What Makes Good English?

What makes something good is difficult to describe. I’m of the opinion that there is proper English. Proper in the way that if you comma splice, or you don’t punctuate you have broken a long upheld agreement on the way that we write. A norm. However, following rules of proper grammar rarely singularly guarantees that your writing is good. On the other hand, improper grammar has no correlation to the beauty or invention of “good” English. After all, who decides what is good? A concept that should be inherently subjective has become a uniform and standardized test. There are countless authors that clearly disprove a blanket test on the efficacy of “good” English. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God could be discounted for its use of a “broken English” dialect. And yet, she writes “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.” A lovely and emotionally complex sentiment. Hurston creates invention not in spite of dialect, but because of it while also demonstrating that complex understanding does not correlate with “proper English”. This is also apparent in Amy Tan’s article entitled Mother Tongue. Tan demonstrates the lack of correlation between eloquence and English, stating that “You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease, all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand.” In my opinion, mastery over someone’s dictated the English language is an important skill to have, after all, it can sometimes allow you to express complex ideas in an eloquent manner. However, it is not a prerequisite for expressing those complex ideas or being eloquent. Returning to Zora Neale Hurston’s quote should be proof that legitimate forms of writing and expression exist everywhere, not just in between commas and semicolons. 

Works Cited

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fawcett Publ., 1969.

Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. 1990,