Williams: 1; Kruschek: 0

Joseph Williams' article "The Phenomenology of Error" is an extremely interesting look into his thoughts and research on writing errors and how readers respond to it. Using Erving Goffman's work on social faux pas as an analogy, he claims that the intensity of a reader's response to grammatical errors will range far and wide depending upon the reader and their feelings on whichever particular error they happen across. Williams finds that there is a pretty wide chasm between a reader's "conscious directive," meaning what the reader consciously defines as grammatically incorrect when asked, and the "unreflexive experience," meaning how said reader actually responds to a grammatical error when reading a document for content, particularly when that reader considers themselves to be "educated and literate and defenders of good usage," i.e. someone in academia (426). He makes his point, and hilariously so, by finding grammatical errors in grammar handbooks that the authors themselves advise against.

The primary thing that got me thinking occurred on 416, when he writes about reading for content versus reading for typographical errors, and later in the essay makes that claim that "if we read any text the way we read freshman essays, we will find many of the same kind of errors we routinely expect to find and therefore do find" (420). It made me think about another essay we read this semester (I can't remember the name, or maybe it was from class discussion...anyway, its in the ether) whose author suggested that, as instructors, we should be more concerned with whether a student is making a good point or claim as opposed to whether that student is making said point or claim eloquently. This is something that I struggle with as an instructor. Most of the time I am unable to separate reading for content and reading for typographical errors, regardless if it is a paper I'm grading or an article I'm reading. For me, the two go hand in hand. My opinion is that if you cannot state your point or claim in an understandable manner then it doesn't matter how good your point or claim is, its pretty much dead in the water, or at least severely limited in its impact, until and unless the wording can be worked out. At the same time, I fully recognize that having a good point or claim to make is sometimes the more difficult of the two to accomplish. Its a vicious cycle.

 On a final note, before I read this selection, I read the description in the contents section and knew in advance there were grammatical errors hidden in the text. I consider myself to be a pretty ardent grammarian, and thought that I'd be able to spot these errors without a problem, so I found it very interesting that, though there were places in the text where I thought the sentences were a little clunky, I couldn't give a name to what was necessarily wrong with it. Point: Williams.