To Err Is Human

Williams argues that writing instructors should rethink their definition of error in student's papers. In an attempt to prove his point, he, without warning, included 100 grammer errors in his essay challenging his readers to list the errors they noticed on first reading it. He maintains that, because he is a professional writer whose relationship to his readers is quite different from the teacher-student relationship, many of the errors in his article have gone undetected. Clever Williams. He has in essence proven that we read the writing of our colleagues differently than we do student writing and that error is not a fixed feature of a text but something constructed by the reader.

But that trick, nor his exposure of grammarians making the very mistakes they admonish against, is not half so clever as his definition of error as a social phenomenon. Williams claims that error is a "flawed verbal transaction between a writer and a reader" (417). He warns the reader against conceiving error as "a discrete entity, frozen at the moment of its commission" (417), such as might be suggested by a tabulation of 432 comma splices "in so many pages or words of student writing.

Williams problematizes such empirical research on the grounds that "[m]erely by being asked, it becomes manifest to [researchers] that they have been invested with an institutional responsibility" to uphold a certain "standard" (418). By throwing the light of the "expert" back on itself, Williams exposes some of the unstated political assumptions behind the statistical measurements of error. He frees up space for the reader, and the pedagogue, to widen the scope.

He talks about "errors" in everyday social life, comically contrasting them with "grammatical" indecencies such as split infinitives or dangling modifiers: "We break wind at a dinner party and then vomit on the person next to us. We spill coffee in their lap, then step on a toe when we get up to apologize. … Or the error metaphorically violates psychic space: We utter an inappropriate obscenity, mention our painful hemorrhoids, tell a racist joke, and snigger at the fat woman across the table who turns out to be our hostess" (419-20).

Dramatizing the concept of "error" in commonplace situations gives the reader as a broad a starting point for error as she or he is likely to find, beyond the freshman or "basic writing" classroom, but, one might argue, analogously applicable to it.

Williams has demonstrated that we are likely to find errors where we look for them, that our reading of professional prose is happily oblivious to error whereas the reading of our students' prose is hard-nosed and scrutinizing.

Photo: Kendell Geers T:error