MLA Elements of Style

Millions of college students consult the MLA Stylebook when writing term papers, but the group that publishes it, the Modern Language Association, devotes precious little time to elements of style at its annual meeting.

“Despite our name, there are very few panels on language at the MLA [convention],” Professor Anne L. Curzan said at the association’s yearly meeting in Washington, D. C. Dr. Curzan is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The panel on which Dr. Curzan spoke was itself markedly dismissive of the concerns of critics who fear a deterioration of literacy and grammar. Rather, panelists and the faculty members in the audience who crowded the suite and the Marriott here where the panel convened expressed frustration at being unable to counter the influence of language critics in the popular press.

Unlike the commercial about Las Vegas, what happens at the MLA conventions does not stay at the MLA conventions. The MLA is the nerve center for just about every English Department at every college and university in the country.

Most of those institutions of higher learning are represented at the MLA’s annual gatherings, either in the affiliations of the speakers on the dais or on the name tags of the professors and Ph.D. candidates in attendance. They openly discuss strategies for achieving their personal and collective goals at these summits.

Michael P. Adams, a visiting English professor at North Carolina State University delivered a well-received attack on Barbara Wallraff’s “Word Court” column in The Atlantic Monthly. For her part, Dr. Curzan dissected Eats, Shoots &Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss.

Punctuation itself is not an ascertainable fact, like mountains,” Dr. Curzan insists. “Creating this kind of insecurity in people is not helpful.”

“There are still victims of these attacks.”

Dr. Curzan is the author, or co-author, of First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching and Gender Shifts in the History of English as well as co-editor of Studies of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations. “Language is made by people,” Dr. Curzan says. “People create language.”

“Language in the form of our everyday conversation has no punctuation.” She did not explain how court stenographers and transcription services function in this punctuation-free world.

Academics have to contend with criticism from forces outside of academia, Dr. Adams lamented, “as a result of our capitalist system.”

“At The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Wallraff’s rise coincided with the publication of articles such as Christina Hoff Sommers’ ‘Girls Rule,’” Dr. Adams noted. “Forget what you heard,” the professor said dismissively. “It’s really boys who are the victims.”

“Never mind what you heard about women.” In the course of this riff, Dr. Adams did not offer one piece of evidence to counter the reams of data Sommers offers in her speeches, articles and books.

When a member of the audience asked why the professoriat “can’t get into The Atlantic Monthly,” Dr. Curzan answered, “We don’t have a voice with the public.”

“How do we get a public voice?,” Dr. Curzan asked rhetorically. “We’re seen as liberal relativists.”

A few minutes later, Dr. Curzan outlined her own pedagogic approach. “I tell my students what is expected of them but I don’t make it a question of right or wrong,” Dr. Curzan explained. “I don’t say, ‘Three errors per page and your grade goes down.’”

“I will just circle something that is not in standard written English but I won’t take points off for it,” Dr. Curzan said. “I won’t get judgmental about it.” Dr. Curzan’s address to the MLA was entitled, “Selling Grammar to the Public.” She may want to pitch it to her students first.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.