What Good Is Grammar?

As an English teacher, I have this line from Hegel on the whiteboard in the back of my classroom:

Grammar, in its extended and consistent form is the work of thought, which makes its categories distinctly visible therein.

It’s more for me than for my students. In six years no one has asked me what it means, although I did see two students once at the end of class glance at it and, during a lull in the conversation, read it aloud out of boredom. It seemed to completely subdue them, as they fell silent and said nothing until the bell rang.

I’m glad no one has asked me about it, because I don’t know what I should say to them if they did. I have no idea how to unpack a line like that in a way that would make sense to a sophomore. It does, however, motivate me to teach grammar, which is why I keep it in the back of the class. It reminds me to keep trying to make grammar as interesting to my students as Hegel has made it to me.

Grammar is always the most unpopular subject to teach. How their eyes glaze over at the differences in clauses! At that age there’s nothing more dull and tactless than analyzing the structure of language. Nothing kills the joy of using words more than understanding whether or not they were used correctly, or determining their categories of speech. The fun of language is in using it. Even as a lover of literature in high school I wasn’t interested in those parts of English. It wasn’t until college when I took a few linguistics classes and started tree-diagramming sentences that I caught a glimpse of its value.

There’s no getting past the fact that, if you want to improve your writing, at some point you have to reckon with grammar. You can get by pretty well if you read enough and imitate what you see that works, but if you ever want to get better, you have to be able to understand, to some degree, how and why it works.

A good sense for the underlying structure of the language you use to convey your thoughts not only helps clarify your ideas, but actually deepens them, too, as that clarity is itself a measure of the depth of those ideas.

Pictured: Depth

Clarity Requires Depth

In Information Theory there’s this idea called Logical Depth. It was coined by physicist and IBM Fellow Charles Bennett. Logical Depth is a way of talking about the complexity or “interestingness” of a message. It’s a measure of the meaning of a message, and I find it useful for thinking about writing and grammar, insofar as Information Theory can tell us something useful about the nature of communication.

Bennett was building on the work of Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory, whose description of information in his landmark paper for Bell infamously did away with the idea of meaning.¹ As an employee for Bell, Shannon was interested in the transmission of a message and not its semantic content. He was looking for a way to measure the uncertainty in a finite set of messages in order to transmit them consistently and efficiently over telephone lines. He called the quantity measured “information” (he also considered calling it “uncertainty”²) although it’s different from the way we normally think of information as something that’s inherently meaningful. This turns out not to be the case.

In Information Theory, information is a measure only of what was said, not what it means.³ To understand what a message means, you need a concept like Logical Depth that Bennett developed later.

Logical depth is a measure of the process that leads to a certain amount of information, rather than the amount of information that is produced and can be transmitted. Complexity or meaning is a measure of the production process rather than the product, the work time rather than the work result.⁴

Logical Depth measures the process that leads to information. It’s a measure of what it took to generate a message, the time and effort of calculation. The more work that goes into producing a message, the more depth there’s said to be.⁵ That work, all that information that went into producing the message gets discarded, although its still there, as context. It’s still in the message (assuming there is logic to the way the message was made) and it can be called upon, summoned again, presumably, to further compile and refine the message into a still clearer one. To talk about Logical Depth is to talk about that process of refinement.

The idea of Bennett’s proposal is that any meaningful or complex quantities must be capable of being described more concisely but are not necessarily so; they can be compressed into a brief recipe.⁶

Tor Nørretranders, whose book The User Illusion summarizes these ideas, calls the discarded stuff exformation, to distinguish it from information. Exformation is what has been discarded in order to produce information, but which can still be understood by the information itself. According to Nørretranders, meaning is discarded information. Information that’s no longer present, and no longer needs to be. Meaning is all the exformation implied in the message. That’s what it means for a message to have Logical Depth.

The notion of logical depth is epochmaking. It implies that it is not the face value of the information but the prior process of discarding information that is central to understanding complexity. What is important is the information that was once present but is no longer there.⁷

This makes sense, of course, if we think about communication. How much of it gains its meaning by the context in which it appears? For example, Nørretranders, in his book, mentions the story of Victor Hugo who, after Les Misérables was published, went on vacation, but couldn’t help writing to his publisher to see how the book was faring. He sent a single symbol: “?” To which his publisher replied “!”

Meaning, therefore, is to be found in the context of what has been discarded. Information in itself is not meaningful. Rather, what is significant is the exformation that went into producing a message.

Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable.⁸

Cloud World (Plesiosaurus) Aaron Morse (2015) acrylic and oil on canvas, 25″ x 31″

What About Grammar?

What does this have to do with grammar? Well, as Hegel says, grammar “is the work of thought.”

If we want to know how to write better—and writing is a kind of thinking—we must reckon with grammar, because grammar is “the work of thought.”

It is by grammar that we clarify our thinking. Its categories distinctly visible therein, we are, when we’re studying and practicing grammar, uncovering the meaning of our thoughts, for grammar is all that exformation that has been processed by the “work of thought.” By having a good sense of it, we clarify our meaning.

That’s what writing is for. When we write, we are doing the work of thought. The purpose of writing is to clarify thinking, both in ourselves and in others. It’s a tool for forming things in the mind, and if we want to know how that’s done, we study grammar.

So what is grammar?

Grammar is the exformation of language. It names the categories of the processes of thinking. By studying its categories, we make clear to ourselves how to think.

And when we write and others read it, if it’s good, it’s because we have shaped in the minds of others what we ourselves were thinking.

I’m using the word ‘thinking’ here, but I could just as easily say ‘imagining.’

This is why I’m glad I don’t have to explain any of this to my students. I do tell them, “Hey, if you paid attention to your grammar, you’d not only write better, you’d think better too.” Most of them think this is a banal thing to say, or they find the statement meaningless. Even if they are genuinely interested, and ask something like, “What do you mean by that?” as soon as I start explaining subject and object and predicate to them, their eyes glaze over and they realize that I’ve tricked them into doing work again.

Maybe that’s for the best. You don’t have to like all the things you learn in school. Especially the important things.

Class dismissed

1. “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.”

—Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.

2. The mathematician John von Neumann wanted him to call it “entropy.”

3. For example, the sentences “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and “Thq uicb brwn fx jmps ovr th lzy dg” have similar statistical properties according to Shannon information.

4. Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion. Penguin, 1998. pp. 79

5. For example, while the sentences “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and “Thq uicb brwn fx jmps ovr th lzy dg” have similar statistical properties according to Shannon information, the first example, because it evolved from the complex processes of language formation, has more depth. The second line has no depth, because it is the result of no logical processes. It’s nonsense. Neither can it be expressed more concisely, because it has no order. “So no computational time is involved, apart from the time taken to utter it.” —Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid. pp 80

8. Ibid. pp 95