A Grammar Question? This Teacher Is at Your Beck and Call

Millions of people out there carry the private shame of the grammatically challenged.

Short-shrifted by their public schools or simply baffled by their mother tongue, they suffer the torment and occasional public embarrassment of poor spelling, bad syntax and awful punctuation.

But in those moments of deepest despair--when they are stumped trying to get pronouns to agree with antecedents or divine the difference between affect and effect --one Michael Strumpf and his Grammar Hotline are there to help.

“Hello, Syracuse,” Strumpf says into the phone after the caller identifies herself as Mary, a former schoolteacher in that city. “No, no, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Go ahead and read me the sentence.”

And so it goes. Strumpf sets the woman straight, bids her farewell and goes on to his regular work grading English papers at Moorpark College.

Piled high on his desk are essays from about 100 students assigned to his three introductory writing classes. Each student will write seven essays over the semester, and Strumpf will go over the essays with each student one-on-one. The workload grows even greater as he demands that the papers be rewritten when they don’t measure up.

“They have to explain every comma,” he said.

Along with the hundreds of essays he grades every semester, Strumpf, 60, answers about 300 calls a week from all over the country on the 20-year-old hot line.

After a recent article circulated nationwide about his service, calls poured in.

“Unbelievable! We’ve had 317 calls today,” he said.

“It’s an epidemic of calls--Monitor Radio, the Canadian Broadcast System, CBS Radio, KNX, the Boston Herald,” he said. “And you know the one question they all asked me: ‘How much do you get paid?’ They can’t believe anyone would do this for free. But that’s the reason we’re alive, right?--to help other people.”

It’s not just about helping other people, though. Strumpf, a self-styled guru of grammar, is on a mission to rid the United States of sentences slovenly strewn together with a careless disregard for proper English.

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He sees this as a national issue. He dreams of a Literacy Corps--an organization modeled after the Peace Corps whose volunteers would answer questions of grammar and punctuation for any American who cared to inquire.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “America is the greatest country in the world. But I travel to other countries, and people there are speaking and writing properly. Why can’t we?”

For Strumpf, bad grammar is one more symptom of the societal decay he sees demonstrated by increased crime, drug use, political corruption and the decline of the family.

Strumpf faults the public school system for graduating students who lack basic skills in their own language. And he has some radical ideas of how to reform things.

“Get rid of the boards of education, all the administrators and the fat that doesn’t have anything to do with teaching kids,” he said, launching into a short list of quick fixes for the country’s schools.

“Start testing teachers--make sure they are professionals,” he said. Get rid of tenure--bad teachers hide behind it and good teachers don’t need it. Start paying classroom teachers more--they should be the second-most-important focus next to students.”

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Strumpf himself ended his quest for a doctorate in English at USC just one year short of the degree.

“ Ph.D. stands for ‘Piled Higher and Deep” he said.

A teacher for the past 38 years, Strumpf supplements his college work with tutoring and consulting for corporations. He has also worked as an expert witness in legal cases that hinge on the grammatical interpretation of contracts. He swears he was an expert witness on a case that was decided on the implication of a single semicolon.

He has also managed to write several nonfiction books and is working on two novels and a play. He developed his devotion to language growing up in New York City, learning Greek and Latin at school and the art of conversation at home.

His love for words and their usage can lead to sharp criticism of those who break the rules.

He recently fired off a harsh missive to the Moorpark College newspaper, for example, after finding a page rife with errors. Showing the offending page, he pointed out a misspelling in a headline and the misuse of the word due .

“They can’t spell do ,” he said in disbelief. “This is college we’re talking about here.”

Strumpf does not fault the students. For him, the mistakes are another example of a failed educational system.

“If they can’t teach these kids properly in 12 years, something is terribly wrong,” he said.

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On other fronts, he said, our language is constantly being ravaged by pop culture. He singles out star athletes in particular, shaking his head at the damage he says they have wreaked upon English.

He wants professional teams to require their players to attend a weekend seminar on proper grammar.

“A weekend would be enough,” he said. “Just give me a weekend.”

More and more students coming into his classes struggle with simple English expression, a problem his school shares with major universities, he said, adding that it’s not all the schools’ fault.

Students “are not dumber today. But they’ve taken more punches to the head and they’re having a hard time standing up,” he said.

So Strumpf does what he can. He has the hot line that takes calls Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. And every Monday night at a local restaurant he hosts a meeting for any student struggling with grammar.

“I want them to know I’m on their side,” he said, “but there are rules.”

He starts each of his college classes by shaking hands with all his students.

“We then have a sort of contract to get down to work,” he said.

When he addresses a student, he will preface his or her name with “Great,” as in “Great Mary, do you have a question?” And he likes to refer to his students as “scholars in training.”

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Still, he is no pushover. He drops students who miss more than five classes and regularly gives out Ds and Fs.

“Students need to know there is a right and wrong,” he said. “They don’t mind being told they’ve done something wrong. They just need reasons. That’s why people call the hot line. They don’t just want answers, they want to know why.”

The people who call range from executives and journalists to parents and teachers. Strumpf’s message for those trying to remember lessons from long-ago English classes is simple.

“I can help,” he said. “All you have to do is call.”

FYI

Call the Grammar Hotline at (805) 378-1494 on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. Moorpark College professor Michael Strumpf will respond at no charge.