IngramSpark, the print-on-demand service, has a page of “Essential Writing Tips for Authors.” Today we are going to attempt to interpret one of them.

Use Proper Capitalization of Pronouns

It’s simply lazy for a writer not to check the correct spelling and capitalization of pronouns. And remember not to capitalize a civic title, such as president or governor, unless it is used as part of that person’s name. For example, write: “It was time for the governor to speak.” Do not write: “It was time for the Governor to speak.” Similarly, it is correct to write: “It was time for Governor Watkins to speak.” It is incorrect to write: “It was time for governor Watkins to speak.”

Let us set this up as a multiple-choice quiz.

Based on the advice in the paragraph above, what do you think a pronoun is?

A. A noun referring to a professional, such as a governor or an insulation contractor.

B. A proper noun, such as “Watkins” after “Governor.”

C. A noun that gets paid for its work, as opposed to an amateur noun. (“ ‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’ ”)

D. A noun that stands in front of another noun, like “Governor” in front of “Watkins.”

E. A noun written in Donald Trump Capitals, such as Governor or Insulation Contractor.

“Who Owns Your Work?” and “Own Your Own Work,” a pair of essays on why your intellectual property probably belongs to somebody else and what you can do to take it back.

For a long time, Dr. Boli has been saying that the English language is changing now at a faster rate than at any time since the days of the Tudors.

In that context, he would like to point out the collection “The Eighteenth Century” in the Internet Archive, an accumulation of eighteenth-century English books digitized from microfilm copies.

It’s a huge pile of thousands of forgotten books well worth losing a few hours or years in. But what Dr. Boli found interesting was that, for every book that he glanced at in the collection, the librarian has identified the language as “Middle English.” As far as he can tell, all 6800 or so books in the collection, which are all from the 1700s, are identified as written in “Middle English.” Because the collection is so large, the great majority of books in the Internet Archive identified as in “Middle English” are from the 1700s—about 92% of them, as of yesterday.

What does this observation mean? It’s hard to say. A glance at Wikipedia’s article on Middle English, which seems to be up to date with current scholarship, reveals that linguists still use “Middle English” as a term for English from some time after the Norman Conquest to the late 1400s.

So we must consider the designation in the Eighteenth Century collection a mistake, though one that has persisted through 6,863 volumes as of yesterday, and we must search for a psychological explanation of the mistake. What does the mistake indicate? It would seem to imply that, to a reader in the early twenty-first century, the language of Addison or Johnson is as foreign as Chaucer was to a reader of the middle twentieth century. Our language is racing ahead into the uncertain future, and a curtain of unintelligibility has fallen across the literature from before 1800.

Enterprising publishers should take note. That line of unintelligibility is moving toward us rapidly. Now is the time to prepare editions of Austen and Dickens and Trollope in translation, so that they can be read by non-specialists with no training in extinct languages. Henry James will be added to the list soon, although late-period Henry James required a translation from the moment the work left his desk. This is also a good opportunity to remove anything in those books that would be offensive to modern taste, such as subtlety. It will be profitable for a publisher to spend a little on a competent translator who understands nineteenth-century English but can speak the language of the twenty-first century fluently. It will be especially profitable if you can persuade a certain number of professors of literature to declare that students will be given an automatic F if they are caught using your translations. With that recommendation, nothing in the world will prevent the students from buying them.

Yesterday we had a little laugh at the expense of an Indian interpreter who, with more ambition than ability, had written an English method for his Bengali-speaking neighbors. But Dr. Boli hinted that he saw this book as a very hopeful sign for the English language. Now he will explain why he thinks that is true.

There was a time when the English language was full of natural poetry. Back in the time of Good Queen Bess, the first of that name, it was almost impossible for an English-speaker not to be a poet. Our language produced Shakespeare and Spenser and Marlowe and dozens of other first-rate poets in her time, but even the most prosaic writing of the Elizabethan age is full of poetry. The Elizabethans couldn’t help it: they opened their mouths, and beautiful music came out.

We Americans had our own age of poetry. In the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, the ordinary American spoke a language that was full of the elements of poetry: rhythm and metaphor and alliteration and—above all—variety. But we outgrew that poetry. Americans of today speak a dull and prosaic sort of English; we naturally think in terms we have learned from marketers and politicians, the two groups least likely to produce a poetic statement.

But there is a country, soon to be the largest in the world in terms of population, where millions upon millions speak a variety of English that is full of natural poetry. “Make English your lap-dog”: no American would say that, but how much better American English would be if it were the sort of thing we naturally said! We laughed at the grammatical errors in the sample letter about “poor sanitary arrangements,” but look at that letter again, and you will see that there is not a single sentence in it that is not perfectly clear on the first reading. Now pick up any random piece of American writing—say, a letter from a politician to the editor of the Washington Post—and see whether you could say the same for it.

Go back and read the sample letter again, and this time listen to the rhythm. It is varied in just the right way to hold our attention. The vocabulary is rich and descriptive. The argument flows persuasively.

It would be easy to point out the errors to our author, and if he is not too proud to take advice, he could remove all our grammatical objections to his writing. But no one could teach him the poetry: he had to grow up thinking poetically. As India grows in prosperity and influence, more and more of this poetic and definite Indian English will penetrate our fuzzy and prosaic literature, and a fresh breeze will blow through the English-speaking world. Let a thousand Sudhamay Balas bloom. They will make us proud of our language again.

Here is a sample letter to a newspaper, printed in a book, and your job, dear readers, is to guess what kind of book it was printed in:

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Sub: Poor sanitary arrangements spread of Malaria.

Sir.

I want to ventilate through your esteemed daily about poor sanitary arrangement in our locality 17 No. ward, Barasat. Now it is a grave problem in our locality. Because of the drains and ditches are not cleaned. So the heaps of the garbage and rubbish are accumulating at random there. These ditches, sweage of garbages are the brooding ground of mosquitoes, spreading malaria in this locality. Day before yesterday a young man 36 year Sadhan Roy died of the Malignant Malaria and many others have been suffering from fever. Formarly the workmen of Municipality were seen to take away the garbages, but now they are hardly seen. We pay a good amount of tax but the Municipality returns a deaf ear to our grievance. It is indeed sad. So I want to draw the attention of the concerned authority.

Therefore, I would request you to publish the above note to inform the public and the authority sharply.

Thanking you

Yours faithfully
S. Roy

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Now that you have read the letter, can you guess what kind of book it comes from?

The answer:

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