Warm up
—- * * FOR NEW STUDENTS ** ————————————— ————
- What industry do you work in and what is your role?
- What are your responses in your role / position?
- Can you describe to the function of your workplace / company?
- How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
- What are the minimum requirements for employment ie Education or Experience?
- How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
- What is the process for changing job roles ie Interview? Test?
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General discussion about your workweek:
- Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
- Anything of interest happening?
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Script
1. Editors serve a noble purpose in our organizations and our society, and they’re usually the first to remind you of that. But sometimes the editors get a little too full of themselves, and they’ll try to push you into changing something that doesn’t need to be changed. We’ll look here at a few cases in which the office grammar police are enforcing style rules that are obsolete or never held much authority in the first place.
2. “Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation,” Steven Pinker writes in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. “But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth.
3. Pinker’s world-class expertise as a linguist allows him to put even the most venerable style guides in their place: “For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them.”
4. Here are a few cases in which you’re justified in pushing back against the editor’s pen:
1. Beginning a sentence with and or but is acceptable and natural.
Neil Whitman elaborates and offers backup from the Chicago Manual of Style, which notes: “There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percents) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions.”
Granted, such usage may seem too chatty for some academic or highly formal writing. Still, in most contexts it allows for the smoothest flow of ideas.
5. 2. The passive voice is sometimes the right voice.
Your Grammarly app will still struggle to recognize this. “Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory,” Pinker argues. There’s a perfectly sensible reason for the guideline against the passive voice: “I saw the movie” generally works better than “The movie was seen by me.” But while a fundamentalist says that a command should never be broken, an open-minded person tries to recognize the spirit of the command, in order to discern when to set it aside in favor of another interest.
6. 3. It’s okay to brazenly split an infinitive.
You may want to say, “I want to gratefully acknowledge your help,” but someone probably taught you that it’s more proper to say, “I want to acknowledge your help gratefully” or “I gratefully want to acknowledge your help.” Increasingly, this is viewed as clumsy and unnecessary, and some experts assert that the rule against splitting infinitives was based on an erroneous understanding of the structure of English.
7. Star Trek’s original tagline was, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Tellingly, when that was updated, it became “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” It became gender-neutral, but it retained the split infinitive, because “to go boldly” just doesn’t have the same ring to the ear.
8. 4. A preposition is something you can end a sentence with.
The rule against ending sentences within or on or within or from is another one that must have been developed by fussy people who wanted the language to be as tedious an affair as possible. But if you get ticketed by the grammar police for this, just rip that ticket up. As editor Megan Krause notes, the perfect comeback is one attributed to Winston Churchill: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
1. Do you think language is changing in the workplace in Japan, In what ways? For Example??
2. How often do you write in English in your workplace? Do you have any problems with English writing?
3. What are the grammer rules in japan? Is it changing over time? Which factors have impacted writing the most?
