that the high-spec end of the spectrum will quickly move downwards. When my daughter was studying 'Don Juan' a few years ago, I recognized the text she was using. When in 1969 I had studied 'Don Juan', the text we used had been quite recently published (June 1967, says Amazon). So in September 1969, when we first opened those olive covers, it was only two years old. Nearly 40 years later, my daughter was using the same text in the same binding.</autobiographical_note>

In the context of education spending this penny-pinching, I'm amazed that any teacher manages to get any hi-tech equipment. But if they can, good luck to them! And anyone who whinges about the cost of education – as Baroness Greenstuff does – should weigh it against the cost of the alternative.

And anyone who decries the pouring of money down the drain, in the case of education, should perhaps reconsider their use of the term DRAIN.

b
Update 2015.07.17.13:50 – Added PS

PS With no  great relevance to the theme, I'm adding a diagram that I produced a few years ago as a prompt for further research in (that is, outside) the ESOL classroom, on the subject of drains.

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now  complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  over 45,100 views  and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 2,300 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

To lose ONE teacher is an anecdote, but...

How many anecdotes add up to a trend? This article has added to the feelings of... despair [no, that's not an exaggeration] that I voiced here.

<autobiographical_note theme="reformation" date_range="1965-6">
My third-year history master was an old priest, semi-affectionately known as 'Gob' for reasons best known to his Maker (presumably not omniscient in matters of orthodontics). Officially he was Father Brendan.

He comes to mind in this context because of his insistence on saying 'the So-Called Reformation', because – he said – the word reformation meant 'reformation for the better', and anything that led to the dissolution of the monasteries could only be called 'The Reformation' if prefixed by 'So-Called' in as sarcastic a tone as possible.

I wonder what he would have made of Michael Gove's So-Called Reforms.
</autobiographical_note>

This article reports the frustration of an 'outstanding' teacher:

According to all the different criteria against which I have been judged, despite the constant shifting of goalposts, I have been outstanding. I worked hard; I delivered engaging yet academically challenging lessons – despite us all being told that these two concepts were mutually exclusive; I assessed pupils in rigorous detail against ever-changing marking schemes; I completed fatuous administrative tasks within all deadlines. I was at the top of my game....

...I see children as individuals; today's ministers see them as a mass that must be trained.

This became particularly visible in Michael Gove's reforms to the English Literature curriculum, which come into effect next month even though he is now out of the picture. Gove was unable to relate to anyone or any belief system outside of his very narrow range of experience, and yet, due to his changes, all young people in Britain (regardless of gender, ethnicity, class, or individuality) are now expected to relate to the white, middle-aged, upper-middle class values which he decided were the right values....

This intellectual snobbery would have made my job not only impossible, but also soul destroying. I cannot stand at the front of a classroom and make children chant the works of Keats – instilling in them the belief that the only voices worth hearing in our society are those of a dead, white, English, male establishment figure.

I seem to be quoting most of the article. You might as well read it in situ. But I'll leave you with her closing words:

We now have a generation of pupils who have been trained that their individual opinions and skills invalid, that reading is only worthwhile if the text was written by a white, British man; we have a generation of disaffected teachers, who are woeful¹ about the notion of change (even if it's sometimes for the better); and a generation of school leaders that has been told that managing teachers must involve distrusting them. Politicians may be transient, but attitudes are not. The rot has set in, its effects will be felt for years.

Basically 'We're doomed'.

b
PS

Another Guardian article worth reading in this context is this – in which a retired (but only 50 year-old) soldier dismisses full-time teaching as  'too stressful' for an ex-army man.

NB Dodgy PS – see PPS (below)

Update 2014.08.11.14:20 – Added this note
¹ This use of woeful to mean full of woe is woefully common. A similar thing is happening to hateful (which, when I was lad, meant likely to occasion hatred [as opposed to feeling hatred]). Ah well...

Update 2014.08.12.09:40 – Added this PPS

PPS

My PS was misleading  in a number of respects – the Guardian page was taking ages to load, and I decided to rely on a faulty memory. The ex-service man (not army, I think) was 'in his fifties'. And he didn't 'dismiss teaching as too stressful' (he was a teacher). Ex-colleagues had dismissed it.

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 45,000 views  and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,300 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

The Thoughts of Chairman Bigdork

Wes Bigd... sorry, Brett Wigdortz OBE has an impressive string of achievements to his name, strangely omitting a business school (which was where I imagined he must have learnt that the best disguise for wooly thinking is wooly language). In an interview in  The Times (quoted in a recent Saturday's Magazine) he said:

You are now ['Now?' I suppose it made sense in the original interview, which I haven't seen.] more likely to  do well on free school meals [??? What's he talking about? Thriving nutritionally?] in an inner city than in a coastal town where you are not. [WTF? This person starts in an inner city and then has an existential crisis when moving to the coast? ]

Think about it. You'll probably need a long time. You see what he's done? The first You and the second you are different people. He has no doubt been on a writing course that tells you [oh yes, I've done that course too] to avoid abstraction by using 'you' as often as possible, regardless. In fact, one of the reviews on Amazon says, self-importantly

Brett writes as though he is talking to each & every [not just each, note†] reader personsally [sic].

Read more here if  you must. Some snake-oil looks really tempting. And there are traps for the unwary at every turn: Listed among 'Praise for Success Against the Odds' is Jeremy Paxman's 'Teach First is great. Everyone should do it'. But this isn't about the book at all. For all I know, the next sentence might have been 'This book is utter drivel though; avoid it like the plague.' Or quite possibly the quote came from an edition of Newsnight that predates the writing of the book entirely. Anyway, caveat emptor (or as Woody Allen said in an aside, when a grossly exaggerated compliment bore fruit, 'She bought it!)

So the trick worked.You can fool all of the people all of the time.

OK – time's up. My guess at what he meant is that a student disadvantaged enough to qualify for free school meals (however the criteria for allowing that are applied by distinct authorities), at an inner-city school (however that is defined) is more likely to 'do better' (whatever THAT is) than a student without such qualification for state largesse at a school in a coastal town (where the local authority probably applies the free school meals criteria in a totally different way). This sort of meta-meta-meta-statistic (depending on the interaction of a large number of unspoken definitions) always bothers me. Kent's The coastal authority's Mr Bumble may just be having a crack-down on dishing out free meals. Such numbers are the homoeopathic medicine of rational argument: supposedly, the more the criteria are diluted the more potent they are.

Hattie Denington, a [just] survivor of her first year, and a self-styled [but  pseudonymous] 'defector', has written of Teach First's 'survival-of-the-fittest model, and its focus on expansion at any cost' in an illuminating piece entitled Why I Quit Teach First.

I feel it needs to show it [Teach First] can provide adequate support to graduates it already employs before it can justify this kind of expansion [from an intake of 186 graduates in 2003 to a reported '1,261 fresh-faced grads' {oh dear, someone needs to go on a writing course, but the post is worth reading despite this sort of infelicity} this year]. As a Teach First defector, it makes me feel I was ultimately disposable. And given schools are struggling to hold on to teachers in general, this isn’t helping...

...Looking at my classes now, I can’t help thinking I’ve let them down this year [although she has become what some observers have called a 'good' teacher] – that any experienced, carefully trained teacher in my place would have given them more. I might have made a great teacher with time, who knows? But the bitter experience of single-handedly letting down whole classes of children has driven me, and a number of others like me, away from the profession altogether.

Education is at least as important as Tony Blair said all those years ago. It needs more than some Big Society posturing (Teach First is a charity)  and amateur meddling by sometimes well-intentioned whizz kids.

b

^†A low blow, I grant. But when reading Amazon reviews I can't help recalling Walter Raleigh's [no not that one, the professor, author of "Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914"]:

I wish I loved the human race
I wish I loved its silly face
I wish I loved the way it walks
I wish I loved the way it talks
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought 'What jolly fun!'

Update 2014.07.27.19:20 – Correction. 'Kent' mention was irrelevant . I got my wires crossed

Update 2014.07.29.10:45 –  Various typo-fixes, and added links

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  over 44,640 views  and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,250 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Gove, Gwynne, Churchill ...?

One of may favourite toys at the moment is the Text Analyser provided by usingenglish.com. As Gove's Golden Rules have been so much in the news of late, and as he is such an espoused fan of Winston Churchill^†, it occurred to me that it might be fun to put Gove's Rules into the analyser, in comparison with a text that Churchill sent to his War Cabinet. The texts are of different lengths, so the comparison is not as balanced as I might have hoped, but the circumstances (a politician briefing his underlings) are quite similar.

Here is Churchill's score:

And here is Gove's:

One number jumps out: the one for Hard Words, defined in the Using English help as

words with three or more syllables. This definition is used in calculating the readability and difficulty of a text, including the Gunning Fog Index

Nearly 12% of Gove's text includes such words, whereas Churchill's text has a score of less than 9%. For words of up to 5 letters, honours are pretty even, but from 6 letters and more Gove (with a few exceptions) stretches his sesquipedalian legs. He beats Churchill on 6 letter words, 7 letters, 8 (by a factor of more than 2), 9 (by a factor of more than 3), 12 and 13 (Churchill has none). Churchill leads in his percentage of 10 and 11 letter words, and is alone in using a single 15 letter word.

This word, 'conversational', is not so Hard. In fact the very concept of Hard Words is a subjective one that the writer of the Text Analyser has tried to render objective by tying it to syllable count. But hardness is a much more complex thing than that, including familiarity (e.g. 'family', with three syllables, is much less hard than 'ilk', with only one), abstractness (e.g. 'motor-bike', with three syllables, is – I would say – less hard than 'traffic', with only two)... and many other factors. For more information on the full text, see this TES resource, which I made with an earlier version of the Text Analyser, comparing Churchill's text with an Aunt Sally parody I wrote – breaking all Churchill's rules and then some).

But Gove does not come off too badly in the comparison. His and Churchill's Fog Index scores are pretty much the same; and Gove's sentences aren't as long (sentence length is one of the factors considered in calculating the Gunning Fog Index.) This (shorter sentences) is what lets Gove use longer words but still have a slightly lower Fog Index. And his Lexical Density^‡ is considerably lower than Churchill's.

So, my report:

Satisfactory, but could do better. He seems to have come under the dubious influence of an older boy (Gwynne Major).  We can only hope he snaps out of it soon.

And while we're on that subject, I heartily recommend Oliver Kamm's piece in this Saturday's copy of The Times, in which he calls Gove's guidance 'well-intentioned and largely either futile or destructive' and says of Gwynne's Grammar

It is a work of titanic silliness, and it's alarming that the Education Secretary doesn't see this.

(That's got quite a ring to it. Gwynne's marketers – probably himself [among his shortcomings, self-effacement isn't one] – should snap that one up. I can see the cover sticker now: '... Work of Titanic Silliness').

b


† One tweeter even proposed this bingo game:

 

He appended to this a link, but in this capture it wouldn't have been live. It is the same as the one I used above for Winston Churchill.

‡ Lexical Density = (Number of different words / Total number of words) x 100
Update 2019.07.28.10:50 – Old footer deleted