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Folk who know me in (that tacky term) meatspace (and probably even those who encounter me online) may have noticed--actually it's hard to avoid--the fact that I'm pedantic and literal-minded to a fault. Whether through nature or nurture, it's a blot made manifest in the next generation. We just don't do shades of grey round here: what it says is what it means--precisely--and there are only right and wrong answers.
Except, actually, it's not quite that simple, as I've had cause to explain on a couple of occasions recently.
Looby Loo had as her homework a couple of weeks back, the task of reorganising a set of instructions for how to clean one's teeth. They were, inevitably, wrong for her.
Wind back, ooh, how long? thirty-odd years, to the summer when we learned to turn off the tap rather than enjoy the gentle swish of the water down the plughole through the entire two minutes of brushing. The habit, post the drought of '76, stuck and I taught Looby Loo accordingly: wet brush under running tap and then switch of tap until the brush needs rinsing off at the end.
Back in the present, we had instructions that only mentioned switching on the tap and switching off the tap once each. What to do? There was no actual prohibition on using some instructions twice, although there was I think an implication that one didn't. (This was, however, an unlikely solution, since it would have meant writing more. I didn't bother suggesting it.) Instead, we broached that difficult subject of the right answer for school not necessarily being the absolute right answer. The right answer for school was to put the information given into the best order, whilst recognising that better practice would be to do as we actually do. (For once, much to my relief, LL didn't automatically assume that school was right and that I'd been incorrect all this time. [Just don't mention the solubility of chalk in water around me for the next little while, she says through gritted teeth....])
Today, whilst reading to me from the really quite hilarious Sir Gadabout Does His Best (which might get me admitting to enjoying some Arthuriana), LL looked up, from the middle of a piece of comic dialogue (and me just aching for the dragon to put in an appearance), and said:
"It's boring."
This was odd, since she was having great difficulty reading aloud because of her fits of giggling.
"Why?" I said, for want of a better response (and, hey, it's her answer to almost everything).
"It keeps on saying 'he said'," she said.
"Yes," I said, "you do rather expect that in dialogue."
I could sense that this wasn't the right response: the wriggling in her seat was intensifying.
"Oh," I said, "you mean why doesn't the book say 'he exclaimed', 'he admonished', or used other words instead of 'said'?"
"Yes," she said, and proceeded to give me what I shall refer to as "the party line". The gist of tpl is that using 'said' is boring and other words should be used instead.
"Okay," I said and took a deep breath before venturing to utter yet another heresy (it does follow that pattern: "school/miss says" followed by "yes, except that's not quite the story" or even "that's plain wrong"). "For the purposes of writing for school, as a way of showing how large a vocabulary you have and how you understand people's emotions to work in a story, you might want to use lots of synonyms of 'said', but actually it can be just as good to stick to 'said' which is often only there as a marker to help us work out who's speaking and save the other words for special uses, for instance if something very dramatic is being said. Actually, if you use too many different words instead of 'said' just for the sake of it, it can make your story harder to read. Sometimes, especially if you're using speech marks properly, you can even miss out some of the 'saids'."
Hah, such a tough lesson for her. This is right when you're toeing tpl; just don't do it near meunderstand that it's not necessarily right elsewhere.
