In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George
Orwell made plain the ways in which those in power use language and grammar to obfuscate, conceal and abdicate responsibility. Grammar remains as political as ever, as Ellen Bresler Rockmore, a lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth, makes clear in her op-ed piece in the Oct. 21, 2015 edition of The New York Times.
You may have heard of the hoopla over the way a new textbook widely used in Texas depicts slavery as “bringing millions of workers” to the American South. Rockmore shows us how the textbook, published by McGraw-Hill Education, distorts slavery even further through its grammar. “But it is not only the substance of the passages that is a problem,” she writes. “It is also their form. The writers’ decisions about how to construct sentences, about what the subject of the sentence will be, about whether the verb will be active or passive, shape the message that slavery was not all that bad.”
Today’s guest post was written by Writing Program faculty member Phoebe Zerwick.