Grammar gatekeeping is bad for fundraising

A grammar error on the radio. On NPR! Gasp.

John McWhorter, in his New York Times column tells the harrowing story: When Good Grammar Gets Snobbish.

He heard it on “This American Life.” The narrator said, “As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch…”

Oh no! A dangling modifier!

That’s a “rule” in English grammar that says a descriptive phrase without a subject must refer to the subject of the sentence’s main clause. The rule is meant to help writers avoid ambiguity.

According to the rule, the narrator should have said, “As a middle schooler, I always wanted to watch one channel…”

Except, as I’m sure you noticed, the “wrong” sentence is not ambiguous. And it’s more colloquial and smoother sounding than the “corrected” version.

But, as McWhorter says:

[T]he dangling modifier rule has fossilized into a kind of fetish less about clarity than recreational pickiness…. Why should we rigidly follow a rule and rephrase a sentence if there’s no ambiguity?

One reason: Gatekeeping. A lot of university-trained writers went through the wringers to learn our grammar.

That education is a sort of “badge” that we earned through hard work.

Fair enough. But the next step is insidious: Some of us have the badge. Others don’t. The badge or its lack is used to keep some people out. They don’t deserve to go through the gate we worked to get through.

That’s grossly elitist, and against the values of most decent people.

It’s also incredibly stupid for fundraising.

Because when you keep people out with elitist gatekeeping, you’re also keeping their money out.

Yep, people who don’t know grammar as well as you do also care about your cause, and some of them are willing to donate. I know that’s obvious, but protecting complex grammar that serves little purpose flies in the face of that truth.

As McWhorter put it:

This is a time when we need to sweep away linguistic cobwebs, like grammar rules that serve no purpose. It requires people to know a password to gain entrance into respectability, one of the last permissible outlets for classism.