The Fight for English

Prof Crystal admires his latest love-text from a fellow descriptivist

Before the Q&A session, David Crystal will be talking about 'The Fight for English'. People moan about language use all the time: whether it's texting ruining young people's spelling, Neighbours making us talk like we're always asking questions, mate, or slang being banned in schools because it makes us look uneducated and uncouth, someone somewhere has an opinion about what's good and bad about English.

But while most people are content to moan and groan about this in the privacy of their own homes, others have taken to the web and some people have even published books attacking supposed falling standards and prescribing their own remedies: often in the form of more grammar, better punctuation and lots and lots of good old-fashioned punishment and correction.

David Crystal - a man who has written extensively, exhaustively even, about pretty much every facet of English - disagrees with these doom-mongers and finger-waggers, though, and in his Fight For English he lays out the arguments for taking a proper, linguistic look at how we use language and where prescriptive attitudes to language stem from.

We want you to be involved in this debate, so we'll be running a writing competition, "Write For English", in which we'll provide you with some examples of contentious takes on how language is used - gripes about grammar, snarkiness about slang, moans about modern words - and ask you to write a response. We'll print the best ones and the winning writer will be given their prize by David Crystal on the day of the conference. More details will follow very soon...