By everything I’ve read, Robert Wright seems like a respectable enough historian. He’s got some interesting books under his belt and he seems to have established himself in a niche in Canadian history. However, the more I read his website the more concerned I became.
On a page about plagiarism he demands that students keep copies of their rough drafts and he concludes in scary red font: “Failure to produce rough work on demand will be regarded as evidence of plagiarism.” Now, I don’t necessarily recommend this method of essay writing (though many find it works fine for them), but many students (myself included) have been known to write essays the night before and some people write the essays the night before and they they edit on the fly thus eliminating rough drafts altogether. I think the onus is on the professor to find the plagiarism, not on the student to modify their writing style in order to placate a professor who can’t be bothered to realize that not everyone writes the way they do.
To add on to Dr. Wright’s errors, however, on only needs to go over to his Tips on Writing Essays in the Humanities page, a page which should really be renamed ‘My Personal Preferences in Style with Incorrect Grammar Advice.’
In section 2 part b. Wright explains:
All sentences must contain verbs. Thus, in the case of the following example -
“The man was tall. Very tall.”
- the second “sentence” contains no verb and is, therefore, not a sentence at all. (This grammatical error is now quite common in print journalism and fiction.)
I might agree that that sentence is not particularly beautiful, but Dr. Wright is simply incorrect. There is no rule and there is no universal rule that makes it a “grammatical error” not to use a verb. I will accept that most sentences should contain verbs, but it is simply not true that all must contain verbs. A simple dictionary definition should clear this up for Dr. Wright:
a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses [Merriam-Webster]
“a word” Sorry, Dr. Wright, it’s just not true. If a word can be a sentence then a verb certainly isn’t necessary. Okay.
c. Do not use nouns as verbs, notably “party,” “evidence,” “impact,” etc..
Party is an intransitive verb. Evidence is a transitive verb. Impact is a verb. I’m sorry that all of these words don’t fine nicely into your categories Dr. Wright.
Peter Mansbridge is the CBC’s television anchor and a leading exemplar of the degradation of the English language as practiced within his profession. Among the many Mansbridge-isms I would urge you to avoid are…
I’ll translate this for everyone: Get off my lawn you damn kids! [Shakes fist mightily.] Sorry Dr. Wright but what you call degradation of the English language, educated people [ie. linguists] call evolution and change.
a. the lazy (and usually redundant) phrase “in terms of,” as in the sentence: “The sky is blue in terms of colour.”
But what if someone is saying that the sky is blue, that is, it’s sad?
b. the use of “1800s” when you really mean “nineteenth century.” (”The 1800s,” like “the 1820s” or “the 1830s,” refers to a decade, not a century.)
That is a pedantic point that isn’t worth including on a style page. In reality I’d say that most people who use 1800s mean the entire century whereas those attempting to talk about the decade will go to greater length to explain themselves.
In conclusion, historians should stop trying to be linguists. Good.
