0
Usenet Posted 21 years ago
Usage

Linguistics v's Traditional Grammar; a desire to read and understand

Hello,
I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult!
I find it difficult to express myself as articulately as others. I would love to get into journalism but my essays and other written papers lack 'thought'. I find it difficult to read some newspaper articles, journal articles, etc because I need a dictionary to understand every second word! I would really like to work on being able to read a difficult article and re-write it in plain simple English. There are people out there who have acquired this skill and I would like to work on being able to do this also!
In an attempt to be able to read an article and understand the meaning of it so that I can re-word it in my own words in plain simple English, I purchased a number of English Grammar books. I thought that the only way I was going to understand the pompous English used by some authors was to understand the grammatical rules so that when I looked up a word in a dictionary, I would be able to understand the meaning of the word, how to use it in a sentence and I would be able to use a thesaurus to find a simple word to use in its place when trying to re-word the article/passage/sentence into plain simple English.

Learning the grammatical rules is not as easy as I thought it would be. I stumbled upon a book called 'Teach yourself linguistic' by Jean Aitchison and after reading the first few pages, it seems that I may need to study the English language first.
Thoughts?
Let me give you an example - a friend of mine referred me to an article where the author, in his introduction, wrote the following:

"On an empirical level this article charts the introductin of a number of key reforms to the corporate policy. The author avers these reforms were shaped by the institutional power of big business. On a theoretical level the article contends that the essence of the recent legal reform process was underpinned by complex interdependence bewteen economic forces and the nature of corporations. The article criticises the distortions and mystifications of legal positivism that treats law in isolation from the economic infrastructure. .. The governing principle in any backlash against theoretical concepts dominant in the legal academy is the recognition that any changes in the doctrinal form of the law must be analysed against the backdrop of the fundamental dynamics of the social relations of capitalism and the lobby groups that express the will of capital".
The start isn't so bad but there are paragraphs and sections throughout the article that are so difficult to understand because every second word needs a dictionary and some words have different meanings, so it becomes ambiguous and the meaning of the passage is lost in the process.

Does anyone know whether learning linguistics would help me, eventually, comprehend the English language so that I will be able to read a difficult passage and understand the underlying meaning? I would very much like to be able to read such passages and re-word them into plain simple English. At the moment I can't even understand certain the difficult words some authors string together in a sentence, which destroys the underlying meaning..
On page 61 of this linguistics book, it talks about inflections, constituent analysis of sentences and shows how they are made up in tree diagrams.
Surely if I understood and could identify a verb phrase, noun phrase and a determiner, I would be able to pull sentences apart, like in the above passage, and undestand the underlying meaning? Does this make any sense to anyone at all??
Is my problem that I don't read enough or is it that my foundations in the English language are so weak that attempts to understand difficult passages of English are made difficult?
A writer isn't born, although I begin to question when people say this to me because when in my final year of high school, I went to school with a young 17 year old who was incredible in English. She was able to write copious amounts of any subject in a few minutes using very high level formal English. I know writing for some is a skill that one needs to work on to acquire, and while I am one of these people, I am struggling to understand why I have such a problem understanding judge language. I want to learn how to re-word such pompous English into simple, easy-to-understand English and I would really appreciate any ideas, links, books, feedback to help me on my journey!

According to this linguistics book, linguistics differs from old school grammar. Apparently linguitics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and describes language but does not prescribe rules of correctness... so am I on the right track in learning how to be a linguist rather than learning every single grammatical rule? I wonder if reading the dictionary would be a better idea!
  

Top answer

[nq:1]Hello, I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult! I find it difficult ... [/nq] Linguistics will not help you to do this in the slightest degree.

  • [nq:1]Hello, I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult!
  • I find it difficult ...
  • [/nq] Linguistics will not help you to do this in the slightest degree.
  • That would be like studying chemistry in order to sell motor oil.
  • Like studying biology in order to follow the pork bellies market.
Free · every Monday

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

New words, one handy idiom, and a 2-minute quiz — delivered to your inbox to keep your streak alive.

4 Answers
0
[nq:1]Hello, I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult! I find it difficult ... comprehend the English language so that I will be able to read a difficult passage and understand the underlying meaning?[/nq]
Linguistics will not help you to do this in the slightest degree. That would be like studying chemistry in order to sell motor oil. Like st
0
[nq:1]Dude, ye're barking up the wrong tree. You need to understand grammar as it really is, not from some book, be it traditional or "linguistic"..[/nq]
I agree with what you responded with, but even if I know something about the topic, it doesn't generally help...
"Plain English is clear, straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary. It is language that avoids ob
0
[nq:2]Dude, ye're barking up the wrong tree. You need to understand grammar as it really is, not from some book, be it traditional or "linguistic"..[/nq]
[nq:1]I agree with what you responded with, but even if I know something about the topic, it doesn't generally help... ... one would have to understand the underlying meaning and re-word it in plain simple English, without changing the meanin
0
[nq:1]... I find it difficult to read some newspaper articles, journal articles, etc because I need a dictionary to understand ... out there who have acquired this skill and I would like to work on being able to do this also![/nq]
I'm going to treat the text you provided. You have gotten some good advice already about the general problems you have with English. Some people have suggested that

Related Questions