Isabelle Kerr manages to contradict (and outright embarrass) herself while writing a critical piece commenting on the use of slang by the youth of today. Her criticism and negative manner towards colloquialisms is demolished by her own hypocritical use of the language. The logic of her arguments are absolutely faulted by contradicting herself, an ironic disaster.
Isabelle Kerr obviously does not comprehend what fantastic things have come out of language diversity. From colloquialisms and invented words English has evolved to become a captivating and beautiful language. The use of poetry through the language can follow a mesmerising tone with words that slip off the edge of the tongue. Ironically some of these are words that have been shortened through the ages, such as an example of a piece of vocabulary from the ‘era of great language and literary triumph’ that Isabelle describes. This is of course the word ’twere’, a contraction of the phrase ‘it were’. Has Kerr realised that that this was originally a term derived from ‘slang’ and was using this to pull our leg, or is she just unaware of insulting us with her insolence? She follows by saying ‘or worse, shortening…already perfectly good words.’, coming directly after the praise for her ‘archaic’ and ‘reminiscent’ word twere. Her lack of knowledge and ability to continuously undermine her own argument is a spectacle (so much so that I think it should be used for students to study how to not to write an article).
Kerr’s next flaw in her letter to address colloquial problems is that she has clearly not researched into the fight against ‘slang’, or even some of literature’s greatest writers. “Shakespeare will be turning in his grave” was a phrase used to make the reader think that language used today would be loathed by a past writer, an extremely important figure related to the developing of the English language. Unfortunately William Shakespeare, writer of many famous plays including Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and many more happened to be very well known for creating his own words which were consequently added to the dictionary. The list includes words such as nervy, rancorous, puke and assassination- which at the time would have been considered colloquial terms and a separate dialect from the standard English language. After all why should we not follow a great master of the English language when we can instead listen to a 20 year old analysing concepts far out of her depth who is a mis-representative of her generation. Her hypocrisy is irritating and so is to believe that people would attempt to speak about this ‘generation’s feeble etymological contribution’. I would love to see some of Kerr’s great contributions (other than her skill to lie about not knowing the definition of twerking- of course to impress others that she has been living in a cave her whole life).
Taking a shot at the Dictionary Kerr manages to mess up the difference between the online and physical dictionaries. Kerr states that by including some of these new words online, ‘the Oxford dictionaries are awarding these dismal words a degree of permanence’. Now other than her personal opinion about how useless these words are (which is perfectly acceptable) she refers to a ‘permanence’ about the online dictionary. We know that what is defined on the internet is far from the definitions of what is accepted formally into our language, so by saying that by putting words such as ‘twerking’ online keeps them forever is blowing the action completely out of proportion.
Our Isabelle questions why these slang words have been elevated to a level of permanence and authority. My question to you is: why has somebody elevated Isabelle Kerr to a level of permanence and authority inside the Telegraph to be allowed to publish this horrendous article.
October 7, 2014 at 2:26 pm
Your intro is valid as a statement of your position, but it’s not highly persuasive – or even particularly fluent in its tone. Remember that this kind of writing is about developing a voice in your writing as well as putting together a coherent argument.
This continues to the second paragraph, where you’re building a logical argument, but not reinforcing it with any particularly subtle rhetorical devices. By these I mean irony, deliberate understatement, amusing asides, allusions, comparisons…
March 21, 2016 at 12:35 pm
Hi Barnaby,
Are you going to bring this to completion sometime soon, I’m ranging around ready to start marking..
March 22, 2016 at 11:52 am
Current Grade: 18/40, 4/10 E1
April 26, 2016 at 1:21 am
The arguments here are great, and there’s some strong evidence of thoughtful language construction as well (I particularly enjoyed the tone throughout, characterised by the phrase ‘our Isabelle’).
The only area for further development could be moments when the sentence construction reads a little inconsistently. An example of this is “The logic of her arguments are absolutely faulted by contradicting herself, an ironic disaster.” – which, strictly speaking requires a ‘her’ before the word contradicting, but would be even more improved by a complete re-write, in the pursuit of a simpler statement. I do like the ‘ironic disaster’ part – which could be a sentence in its own right.
37/40 9/10 [A1]