{"id":716,"date":"2010-06-11T22:00:19","date_gmt":"2010-06-11T20:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=716"},"modified":"2010-05-26T09:38:52","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T07:38:52","slug":"do-you-make-these-mistakes-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=716","title":{"rendered":"Do you make these mistakes in English?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Do you make these mistakes in English?<\/strong> The story of Sherwin Cody\u2019s famous language school. By Edwin L. Battistella<\/strong>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 214. ISBN 9780195367126<\/a>. $29.95 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Matthew J. Gordon<\/strong><\/a>, University of Missouri<\/em><\/p>\n

This book tells the tale of Sherwin Cody (1868\u20131959), an educational entrepreneur who created a correspondence course in prescriptive grammar. Cody successfully marketed his 100% self-correcting course in English language<\/em> for over four decades, and Edwin Battistella offers a portrait of the man and his work that demonstrates how Cody\u2019s success\u2014while tapping into perennial linguistic anxieties\u2014was very much a product of his times.<\/p>\n

After setting the stage in an introductory chapter, B turns to a sketch of Cody\u2019s biography. Cody was a remarkably prolific author whose early work focused on literary topics. He published books on various American authors as well as guides for writing fiction. He got his first taste of what would be his life\u2019s work in 1896 when he became responsible for a home-study course in English offered by the Chicago Tribune<\/em>. Eventually he reworked the material for that course into The art of writing and speaking the English language<\/em>, and in a move that became a hallmark of his career, Cody marketed this book with print ads in prominent venues. Indeed, B argues that Cody deserves to be recognized among the pioneers of twentieth-century advertising. The title of the book comes from the most frequently used (and most successful, in terms of sales) headline in the ads for Cody\u2019s 100% self-correcting course<\/em>.<\/p>\n

B\u2019s attention to the rapidly evolving world of advertising is just one example how he fleshes out Cody\u2019s story by framing it within the broader social context of the times. He draws parallels between Cody\u2019s work and other commercial campaigns for self-improvement including the Harvard classics<\/em> book series and even Charles Atlas\u2019s bodybuilding course. B devotes an entire chapter to perhaps the best known guru of self-improvement, Dale Carnegie, whose personality, message, and business model represent a strong counterpoint to Cody\u2019s. Carnegie and Cody promoted a shared goal; after all, the purpose of learning to win friends and influence people, like the purpose of training to correct your mistakes in English, is to achieve financial success. In this way Cody differs from many other prescriptivist authors. To be sure, he uncritically accepts the notion of \u2018correct English\u2019, but apparently he does not interpret the prevalence of certain \u2018errors\u2019 as a sign of declining morality, much less as an attack on the English language. The problem with speaking or writing incorrectly, according to one of Cody\u2019s ads, is that mistakes \u2018may cause others to lower their estimates of your education and refinement\u2019 (7) and thus may hold you back in business and life. Cody\u2019s emphasis was on practical strategies for developing correct habits to make a good impression. As B notes, Cody was equally sensitive to usages that might be viewed as pedantic or stuffy, and he advocated a \u2018colloquial middle ground\u2019 (9).<\/p>\n

B avoids the polemical tone that typifies linguists\u2019 writings about prescriptivism. Instead of challenging the assumptions surrounding correctness directly, he sketches the social context surrounding Cody\u2019s 100% self-correcting course<\/em> in such a way as to expose prescriptivist ideas for what they are: matters of etiquette. This strategy no doubt reflects the fact that the book is written for general audiences. Still, there is much here of note for specialist readers as well, particularly for linguists interested in the history of prescriptivism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you make these mistakes in English? The story of Sherwin Cody\u2019s famous language school. By Edwin L. Battistella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 214. ISBN 9780195367126. $29.95 (Hb). Reviewed by Matthew J. Gordon, University of Missouri This book tells the tale of Sherwin Cody (1868\u20131959), an educational entrepreneur who created a correspondence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}