ENGL310: History of English (Fall 2022)

Your Name: Madeline Golya

Please save/download a copy of this document and answer the following questions. You will
upload your completed ticket in the week’s Exit Ticket (after class on Thursday).

Use this space to reflect on the two chapters from Fixing English that we read (Ch. 1 & 2): what
do you think of the arguments presented? How does this change (or not) your views on
“correctness’? Choose at least three quotations from the chapters to include in your response.
(Note: Your response need not be formatted in linked paragraphs - a few sentences or even
bullet points are appropriate here.)

I think the arguments presented, more than showing me a different look at prescriptivism,
showed me a detangling of what I understand prescriptivism to be, and therefore helped to
show the separate entities of how language is influenced by prescriptivism. While I understood
that inside “prescriptivism there exist [s]... distinct yet interrelated strands” (Curzan, 24), I did not
understand them in the nuance and distinction, unraveled from one another, that Curzan
explains them in. I also did not quite understand that the “distinct but overlapping strands of
prescriptivism [exist] with different aims” (Curzan, 17). While I knew prescriptivism wanted to
create style and also standardize English, I did not connect that these aims could be anything
other than intertwined. I also found it interesting in the second chapter when Curzan talks about
the ways in which language changes occur below and above a speaker’s conscious awareness.
Her point saying that whether or not people read a certain grammar book, if it is widely bought, it
still “reinforces ideologies about the importance of “correct” usage” (Curzan, 42), regardless of
the number of people who actually directly interact with the ideas in the book. It was strange but
made sense to think that people can be influenced by things they have never touched or read
simply because people expect there to be.