The Phenomenology of Error
An essay published by Joseph Williams in the National Council of Teachers of English journal, May of 1981.
Contents |
Argument
In "The Phenomenology of Error," Joseph M. Williams places the responsibility of understanding and questioning a text on the reader. Much of what Williams wants the reader to understand is the way academia and scholars treat errors. Williams states that often when we begin looking for errors, we will find them; When we do not look for errors, it is harder to notice them. Williams states that an audience needs to understand that no matter how respected a source is, it is always the subject of criticism and error. Within this essay, Williams is pushing against two forces:
1) Rules established by institutions who feel pressure to create standards
2) The difficulties in establishing a binary opposition with errors in writing.
Williams draws on the Reader Response Theory by placing responsibility on individual readers to develop expectations for "correctness". Inherent in Williams's essay is the analysis of error in a post modern context. The difficulties of moving from a binary understanding of error and correctness to the more fluid reader response understanding are complex and contradictory. To compensate the skeptic and demonstrate the complexity and necessity for such a discussion to the skeptic, Williams creates a number of involved graphic representations. Williams begins with four categories:
- 1a. A rule is violated, and we respond to the violation.
- 1b. A rule is violated, and we do not respond to its violation.
- 2a. A rule is not violated, and we do not respond.
- 2b. A rule is not violated, and we do respond.
He then adds a second gloss with this:
- [ + violate, - favorable]
- [ - violate, + favorable]
- [ + violate, + favorable]
- [ - violate, - favorable]
Williams' Illustration:
Williams concedes that there is more to understand. The combination of the two surveys of error and correctness response encapsulates our initial reactions to error. Williams' system is a counterweight to the idiosyncrasies of prescriptivists, who do much of their work under the guise of language purity, not clarity. This point is clarified when we react favorably to an error when we know it is one [+Violate, +Favorable]. For example, language has no perfect form, only forms that are more clear than others.
At the end of the text, Williams surprises the reader with the notification that Williams has intentionally placed 100 errors in the text. While shocking most of the reading audience, he has also just made clear a point that he has been trying to highlight throughout the entire text. He encourages the reader, if they want to play the game, to send a list of errors seen on the first reading to the University he's affiliated with.
Contradictions
Several contradictions are shown within the essay, including examples from George Orwell and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. These contradictions highlight how simple it is for grammatical and stylistic errors to be overlooked by even the most educated editors. These examples are key in Williams' point that although these texts have been in print for years (and have been used as teaching materials), these problems have yet to have been pointed out.
Example 1 - E.B. White
"For example, E.B. White presumably believed what he (and William Strunk Jr.) said in The Elements of Style (New York, 1979) about faulty parallelism and which vs. that:
Express coordinate ideas in similar form. This principle, that of parallel construction, requires that expressions similar in content and function be outwardly similar. (p. 26)
That, which. That is the defining or restrictive pronoun, which the non-defining or non-restrictive . . . The careful writer . . . removes the defining whiches, and by so doing improves his work. (p 59)
Yet in the last paragraph of "Death of a Pig," 9 White has two faulty parallelisms, and according to his rules, an incorrect which:
'. . . the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar . . . I have written this account in penitence and in grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain my deviation from the classic course of so many raised pigs. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, . . .'"
Example 2 - George Orwell
"In this next example, Orwell, in the very act of criticizing the passive, not only casts his prescription against it in the passive, but almost all the sentences around it, as well:
'I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged . . . Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry . . . the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds . . . The range of verbs if further cut down . . . and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not an formation. Simple conjunctions are replaced by . . . the ends of sentences are saved by . . . '"
Errors
Williams' biggest statement in this essay is his strategic placement of errors throughout. Not only does his help him put the reader in he mindset that he wants, but it challenges them to truly understand what is important when reading an essay on style. Here are a few examples of Williams' work:
Example 1 - Misspelled Words
"Many of us may be surprised when we get a paper with no mispelled words, but that pleasure does not derive from our noticing that each word in turn is correctly spelled, but rather in the absence of mispelled words."
Example 2 - The Use of "Irregardless"
"I see where the President has said that, irregardless of what happens with the gasoline shortage, he'll still be against rationing, just like he has been in the past. He seems disinterested in what's going on in the country."
"It has also labeled as non-standard irregardless, like for as, disinterested for uninterested, and see where, as in the construction, I see where . . ."
Example 3 - The Incorrect Use of "Which"
"Were the number of items large, we would be constantly distracted by noticing that which should not be noticed."
Williams states that the error count of the essay is "around 100". Although the essay has been around for almost 30 years, no official list has been compiled of the errors.
