Word: grammar
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Vladimir Nabokov has lived all his adult life as an endangered (and dangerous) species. Woe unto the literary pretender who does not get his facts and grammar straight. Titled men of letters must be particularly careful. Edmund Wilson audaciously questioned Nabokov's Russian and was mauled by return mail. Critic George Steiner was the victim of one of the neatest decapitations in literary history. Responding to a generously appreciative essay, Nabokov wrote that "Mr. Steiner's article ("Extraterritorial") is built on solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and should be corrected...
...strikingly craggy face familiar around the boulevards. He also continued to write and yearn for literary immortality. Even when he did gripe about reviewers, one could wonder whether he really cared what they were saying-or even quite understood. "They just said I was a bad writer, bad grammar, blah, blah, blah," he told one interviewer. It was as if the fine points of writing did not matter that much to his work. And perhaps they did not, any more than the fine points of draftsmanship mattered to Grandma Moses when she sat at her pine table...
Such freedom as Colin possesses is merely the badge of his isolation. Coached by his coal-miner father, he has made it past the crucial examinations into grammar school, the English ticket out of the working classes. But the long bus rides, the harsh school regimen, the summers spent working as a farm laborer are only the downpayment on his escape; the price for fulfilling his parents' dream is one that Colin, severed from a past which lingers to haunt him, must keep right on paying...
Traditionally, educators have blamed the fact that Johnny can't write on inadequate training in the basics of grammar and syntax. Not so, says A.D. (for Albert Douglass) Van Nostrand, professor of English at Brown University. He contends that the problem is not so much that Johnny can't parse a sentence as that he can't think. Or more precisely, he cannot think on paper. Even a student who is a whiz at grammar, Van Nostrand argues, may be a dunce at stringing together sentences and organizing paragraphs...
...graying, bespectacled and energetic Harvard Ph.D. (American literature). He had been lecturing on the American novel for 13 years at Brown when, in 1964, he volunteered for a job that his colleagues regarded with horror-teaching the required freshman writing course. His students, he soon found, often had grammar down cold but were shaky about organizing their ideas. Later, as a communications consultant to various business firms, he noticed that many executives labored over letters and short messages that turned out to be nearly incomprehensible anyway. The professor's prescription was to isolate the steps involved in writing...