Trump’s election has caused me to ask myself some important
questions. Did I grossly overestimate my country’s progress on racial and
gender issues? Is the environment doomed?
Have I been approaching the letter of recommendation incorrectly this whole
time?
As a college English instructor, I am often asked by
students to write letters of recommendation, and I have always assumed that
the most effective way to endorse my students’ skills is through cogent
thoughts expressed in grammatically correct sentences that transition smoothly from one thought to the next.
But, as many of us recall, in the beginning of the election, Sarah Palin endorsed
Trump in a rambling, incoherent, grammatically questionable speech, and, as we
all know, Trump—a fellow rambling, often incoherent, grammatically questionable
communicator— won. So speaking of letters of recommendation, I might need to
ask someone to write one for me because my job as an English teacher depends on
the belief that proper grammar and strong language skills are necessary for
success.
Sarah Palin—the former governor of Alaska, the 2008 vice
presidential candidate, and author (well, you know, kind of) of the best
selling book Going Rogue: An American
Life—has certainly experienced success, yet she utters “sentences” that can
be as treacherous as an Alaskan winter. In fact, her words are often a bridge
to nowhere. As Stephen Colbert noted, in order to communicate like her, we
would have to tase the part of our brains that understand sentence structure.
So I can’t help but worry about the future of the English language—or
“American” as Sarah Palin calls it.
But I am not ready to kowtow and pussyfoot and bend over and
say, “Thank you, enemy.” In other words, I refuse to give up on the future of
the English language. So, the pen being mightier than the sword, I wrote a book
that comes out in March 2017--Sarah Palin’s Expert Guide to Good Grammar: What You Can Learn from Someone Who Doesn’t Know Right from Write. Here's what it looks like!It uses Palin’s rogue approach to the English language against her by basing its lessons on excerpts from her autobiography, speeches, debates, Facebook posts, emails and interviews.
As you can imagine, I accumulated a ton of material, and
unfortunately all of it didn’t make it into the book, and I don't want it to go to waste--so I’m going to share it
here with you.
Get out those tasers!
