The Elements of Clunk

The Chronicle of Higher Education laments how students are writing these days.

From the article...

Consider:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

Those two hypothetical sentences contain 11 instances of this new type of "mistake" (I put the word in quotes to include usages that would almost universally be deemed errors, ones that merely diverge from standard practice, and outposts in between). They are as follows:

1. There should be no comma after "But."

2. The period after "Iron Man 2" should be inside the quotation marks around the title (which would be italicized in most publications, including The Chronicle).

3. No comma is needed after "movie."

4. "Its," not "their," is needed with "Weather Channel."

5. "Whomever" should be "whoever."

6. "Myself" should be "I."

7. "Girl that" should be "girl who"

8. "Gray" is the correct spelling, not "grey."

9. "Amongst" should be "among."

10. "One year anniversary" should be written as "one-year anniversary," but, really, "first anniversary."

11. It's a "Yankee," not "Yankees," game.

Are you surprised by the absence of smiley faces, LOL-type abbreviations, and slang terms like "diss" or "phat"? A reading of the typical lament about student writing would lead you to think all are rampant. However, I have yet to encounter a single example in all my years of grading. Students realize that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment (even an assignment for my classes, which for the most part cover journalism, broadly defined—that is, writing for publication in newspapers and magazines, in print or online). Maybe students are being too careful. Slang can streamline or lend poetry to language, or both. The new errors and changes, on the other hand, make it longer and more prosaic. They give a new sound to prose. I call it clunk.