Language Debates Author:Diana Hacker The idea for these language debate3s grew out of emails sent to Diana Hacker by students and other users of her books: queries about split infinitives, protests over her use of "however" to begin a sentence, requests for a ruling on the correct use of "myself" (to settle a debate between friends), and so on. Some of Diana's email correspondents ... more »have seemed willing to accept her word as the ultimate authority.
In her replies, Diana would try to get the writer thinking about the rationales for rules of grammar and usage. Why is a rule worth following? When might a writer reasonably decide to break it? Does it, in fact, have any validity at all? While drafting these emails, Diana would often consult current usage guides. When she quoted usage experts, she would focus not on their authoritative rulings but on their evidence and their reasoning. She wanted her correspondents to understand that she--and the real experts, such as Fowler, Follett, and Garner--didn't just make these rules up.
Diana Hacker wrote the following in the preface to the first edition of Language Debates:
Linguistic usage is more complicated than at first it seems. To defend a particular rule, we may be able to demonstrate its impact on clarity and ease of reading, but not always. Some rules are validated simply by convention or the principle of consistency. Still others are matters of social status, etiquette, aesthetics, or even morality (as with dishonest uses of language, such as doublespeak). To add to all this complexity, the rules sometimes change, coming into fashion and then falling out of favor over time. Indeed, faced with such complexity, usage experts themselves do not always agree.« less