Gore Vidal, an American writer and public intellectual, very aptly said, “As the societies grow decadent, the language goes decadent too. Words are used to disguise and not illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it”. In Pakistan, the English language, an official means of correspondence and communication, is rarely taken seriously. All forms of written discourse, either as essays written by high school students, official government letters, or research papers posted by university students or scholars, depict grave spelling errors, incorrect grammar and misplaced tenses.
Moreover, the most traumatic part that teachers face with regard to English literature pedagogy is that there is a lack of originality and creative thought. In place of that, students prefer to plagiarise and copy-paste ideas from online sources. This reflects the depleting ability to think critically on the part of students and the lack of effort in teachers and instructors when it comes to guiding them towards quality literature. In this respect, our society has moved far away from genuine literary criticism. Furthermore, with the boundaries between formal and informal language disappearing, the emphasis on taking care of spellings, grammar, punctuation and composition is slowing dwindling. Moreover, those who speak with flawless accents also fail to distinguish between the words that sound the same but have different meanings such as “affect” and “effect”, “principle” and “principal”, and “there” and “their”.
Thus, English teachers who have a strong command on their subject find these mistakes appalling. Editing articles submitted by determined contributors who want their work to be published becomes an arduous job when they are loaded with basic grammatical errors and over-ambitious vocabulary that distorts the meaning of their work. Therefore, schools and English language institutes need to revitalise the beauty and true character of the English language by focusing on its basic structure and grammar.
Hadia Mukhtar
Karachi
Published in The Express Tribune, Septe0mber 21st, 2020.
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