SpecGram—The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor

The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments

Now with Footnotes!

Athanasious Schadenpoodle

So, Dear Reader, you have completed your Ph.D. in Linguistics (yay you!), run headlong into the grim realities of the modern job market (poor you!), broadened your ideas about possible teaching contexts (smart you!) and landed a gig in an English department (lucky you?). You’ve potentially got the base of the Maslovian pyramid covered for at least a semester, but you’re in a rather alien environment, surrounded by people who talk funny in a way that Dialectology 501 never prepared you for and who have some markedly odd folkways. Some culture shock is inevitable, but a little knowledge can go a long way toward alleviating the worst of it. Thus, we¹ have prepared this guide, which aims to provide some practical advice—or at least, practical by academic standards. The first section discusses characteristics of English departments as a whole, the second describes some of the faculty constituencies that you may be interacting with, the third provides some observations about student populations, and we end, like the lamentable sorts of careers, in administration.

Part 1: The Gig

While English departments are highly variable, there are some rules of thumb that tend to be reliably useful. You should, for example, keep two things always in mind:

English departments tend to have a lot of different kinds of faculty in them, each of whom thinks the department should be about whatever they do, and
None of those kinds of faculty is likely to want to teach linguistics courses, hear about the details of linguistics courses, or know much about linguistics. They do, however, think they know all the important things about how language works, because they’re in an English department.²

English as a field is devoted to the study of the myriad glories of the spoken and written word; taking the language apart so you can get into the engine and fiddle around describing parts of it really, really isn’t the average English faculty member’s idea of glory.³ Since you got the job in the first place, it’s likely that you already have some experience and preparation in teaching composition and/or ESL, or you have a background in Old English and are going to teach That One Course on Old English. Maybe the department has That Freshman Course on Language (in which case, celebrate!) or even a TESOL program (celebrate extra!). You might be teaching subjects related to any and all of the above. Rest assured that most, if not all, of the other members of your department would really rather not be teaching any of that even if they had the preparation for it. This principle holds true even if you also teach composition.

Practical advice:

Faculty may feel that they need to act mildly interested in a subject even if they’re not, out of basic politeness. Keep that in mind if you’re ever talking about syntax or syllable structure.
Don’t assume that everyone is interested in how language works. They’re more likely interested in what it does, or in being able to say something quirky about what a piece of it might be up to.
Everyone—everyone—in the department will be highly cognizant of the fact that the Administration now views the Humanities as some kind of expensive, frivolous money sink. Real scholars think up new ways to make employees obsolete, or how to make mountains explode; they don’t waste time wondering whether you should do either of those things in the first place. So, uh, ixnay on the ocialsay iencscay osturingpay. Really.
Some of your colleagues may be able to offer profound insights on the nuanced implications of a sentence in context, but not really have much experience thinking about how the words in the sentence relate to each other structurally. It’s holism all the way down. Don’t shift into expert mode and start lingsplaining at them! No one likes that, and you’ll inevitably get a comeuppance the next time you’re discussing anything literary and miss a bunch of allusions and implications.⁴
To us, linguistics is a vast field, divided into very different subspecialties. To Engfolk, linguistics is a single subject area whose heyday was under Roman Jakobson⁵ (whom Famous Critic Stanley Fish regarded as giving the most boring lectures ever), and which survives because of tradition or something.
When we say “formalism” we’re talking about a penchant for model-theoretic approaches (or at least ones that dress up in model-theoretic clothing) and extensive use of pseudo-mathy notation. When your colleagues say “formalism” they’re talking about a literary-critical approach from the early/mid-20^th century that Stanley Fish heard a lecture by Roman Jakobson about. Be prepared for the confusion that the mismatch causes, and head it off if possible.

Part 2: Constituencies

Chemistry departments are reliably full of people who study chemistry; one may study a different kind of chemistry from another, but it’s all chemistry. English departments, on the other hand, can come across as a kind of Humanities yard sale; they’ve always got people who work on English literature, but past that, the details vary per institution. All in all, the composition of a department can contain any combination of the following; practical advice is included per subgroup.

The Criterati

These are folks who are primarily interested in Literary Critical Theory,⁶ not in literature; in fact, they’d much rather be responding to the work of other Criterati than spending time with actual literary works. If this sounds negative, pause for a moment and think about people who work exclusively in syntactic theory, and how interested they are in actual language in use, or for that matter, in actual language. Now, think about the status those people have in the field. See? The Criterati also include a subgroup that describes their work as being in Cultural Theory, which is a nifty way to talk about culture without having to bother with studying all that pesky anthropology.

Practical Advice:

Out of all the constituencies in an English department, you’ll probably have the least basis for academic discussion with this one—the scholarly base for LCT doesn’t overlap with the one for mainstream linguistics very much at all. And if you find yourself thinking, “I should be able to follow this argument, but it doesn’t make any sense,” be aware that LCT extensively uses the tactic of attaching new, technical definitions to fairly common words. There is a lot of “interrogation” going on, albeit in a very much less coercive way than you’re expecting, and what sounds like ‘difference’ with a French stress pattern is different from ‘difference’. The Criterati’s argument would make sense (probably) if you had that inside info. If this bothers you, remind yourself what syntax does with the label ‘subject’, as opposed to what the word can mean in everyday English.⁷
Criterati form camps the same way syntacticians do: frequently, vigorously, and on obscure bases. There aren’t usually many of them in a department, though, because there are only so many courses on Critical Theory. If you only have one, that one’s theory camp will be presented as the only viable one in existence. Basically, they’re the Humanities version of Minimalists.
Criterati (and literati, discussed below) have very firm ideas about what good writing style is, and—judging by their publications—it’s one in which the author refuses to get to the point, and phrases things in the most opaque ways possible on the grounds that having to figure out what the hell the author is getting at is a kind of prune juice for the mind. If you’re in the habit of asking colleagues to read drafts for feedback (and that’s a good habit!), just be prepared for suggestions like, “stating your thesis flat out on the first page comes across as a bit sophomoric,” or “this description didn’t really push the envelope as much as it could have.” You may also get “I couldn’t find a mention of Foucault anywhere.” Going the other way, if you you write a comment on a Criterati colleague’s draft to the effect of, “There’s a simpler way of saying this, I think,” you’ll get a totally baffled and perhaps somewhat hurt look in response.
If the topic of semiotics comes up, you’ll likely find that they believe the term only applies to studies of non-linguistic sign systems, and their idea of major semioticians may differ significantly from yours (by, for example, not including Peirce but including Barthes).
If you hear the phrase “Object Oriented Ontology”, and you might do because it’s trendy, be aware that it is kind of based on the same principles as object-oriented programming, but doesn’t acknowledge that relation very often, if ever. The wheel is new; the wheel is a breakthrough.
Criterati have a lot of experience trying to get students to think about highly abstract and frequently counterintuitive concepts. They also have a lot of experience dealing with student confusion. Learn from them!

The Literati

These are the faculty members who write papers applying some form of critical analysis framework to specific pieces of literature (or sets of pieces); this is frequently as a cover so that they can continue to do what they like best: thinking about literature. They’re the Engfolk equivalent of the linguist who writes papers on “C to T Raising in Latverian” so the Dean will stop bothering them about their research output and they can get back to working on Latverian.

Practical Advice:

If you’ve read a book they’ve read, you have an instant topic of conversation at department potlucks. However, don’t focus on things most people do when talking about books—e.g., whether it was “good” or not, or which parts of the plot you found particularly exciting. Freshman do that all the time in literature courses, and Literati get tired of it after week .5 in the semester. Focus instead on interesting uses of language, or ways in which the book can be seen as a commentary about <fill in whatever you want here>.
Literati live, breathe, and swim in written works, and even though the idea of a ‘canon’ has waned, they’ve all read many of the same foundational texts. This leads them to fire off allusions that you might find mysterious. They will unconsciously assume that you’ve read those works too—you’re in an English department!—and so you need to put some thought into how to let them know you may not have. Or you could plow through a few Norton Anthologies, a process that should take only a year or so.
They share a jargon base and ideas about writing style with the Criterati, and so their technical discussions can be quite opaque to linguists (and, of course, linguistic jargon can be counted on to baffle almost everyone). But what they’re really interested in is new and unusual observations about literary works. You don’t have to know the jargon to discuss those. In fact, if you can use your linguistic analysis chops to arrive at (or support) a new observation, there’s some potential for co-authoring.
You may observe the remnants of a pecking order based on focus area: the idea of studying British literature predates any acknowledgement that Americans had any, and both of those predate anyone thinking about the rest of the world at all. If you do see traces of this kind of thing, it’s probably best to refrain from pointing out that Classicists should by rights outrank them all; Engfolk can be a bit defensive about that. That’s probably part of the reason Classicists were packed off into odd corners of campus.
Literati usually do the bulk of teaching That Freshman Literature Course, etc. That means they have an enormous amount of experience in convincing students to actually do the reading, getting the students to actually think about the reading, and (of particular value) getting the students to stop phrasing their value judgments about the reading as if they’re facts. Learn from them!

The Translators

This is usually a hybrid category—English-departments don’t typically hire someone who translates literature as someone who translates literature; they hire people to be specialists in “World Lit” and those people turn out to (surprise!) be adept at more than one language. So, a Translator will ostensibly be a Criterati⁸ or a Literati. However, the fact that Translators know about and are keenly aware of the importance of translation effects results in a different kind of dynamic because of the way English departments have historically operated: treating other languages’ literary works the way English 19^th-century archeologists treated everyone else’s artifacts. Find a Voltaire text? Bring it home and convert it into something English-speakers can go look at without feeling like they have to learn a language. Translated literary works, in short, are treated as part of the English Empire. English departments frequently teach Homer (in translation), Virgil (in translation), Cervantes (in translation) and more; but rarely is there a discussion of the ways in which the word choices in the translation might not tell you much about the word choices in the actual literary work.⁹

Practical Advice:

Translators are, sadly, accustomed to colleagues not knowing how much expertise, analysis, and sheer work goes into translating literary prose, let alone poetry. Any conversation in which you can acknowledge the complexity of the issues involved is an opportunity for solidarity.
Likewise, Translators are guaranteed to be structurally aware of language in a way that most other English faculty aren’t (with the exception, maybe, of some of the CompRhets). Depending on what subfield of linguistics you work in, there may be a lot of common ground for discussion.
However, they are likely to be put off by discussions of abstract structure disconnected from semantics, since they spend their academic lives negotiating linguistic choices in relation to meaning.

The CompRhets

These are the folks whose field of study is how people write, and how teachers can help them learn to write better. This can be very, very different from focusing on “what makes literature literature” or “how literature relates to culture”; you can definitely assume that the Criterati and the Literati have noticed that—and that the CompRhets have noticed the Literati and Criterati noticing it. This matters! There are serious status issues complicating relations between the groups, partly for historical reasons (in its current form, it’s a comparatively young field despite the antiquity of the Rhetoric part) and partly for economic ones. CompRhets teach the bulk of composition courses, which in an institution with composition requirements (e.g., most American ones) can mean they’re teaching a lot more students than are enrolled in literature courses. Those students tend to be in smaller sections, so there are an enormous number of those sections. Universities invariably present themselves as valuing writing ability quite highly (it’s a great line for the Mission Statement!¹⁰), but equally invariably treat composition courses as low-status, lower-pay gruntwork. That’s mainly for budget reasons: paying grad students and temporary hires low wages means those enormous numbers of sections become giant money-makers. But it’s also affected by prestige issues, and the prestige of the field is affected by the fact that very few people like teaching composition. For many, the “read and mark the papers” portion of the job is roughly akin to taste-testing the attempts of new cooks who don’t realize that maybe the dish soap shouldn’t go in the food, or listening to a novice musician miss 85% of the notes.¹¹ It’s hard to sit for hours at a time gagging lightly. The assumption most people make is that it’s the job people take because there aren’t positions for something better.

What should happen, of course, is for university administrations to recognize that (a) some people actually do like teaching composition¹²—their feeling of social value when a student becomes a better writer outweighs their negative aesthetic reactions to iffy prose—and (b) in any case, one should perhaps pay people more if they’re doing something other people don’t want to. But this does not happen, and the resulting situation is one in which the CompRhets know they’re doing a large amount of vital work that isn’t valued nearly as much as it should be. At some institutions, the CompRhets are grouped with another department (usually Communications), given their own department entirely,¹³ or (in the case of actively evil administrations) treated as a non-academic service unit.¹⁴ On the assumption that you’re in an English department that does handle comp, though, you might find the following advice useful:

Practical Advice:

It’s more likely that there’s at least some history of tension between the CompRhets and the Criterati & Literati than that there isn’t. That doesn’t mean that the groups actively dislike each other, but it can lead to a certain amount of tentativeness (for want of a better term) in discussions of department priorities, etc. In fact, that tentativeness is a good sign—it means everyone is mindful of each other. A worse case is one in which the CompRhets are sidelined.¹⁵ If there is active dislike between the groups, be prepared to play Switzerland. Well, something like Switzerland, but without any of the money, pikemen, or nifty syntactic patterns.
If you’re an applied linguist, you have many areas of overlap with CompRhets—they’re interested in code-switching, genres, and registers; they’re actively aware of the social implications of dialect, and most will have had at least some coursework on working with non-native English speakers. If you’re an applied linguist who works with TEFL or the like, you’ll even be able to discuss research, as long as you remember that CompRhets usually really, really, really don’t like quantitative anything. CompRhet articles read like qualitative TEFL articles mostly, although there’s a sense of some kind of slippery, plastic coating on the prose, and a faint hint of patchouli.¹⁶ If you’re a theoretical linguist, well, you’re already used to having no areas of overlap with anyone,¹⁷ so you’ve got coping strategies!
Be aware that, through no fault of your own, you are in the shadow of the Skillendrill Anathema, and risk being held accountable for the sins of academic ancestors you didn’t even have. Old-Skool™ composition teaching was known for its use of extensive, mechanical, decontextualized grammar drills on the assumption that if you could make a student use whom reflexively, they could write well. Modern composition-teaching theory is partly founded on a rebellion against that approach.¹⁸ The minute you start talking about syntax or morphology, it can trigger an immune reaction in the CompRhet, who is likely thinking “Oh no, not that again! We thought we had that contained!” Learn to salt in preliminary statements like, “Of course I’m not giving people drills or anything....” If you find yourself thinking, “It would still be handy to have some metalanguage for talking about stuff, so that they’ll know what ‘independent clause’ means in their style guide” or “sometimes you focus on grammar simply because you think they could benefit from actually looking at the words,” put some extra thought into how to phrase things.
Modern composition teaching heavily focuses on writing—and learning to write—as an interpersonal process. Linguistics is a social science, and social science is what happens when people who aren’t good at socializing try to figure out how to do it from the top down. This means that the core of modern composition teaching may seem very alien to you. If you’re in a discussion with a CompRhet colleague, be aware that some of the terms and frameworks for discussion in the field may presuppose a level of social awareness that you might not actually have. For example, your colleague may say something about the learner “be[ing] comfortable with experimenting with a new professional persona in language”, at which point you, as a linguist, are probably thinking something like “Is there a way of operationalizing this ‘comfortable’ descriptor? Could I go by something as simple as absence of a frown, or should I try to take overall posture into account? Is use of the term ‘persona’ getting at something qualitatively different from what I get if I view linguistic choices as dimensions in an n-dimensional space and think of a particular profession’s language as a region in that space that the student may be trying to find a vector towards?”—i.e., the usual. If you start asking questions to check your understanding, you’ll confuse the heck out of the CompRhet. Don’t try to address everything piece by piece; just try to accept that vague terms may become clearer as you get more experience.
CompRhets have a massive amount of experience getting students to write the darn papers. And they’re great at coming up with valuable student feedback that isn’t some form of “Ow! That hurt there! Here’s how to make that not as hurty! Bless your heart.” Learn from them!

The Creatives

These are the people who actually make literature, or at least try very hard to: the poets, the novelists, the short-story writers, the dramatists,¹⁹ the...the...whatever you call people who write creative non-fiction, whatever the heck that really is.²⁰ In short, the “Creative Writers.” At some institutions, they’re off in Fine Arts, but it’s common for them to be in the English department.²¹

Practical Advice:

One of the weirdest, and most important things to keep in mind about Creative Writers in an English department is that they can make some Criterati and Literati nervous. If you spend your adult life studying literature and how it works, then there’s a sense in which people who successfully create it could be considered to, well, uh... outrank you. The Literati usually deal with this by noting (correctly) that studying the work doesn’t require studying the creator, and that the creator doesn’t always do things consciously. After all, to take an edge case, people can be impressed by an idiot savant without being intimidated by them, right?²² The Criterati deal with it by making Critical Theory have as little to do with literature as they possibly can. But there’s always, in the background, the sneaking suspicion that someone who actually writes the stuff might have insights you don’t, and that creates some tension. At the same time, the Creatives know that the other groups may start analyzing their works, which has to be a rather creepy feeling. As with the CompRhets, as a linguist you may find that there are some occasions in which you have to play Switzerland.
Most Creatives who work long-term in an English department also have at least some professional preparation as Literati, and can speak that group’s language (if a bit more colorfully). They very much don’t share a jargon base with linguists, but they do share a preoccupation with language. In fact, once you get past jargon, they’re frequently the group most interested in the effects of grammatical and lexical choices; they spend all day actively and consciously making them. While they’re typically more interested in, say, the emotional and social implications of the wording of a poem than the poem’s more important characteristics, like the evidence it furnishes for syllable structure and moraic weight, there’s still a connection.
An additional note on diplomacy may be useful here. As part of their preparation, Creatives are frequently exposed to mass-market “how to write well” publications of the Strunk & White variety, and the usual statements about What Not to Do written by luminaries like Stephen King or David Foster Wallace. Of course, good creative writing robustly ignores all this,²³ and so any decent Creative in an English department has become adept at a kind of double consciousness that allows (for example) condemning adverbs while using them at normal rates.²⁴ Keep in mind that no matter how ardently you feel you should combat quack grammar dicta, a respectful collegial approach is always best. Putting copies of Geoff Pullum’s better rants in people’s mailboxes may not come across as collegial.
Even more than the CompRhets, the Creatives have experience in giving students useful feedback on writing, and in maintaining an actively supportive, even nurturing demeanor no matter how likely the writing would be to trigger flight responses or even small seizures in less stalwart types. And Creatives can organize events like nobody’s business; half of their professional life is setting up performances, getting poets to coordinate readings without destroying the building, and more. Learn from them!

The Educatorors

These are the people who teach people how to be English-teachers, and they’re being listed last not because they’re less important in the operations of a department, but because in many universities they’re not in the English department; they’re in a School of Education. There is therefore a lower chance that your department includes this constituency, but if it does, it’s important! Unlike the rest of the department, Educatorors have to devote a large chunk of their time to keeping track of the myriad, ever-changing requirements of public educational systems. In many countries, that means keeping tabs on what the Ministry of Education is up to this week; if you’re in the U.S., it means trying to keep up with whatever détente is currently operational between the Federal and State agencies, and tracking how local school boards are cleverly subverting the guidelines for one reason or another.²⁵ The actual pedagogic theory behind what the Educatorors do—their core academic preparation—will be roughly familiar if you’re from an applied linguistics program and have had TEFL courses,²⁶ but there’s a gigantic additional chunk of preparation involving first-language literacy teaching, and classroom management, and something called Professional Demeanor.²⁷

Practical Advice:

As with the CompRhets, there may be tension between the Educatorors and the Literati & Criterati; if anything, it can be worse, since Educatorors may have Ed.D. degrees instead of Ph.D.s (they’re a completely different tribe, with different rituals!), and when they talk about literature the discussion usually revolves around books used in schools. Finnegans Wake tends not to be in there. Again with the Switzerland thing.
Educatorors end up having to learn a dialect of Bureaucratese, and sometimes use it so much that they have trouble with code-switching (as in, they can’t). It’s a dialect rich in impenetrable acronyms (Minimalists will have an advantage here, for once!), heavily larded with buzzwords, and chary of concision.²⁸ While it can be very frustrating to have a conversation in which you’re trying to get one piece of information and getting what sounds like a hazy business presentation in return, keep in mind that they had to learn to do that. Also, keep in mind that linguistic jargon is at least as bad.
A related point: Educatorors in the U.S. system early on got used to spelling out, in minute detail, what the objectives of a course are and how the students are to be evaluated to see if they meet them or not. This kind of approach is now applied in many U.S. universities as well, so the Educatorors are put in the position of being experts at doing something that the rest of the department now has to do but (usually) deeply resents doing. To make matters worse, a few decades ago educational systems took Bloom’s Taxonomy—a listing of types of cognitive tasks with terms that were given very precise definitions, like you do in a taxonomy—read only the tl;dr version of it, and ran rampant with it, retaining the terms but not the precise definitions or even much of the basic reasoning. Bloom’s basic premise was that you should define a course objective in a way that was measurable in some way, and that if a student did well on a subject-specific task that involved a higher-order cognitive skill built out of much lower-level ones, you could assume the student did okay on the lower-level ones too for that kind of subject-specific task. In worst-case tl;dr situations, that got turned into ideas like “Synthesis is too hard for 8^th-graders” (it wouldn’t be for subjects they are highly familiar with) or “Classification is too easy for a senior college course” (it can be very difficult depending on what one is classifying and how the system works). And the terms got reified as lists of “action verbs” (that term doesn’t mean what you think), which in some cases faculty are told they have to pick from. All this is to say that you may find yourself wanting to hold your local Educatoror responsible for the sins of administrators, but you shouldn’t do that. Most know that it’s a fustercluck, but in the event that an Educatoror seems overly messianic about the list of action verbs, simply ask whether Bloom’s technical definitions are being used for them, and whether the revised taxonomy is being used or the original. Raise one eyebrow when you do that.²⁹
Those who work most often with preparing future elementary-school teachers may have gotten in the habit of Sounding! Really! Excited! About! Everythiiiiiiing!! Just roll with it. It’s like the Bureaucratese thing.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their focus on procedures and regulations, Educatorors can be some of the best possible people for running committees. They may be unnervingly fond of having meetings, but they’ll figure out a process and how to get people to follow it, even if it involves colorful post-it notes and a feltboard. While this may sound annoying, your author would like to assure you that it is far, far preferable to being in a committee that can’t figure out how it’s going to do anything. And Educatorors are the first people to go to if you have a classroom-management problem; they’ve studied people like Trevor Who Won’t Shut Up Ever. Learn from them!

Part 3: The Students

You will have at least three categories of students as an intrepid linguistics instructor in an English department: (a) those that are taking a course to get a distribution requirement (a.k.a. gen ed requirement) out of the way, (b) English majors or minors that are taking a course to get an English degree requirement out of the way, and (c) students who are just plain interested in language. These three behave somewhat differently, as will be discussed below. There is a second, orthogonal, tripartite distinction as well, however; one based on attitudes about language:³⁰ those who think they know how English works already because they did well on prescriptive grammar tests, those who think they don’t and probably can’t know anything about English at all because they bombed grammar tests, and those who say things like “Okay, whatever” and crank up the music in their headphones. Regardless of what else you do, you need to try to confront the first type with how much they don’t know, get the second group to realize how much they do know, and get the third group to think you have no tolerance for that crap (even if you do).

The Gen-Ed-ers

Only a few of these people would have chosen to taken the course you’re teaching of their own volition; the rest are being forced into it by the university, and they’re probably not happy about it even a little bit. Stereotypically, they’re freshmen, but in reality many of them have likely done what you probably did: put some courses off to the last semester because they weren’t interested in those subjects. Their intended (or actual) majors might be anything on campus, although there is sometimes a “tilting” effect if there are multiple different courses in the distribution requirement category your course is in.³¹ While there will be a few students from the “I know everything about English” group in a class like this, there will typically be a hefty proportion from the “I don’t know anything” and “I wonder if the instructor is noticing my headphones” sets.

Practical Advice:

Don’t be blunt or awkward,³² but try however you can to let your class know that you think it’s okay if they don’t want to have to take the course. It’s reasonable for a student to view the administration as actively trying to extract more money from them; don’t paint yourself as an active accomplice. Do, however, let them know that you’re fascinated with the topic, and that they can’t hold it against you if you go ahead and let that show. It’s natural to resent being forced to listen to techno music if you don’t like it; but if you get angry at someone else for dancing to it, you’re being a jerk.
Find out what majors your students are interested in, and go find language examples from those fields. Or better yet, ask them to bring in examples, especially if you’re doing a unit on registers and jargon. You learn stuff, they learn stuff, everyone wins!³³
Some of your students may come in with the suspicion that you’re going to do some kind of liberal Social Science Social Justice thing and go on about valuing everyone and the like, and thus react badly when you do your Social Science Social Justice thing about dialects and prescriptivism. No one likes being preached at, except for the really pale, twitchy types who stare too much without blinking, and you don’t want your class to be geared toward those. There are no guaranteed ways around the “stop pontificating!” reaction, but actively thinking about how to be less preachy while still making the points that science supports is a good move. It’s sometimes helpful to have the students find examples of people yelling at each other about grammar on the internet and then informally analyze the possible motivations of the people yelling. Those motivations almost invariably boil down to “I want to do what I want to do” on one side and “I want everyone to know I’m smart, but I want to point at ‘the rules’ so it’s less obvious that it’s all about me” or “I want a group to stigmatize so I can feel superior” on the other. Once the students notice this, they’re more likely to think about why they want to yell about grammar.
If you’re teaching a course that involves a lot of writing, keep in mind that some of your students’ intended occupations don’t involve essay-writing, ever. They really aren’t wrong when they see no direct application of what you’re asking them to do. Acknowledge that! And then use it to talk about genre.
Another genre point: Your department colleagues may or may not know that there are documentation styles other than MLA, and usually only the CompRhets know that people who are used to APA (or Chicago) are really annoyed by MLA. You know all this, though, and you also know that many of your students will not ever use MLA. Have them find what their field uses, and work that into the genre unit too.³⁴

The English Majors (and Minors)

This group may not want to take your course specifically, but they know that the department whose degree they voluntarily signed up for deems it necessary. Thus, while they may resent having to take the course just as much as the Gen-Ed-ers, they’ll feel at least a little bit less validated in their resentment. And if your course is an upper-level one, your regular English majors will be used to instructors giving them paper assignments, expecting them to figure out ways to approach the assignment, and rewarding them for clever strategies. You’re much less likely to get questions like, “But what should the second paragraph say?” and more likely to get ones like, “Is it okay to look at modals in some of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories?”³⁵ If your institution puts English Education in the English department, you’ll likely find your Ed. majors want more precise directions, but if you point out potential classroom-application-related topics to work on, they can be extremely motivated.

Practical Advice:

While plenty of people that are good at math go into the Humanities, people who are (or view themselves as being) bad at math go into the Humanities in much larger numbers. And linguistics, with its emphasis on strings of abstract units and the ordered groups those units go into, etc., can trigger math anxiety almost as well as actual math can (the Greek letters don’t help, formalists). You may find some students shutting down because of that. Try introducing notation as being the result of linguists having math envy and dressing non-math up as math. This may, on a good day, head off the allergic reaction a bit.³⁶
The minute that you exclude meaning from the domain of linguistics, you’ve rendered everything you’re saying irrelevant in the eyes of most English majors. No matter what your dissertation was on, you. are. in. an. English. department. “Get over it” isn’t the best adage for this kind of thing, but “get into it” may be apt.
If you’re doing a phonology unit, don’t forget poetry. Older forms are great for talking about syllable structure; even the modern stuff gets students to think about sound more than regular prose does, and frequently uses ambiguity as an engine core. When your students start asking about deeper kinds of meaning, social nuances and the like, you can always adopt that confident expression and note that you need to cover distinctive features before the end of the period.
Trying to discuss the coordination-subordination distinction cold will panic most English majors. Presenting them with a pair of sentences like “I opened the door and the dog ran out” and “When I opened the door, the dog ran out” and asking when you’d use one instead of the other, on the other hand, is right down their alley. If you’re fascinated by the grammatical distinction and have never thought about why you’d use one instead of the other, though, you might want to mull over that a bit. Not that a linguist would be in that category or anything.
Your English majors have a lot of practice thinking about texts, and about social issues, in ways you haven’t. Learn from them!

The Linguaphiles

Okay, this is the lot you’re most likely to “get” at a fundamental level, because you were one. Like the Gen-Ed-ers, these students can be from any major on campus, although Foreign Language and Social Sciences are more common in the mix. Unlike the Gen-Ed-ers, these students want to be in your course (which in the general course of things can be a Gen Ed course, of course³⁷). A much larger proportion of them may be in the “I know how English works” category, and many of them will have avidly read pop-culture material making claims about language that may not be true (“People in Appalachia speak Elizabethan English!”). This all means you’re faced with a delicate situation: you need to disabuse them of their confidence, but they care about that confidence—a lot. The trick is to set up opportunities for them to discover where they’ve made a mistake, without hitting them over the head with it. As an instructor, being right doesn’t automatically mean you’re teaching well, especially if you’re a right jerk about it.

Practical Advice:

You need to model being fascinated with language and thinking you know things about it, and then finding out your original ideas were false. Think of some cases where you learned you weren’t right about a linguistic factoid, and talk about that in class. Do not, however, do this after one of your students has just come out with that same false factoid. Students are very good at reading perlocutionary meaning even without knowing the term for it, and they know the term “passive aggressive” already.
This type of student gets extra frustrated when they can’t figure out a data problem (“I should be able to do this! Aaaargh!”) and then extra interested when they find out what the trick to the solution is. You can do things like spring ergativity on them early with a data problem, as long as they know it’s a “bonus point” problem (or there is some other way to signal that you think the problem is unusually hard).
Since Linguaphiles are the population from which linguists sprang, it’s natural to shift into “academic evangelization” mode at them—this is how fields sustain themselves. At those moments, remember how much trouble you had with the job market.³⁸ And if students, on their own volition, drop by during office hours to ask about how one becomes a linguist, bring up the job situation in the first minute or so. You’re providing information that can affect someone’s life in a major way. Few students are independently wealthy. But then, dying languages really, really need to be documented. It’s a complex conundrum, but it’s one you should actively think about. If that advice is a bit baffling, keep in mind that your colleagues can probably tell you a thing or two about ethics. They’re in the Humanities.

Part 4: The Administration

English departments exist in a larger administrative context, of course, and the operations of that context are manifold and mysterious. Going into detail at this point would require your author know what actually goes on in administrations, so instead, you’re just getting a couple of general pointers based on remote observation. This degree of uncertainty and vagueness accurately mirrors the experience of dealing with the Adminisphere!

Staff lower in the administrative hierarchy—secretaries, the folks who actually know how to do IT maintenance and upgrades, the people in the Registrar’s office who talk to actual students, and the like—are typically focused on doing their jobs well, and try to hang on to those jobs as long as possible. In other words, they’re mensches. When they do something baffling, there’s almost always a reason. They probably do more real, measurable good than your research does,³⁹ so be nice to them! Also, it’s stupid to make them angry.
Upper-level administrators, on the other hand, are an odd bunch. While there are a good number of exceptions,⁴⁰ most of them view their real job as getting promoted to a higher rank at a more prestigious institution.⁴¹ Whatever the tasks required of their current position, they’ll see those only as a set of guidelines for how to posture so as to get promoted as quickly as possible. And they move around a lot; they’ll shift sideways in the same institution at the drop of a hat if they think there’s a .01% increase in prestige associated with it. This means that if they do things that annoy the heck out of staff, they’ve skipped off elsewhere before the reaction can really affect them. And what they actually do is, to them, much less important than what they’re perceived to have done, since it’s that perception that the hiring committee at Better University is going to use as the basis of their decision. All this is to say that a certain amount of laconic caution is warranted whenever you’re asked to Further an Initiative. You might think that, surely, someone has vetted said initiative to make sure it won’t blow up the budget after eight years, or run afoul of state guidelines, etc. Don’t just assume vetting! The initiative might just exist to go on a resume that allows the Budding Leader to ascend, leaving mortals to pick up the pieces.
Deans are usually in an in-between zone; some will be Future Leaders™, while some will be regular academics who are trying to get things to “work right for once” before they retire. That first subset is predictably awful; the second is unpredictable unless you actually know the particular Dean. Either way, you usually don’t want to annoy them.

¹ The Committee for Professional Preparation decided that there should be a pamphlet and then unanimously voted to have an absentee junior member, your author, write it. Never miss committee meetings.

² You may have already realized that, in which case you just then said something like, “Duh, what kind of Dear Readers is this rube used to?” But it’s also common for linguists to like teaching things that other people don’t want to.

³ Glory is got by (for example) coming up with a way of reading The Sound and the Fury—or, for the younger, more hip crowd, Sharknado—as a comment on the relation between Habermas’s conception of the civic order and Mill’s construction of utilitarianism, and then packaging it as an article that mentions intersectionality at least eight times.

⁴ And you will, because the kind of field that comes up with the notion of analyzing sentence semantics out of context, using features and lambda calculus, is the kind that prepares you to read literary texts in a way that, in a psych test, would get you placed on the autism spectrum in five seconds flat.

⁵ If you don’t know who Roman Jakobson was, I hereby shake my Cane of Approbation at you and your program. But you’re probably young, and at least have an excuse. Now get reading.

⁶ Which is apparently something about critiquing how people critique things; however, since ideology is part of how people critique, and critique critiquing, it ends up shading seamlessly into parts of what gets called “Continental philosophy.”

⁷ LCT also uses ‘subject’ and ‘object’—but in a really, really different way.

⁸ In case you are annoyed by what looks like a Latinate plural suffix being used on a noun paired with an article that only goes with singulars, rest assured that this particular {-i} is the gender-non-specific nominative singular animate suffix that Latin should have had. The nominative and genitive plural is {-i.jai}; the dative plural is {-i.jai.i.jai.jo}.

⁹ Yes, your author is cheating here and dropping in that phrase ‘the actual literary work’ with entertainingly annoying presuppositions, but if pressed, can and will use arguments about the intentional fallacy as a shield.

¹⁰ In case you’re new to AdminSpeak, a “Mission Statement” is what happens when an institution that says it’s dedicated to higher learning and truth and all that is put in the hands of people who view those goals as a potentially useful marketing posture. The result is a shiny cloud of glittering generalities and some hefty consulting fees.

¹¹ In a piece that’s not supposed to be punk, or Bob Dylan.

¹² Your author is in awe of these people.

¹³ In which case the English department is put in the position of worrying extra hard about where the funding for the literature courses is going to come from, and the CompRhets are put in the position of worrying about the moral quandary presented by schadenfreude.

¹⁴ Nothing shows commitment to furthering students’ achievement of advanced writing skills like putting the relevant courses in the same general administrative category as laundry-facility management. As a bonus, you can call it a “demonstration of leadership in writing excellence.”

¹⁵ Theoretically, the CompRhets could sideline the other groups, but if the department is called “English....” this typically hasn’t happened.

¹⁶ As someone who works in an English department, your author has no compunctions whatever about making statements like that. That’s all literary and everything.

¹⁷ Admit it—if it overlaps, it’s not the Narrowly Defined Language Faculty, is it?

¹⁸ Intriguingly, some of the arguments involved in the rebellion were founded on a mis-reading of Chomsky, whose claim that children acquired language simply from exposure was taken to entail that they’d acquire formal written English conventions the same way. Even for those of us who like to snipe at Chomsky, that’s not what he was getting at.

¹⁹ All English-department members can be counted on to generate drama, but few can intentionally write it.

²⁰ Your author is absolutely sure it’s a thing, but no one seems to agree on what that thing is, except that it’s not political essays no matter how well they’re written. And apparently it’s not satire.

²¹ They’re almost never in Communications, for the same reason the Criterati and Literati aren’t: clarity is not the foremost element of their design specs.

²² They don’t phrase it that way, of course. It’s just that the logical possibility is soothing.

²³ We should make an exception here to acknowledge the very real worth of DFW’s footnoting habits, which were exemplary.

²⁴ This is a lot easier when you don’t know that not and often are adverbs.

²⁵ The U.S. does not have a national educational system; it has a multifocal educational melee. Think of the Holy Roman Empire, but with less coordination and more statutes. The federal government tries to indirectly manage how the states manage educational standards, the states try to word standards in a way that will result in them being high-performing no matter what, and school boards find new ways to shift most of the funding away from academic subjects and towards high-school athletics teams.

²⁶ If you’re a theoretical linguist, it’ll be just as alien as all other fields are, so at least you’ll be used to it.

²⁷ Which involves acting like what you probably already think a good instructor should act like—except kinda weaponized. Think of 5^th grade, and then go have a drink to get over the memory.

²⁸ So at least it gets one thing right.

²⁹ If there is no commitment to Bloom’s definitions, then start using verbs like ‘opine’ and ‘adumbrate’. When objections are raised, point out that there is no basis for objecting other than “it’s not on the list,” which is an invalid argument in the absence of the definitions. Do not, however, do this with the Chair or a Dean. Use common sense.

³⁰ Your author has shamelessly stolen this division from his colleague, [redacted] .

³¹ The French Major, for example, is more likely to take That One Linguistics Survey Course than That One Political Science Survey Course. And the other French Major will too, if there ever is one.

³² This is the kind of advice that’s always right, but never easy to follow except in hindsight. And that previous sentence was a good example of “stating the obvious.” You may, therefore, be wondering why this footnote is here. Grice! That’s why. Also, we promised you footnotes.

³³ You may, however, find out that meteorology is really fascinating, and “waste” time reading about it. And then the same thing happens with botany, and...well, try to keep it under control if you’ve got papers to write, or grading to do.

³⁴ If you’re a theoretical linguist, yes, you should do a genre unit. Geez, people.

³⁵ At which point you look confident, nod, and then look up Flannery O’Connor on Wikipedia in your office. She was to Southern Gothic short-story writing what Jackendoff was to X-bar theory. Or something like that. After a decade or so, you’ll know lots of factoids about authors, and have a lot of practice looking confident.

³⁶ Also, it’s true.

³⁷ That was deliberate, and therefore potentially literary, even though your author’s intentionality is otherwise irrelevant! This will all eventually make sense.

³⁸ If you’re a wunderkind who got hired immediately, then...wait, it doesn’t matter, because you wouldn’t be a linguist in an English department. If you are in an English department and regard yourself as a wunderkind, you’ve got problems this guide can’t help you with.

³⁹ Unless you work on language preservation, or dialect equity.

⁴⁰ For example, any who might be from your author’s institution who are reading this! They’re all wonderful people.

⁴¹ If you have noticed by this point that some academics behave in this way as well, you’re certainly correct. Those are the ones who are Future Leaders™.

	Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLXXX, No ρ Contents