Saturday, August 8, 2009

In Your Own Words

Robert Fulford does not approve of ghostwriting -- well, few of us do when it involves a doctor's name being slapped on an article written by someone at a pharmaceutical company. But he says it's harmful even in less outrageous cases:

Ghosting points us toward a world of counterfeit personality where all prose will be written in the same down-trodden, down-market language, public utterances will be uniformly colourless and individual voices will be deadened or eliminated.

In TESL training, I learned about the "idiolect", the unique way in which every individual uses his language -- and everyone does have a unique way, though the differences from other people's usage may be very subtle. No one has quite the same vocabulary or pronunciation as yourself. (I just recently realized that I had never used any expressions like "pass away" and wasn't about to start - I was going to have to blurt out to a stranger that someone had DIED.)

So if you get someone else to process your raw thoughts into coherent prose, they won't be using your idiolect. Fulford seems to be saying they won't be using their own, either, but some sort of generic, and therefore dull, language. If this becomes common practise, all language will grow dull.

I don't know. As long as there are still adults learning English, there will be idiolects that produce word combinations that don't occur to us native speakers. (How many anglophones, for example, would say, "It's cheap, sad, and disgusting"? Yet there's no grammatical reason not to.)

Just so they don't get so self-conscious about it that they get everything ghost-written.

(Full disclosure: I once wrote out a letter for a couple of my students to copy so they could establish residency to enrol their kids in school. They had no lease to show, and their landlord couldn't write a letter saying they lived in his building because he couldn't write at all, except to sign his name. So I composed the letter, scrawled it out, and as far as I know one of them copied it and gave it to the landlord to sign.)

So I don't think the death of the idiolect is upon us, but I think we do have to be careful to use our own words.

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