The Write Stuff : Professor Dispenses Advice on English Usage Over a Hot Line

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 sometimes public embarrassment of poor spelling, bad grammar and awful punctuation.

But in those moments of deepest despair--when they are stumped trying to get pronouns to agree with antecedents, or trying to 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 school teacher 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 one-on-one with each student. 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 news 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 nation of sentences slovenly strewn together with a careless disregard for proper English.

He sees this as a national issue. He dreams of a “Literacy Corps”--an organization modeled after the Peace Corps, in which 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 just another symptom of the societal decay that he sees demonstrated by increased crime, drug use, political corruption and the decline of the American 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, beginning 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.”

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 Deeper,’ ” 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 hinged on the implication of a single semicolon.

He has also managed to write several non-fiction books and is working on two novels and a play. He said 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 how they are used can lead to tough criticism for those who misuse them.

He recently fired off a harsh missive to the Moorpark College newspaper, for example, after he found a news 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.

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

He wants professional sports 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.

“(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.

It’s not all the schools’ fault, Strumpf said.

So Strumpf does what he can. He has the hot line that takes calls Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. And every Monday night he hosts a meeting at a local restaurant 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 students, he will preface their names with “Great,” as in “Great Mary, do you have a question?” And he likes to refer to his students as “scholars in training.”

Still, he is no pushover. He drops students who miss more than five classes and regularly gives out D’s and F’s.

“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 English classes long ago is simple.

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