How to kill the English language

Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schooling a seven-year-old. Forgive me if in mentioning it I retraumatise members of category c).

‘Fronted adverbials’ have become something of a cause célèbre among the parents of primary school children. They even occasioned a prime ministerial joke, interpreted in some quarters as a dig at a certain former education secretary, about ‘every detail of the syllabus, from fronted adverbials to quadratic equations’. This term for what others know as a sentence modifier — essentially, a word or clause that qualifies the main part of a sentence — has become a metonym for a whole approach to language teaching. It’s an approach that has baffled many parents, exasperates experienced educators (try getting Michael Rosen started on this stuff), and seems to issue in some very odd and potentially counterproductive ideas about how sentences are best formed.

Let’s take that example, to start with. Why the special interest in ‘fronted’ modifiers? ‘Fronted’, by the way, is a gruesomely clumsy usage to indicate that it’s a pre–modifier, i.e. coming at the beginning of a sentence. ‘Before he could teach me any more grammar, I scarpered’ isn’t intrinsically more valuable than ‘I scarpered before he could teach me any more grammar’. Indeed, a sensible piece of advice on clear writing is to form ‘right-branching’ sentences — i.e. to put the main clause as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible. If you’re rewarded for rewriting a whole block of text inserting pre-modifiers, you might arrive at the idea that sentences that start that way are better than the other sort.