Bad Teacher
I laughed like a drain when I read this article from the Guardian which tells the story of group of university professors who wrote an angry letter to a Government Minister - Michael Gove - complaining about poor educational standards.
Yet after launching their 'blistering attack' on the Education Secretary the professors found themselves as recipients of a presumably unwanted award, for Bad Grammar - which judged their letter to be "simply illiterate".
Ouch, that had to hurt!.
But I still think that these highly paid boffins should be made to sit on the naughty step for a while - because until they sharpen up their act a bit, no one's going to listen to a word they have to say.
Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove
Professors who wrote to education secretary complaining about changes to curriculum win inaugural Bad Grammar award
By Alison Flood
It was a blistering attack on Michael Gove for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy questioned. Their letter has been dubbed "simply illiterate" by the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards.
The professors, from universities including Nottingham Trent, Leeds Metropolitan, Oxford and Bristol, had warned that Gove's national curriculum proposal meant children would be forced to learn "mountains of detail" for English, maths and science without understanding it. But according to the Idler Academy Bad Grammar awards, they made a string of grammatical blunders including using adjectives as adverbs and mixing singulars with plurals.
"The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing," said Toby Young, who was joined on the judging panel by fellow writers Harry Mount and Nevile Gwynne.
Tesco was a runner-up "for using adjectives as nouns and failing to put hyphens in the right place" and Transport for London was attacked for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign". The journalist AA Gill nominated himself for the award, but "the judges decided that his conversational style was in fact grammatically sound", said organisers.
The award is intended to draw attention to "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better". Gwynne, author of Gwynne's Grammar, highlighted a particular paragraph from the academics' letter for criticism:
"Much of it demands too much too young. This will put pressure on teachers to rely on rote learning without understanding. Inappropriate demands will lead to failure and demoralisation. The learner is largely ignored. Little account is taken of children's potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity."
Gwynne's attack opened with a consideration of the phrase "demands too much too young".
"Presumably they mean something like 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much', but, as worded, it simply is not English," he said. "In that sentence as worded, 'too young' can only be two adverbs, 'too' qualifying the adverb 'young', and 'young' qualifying the verb 'demands', as would, for instance, 'soon' or 'early'. But 'young' is an adjective, and cannot ever be an adverb. And it certainly is not doing the work of an adjective in that sentence, because there is no noun that could be 'understood' and which would turn that sentence into English."
Gwynne was also disturbed by the academics' statement: "Little account is taken of children's potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity."
"In the second clause, 'Little account is taken' is understood before the words 'that young children need'," he said. "But there is no such verb as 'to take account' but only 'to take account of' as in the first clause of that sentence. The second clause of the sentence is simply illiterate."
According to Gwynne, the phrase "to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity" requires "something of a struggle" to find a genuine meaning.
"It is at the least an unstylish bit of writing – children in the plural having in quick succession 'experience' in the singular, 'lives' in the plural and then 'activity' in the singular again," he said.
The judges are not the first to criticise the academics' letter. Gove himself was unimpressed by their views, describing them as "bad academia".
