Whose Word Crimes?

Yesterday, "Weird Al" Yankovic released a video for his song "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". Since a lot of people I know are language folks of one sort or another, I saw it flow and re-flow through various streams of social media. But I had qualms.

I love Weird Al, and he's been a formative influence on my life, since I started listening to him when I was a kid. (My entire sense of humor could be described by three childhood influences: Weird Al, the Marx Brothers, and Monty Python.) I also think the detestable "Blurred Lines" is ripe for ridicule and attack. And I like words.

But how are we to understand the speaker in "Word Crimes"?

Most people I saw who shared the video seemed to identify with the speaker. This is not as disturbing as people identifying with the rapey speaker of "Blurred Lines", but it reveals a certain cruelty in the feelings of people who want to be identified as linguistically superior to other people. A tinge of cruel superiority is essential to grammar pedants, and "Word Crimes" reveals that again and again in how it characterizes people who commit such "crimes". On his Facebook page, Jay Smooth listed these characterizations:

"raised in a sewer"
"Don't be a moron"
"You dumb mouthbreather"
"Smack a crowbar upside your stupid head"
"you write like a spastic"
["spastic"?]
"Go back to preschool"
"Get out of the gene pool"
"Try your best to not drool"

Hyperbole in service of comedy? Or your (not so) secret inner feelings?

It's interesting to follow the comments on that Facebook post as well as on the Grammar Girl post that Jay Smooth linked to. Various interpretations and arguments come up, including the common complaint that it's just comedy and you shouldn't take it seriously (a pernicious attitude, I think). I don't know exactly what Weird Al intended with the song, nor do I particularly care (it's a clever song, with fun animation in the video) — it's more interesting as a kind of Rorschach test: Do you identify with the speaker in the song? Do you enjoy the cruelty and want to replicate it?

Writing Tools

photo by Eric Schaller

I'm teaching a course called "Writing and the Creative Process" right now, and one of the things I would like to offer the students is a list of tools I've found actually helpful when writing -- computer programs and reference books, mostly. I thought it might be fun to open up the conversation and get some recommendations from people other than me, since my own practice is peculiar to, well, me.

So, a question for you, O Denizens of the Internets: What have been the most helpful tools for you when writing? (And "writing" doesn't just mean you're a professional novelist whose last few books were sold to Hollywood. We all write things in our lives, whether business letters or shopping lists of secret poems we never show anybody. Everybody is qualified to answer this question who wants to!)

I'll put my own essential items below the fold...

The Length of the Gimmick

J. Robert Lennon points to an essay by Ed Park in the NY Times from a couple days ago, "One Sentence Says It All", which I missed until now, but which obviously appealed to me, an avowed lover of long sentences, because it concerns books that are written as a single sentence.

Park's focus is primarily on what "really" makes something a one-sentence novel, a kind of purity test, while Lennon mostly just seems grumpy, declaring the whole idea to be "the kind of fake formal experimentation that a writer is more likely to use as cover for his incompetence than for any kind of genuine insight into character, situation, or language".

I think Lennon's opinion is noxious, and I'm skeptical of any use of the word "gimmick" for a writing technique, because it seems to me a particularly prejudicial and generally inaccurate term -- in a broad sense, any literary (as opposed to purely pragmatic) way of writing is gimmicky, because any writing that is not so conventional as to be invisible draws attention to itself. Anything in the plot of a narrative that draws attention to itself is, then, a gimmick, any word that is not banal is a gimmick, etc.

It may be that Park's focus on what a one-sentence novel actually is inspires some of this annoyance from Lennon, because it moves the focus away from the purpose and effect of what are, in fact, different techniques employed by the various writers; but Lennon's grumpiness comes, I suspect, from deep-seated assumptions about what writers should do -- the sort of assumptions that are useful for writers themselves, because they can be fuel for writing, but are dangerous when elevated to the level of absolute statements for everybody else. I'm all for writers saying, "I'm going to write this way because I don't want to write that way," but I'm ferociously suspicious of writers who say, "My way of writing is the best and your way of writing is wrong." (It reminds me of when somebody once saw a t-shirt that proclaimed, "My God is an awesome God," and pointed out the subtext: "Your God sucks.")

When talking about writing, people don't usually use gimmick to mean just a technique that draws attention to itself (the way a performer would say, "You gotta have a gimmick"); instead, it's usually meant to point to something considered by the word-wielder to be inauthentic or artificial. It's sibling to the wheezy old canard about non-mimetic fiction: it's a game, it's a trick, it's not real fiction. Real fiction provides, as Lennon says, "genuine insight into character, situation, or language". Note the word "genuine", highlighting the idea that gimmicks are the path to fake insight. Real insight, apparently, comes from pretending that fiction is true, from relying on verisimilitude, from suspending disbelief. This is residual Victorianism, the continuing belief that the 19th Century British dominant novel form is the single goal toward which writers should aspire. I like plenty of novels written that way, but I don't think they should be given a special place of honor above novels using other approaches.

If we assume (and it really is an assumption) that we should read fiction for "insight into character, situation, or language", then I fail to see how a single-sentence novel doesn't at least have the chance of providing insight into language, nor do I see how the one-sentence technique itself must inevitably lead to false insight into character or situation. Perhaps what Lennon means is that such a technique distracts from where the reader's attention, in his scheme, should be: on thinking about character and situation, and not thinking about one writing technique in particular. But this idea is contradicted when he asserts that "the writer generally finds new ways to separate ideas and establish rhythm, and the reader quickly gets accustomed to them." If that's so, then the technique is not distracting, and therefore there shouldn't be anything getting in the way of the proper, legitimate contemplation of character and situation.

The problem, the gimmickry, seems to come from what Lennon assumes is the writer's over-exertion, or misplaced exertion. "[N]obody's really being challenged here--it's all proof-of-concept," he says, adding yet another generalized assumption. "If you're going to break it up with conjunctions or semicolons or what have you, you might as well restore the periods, indentations, and chapter breaks, and devote more of your energy to evoking the wrinkles in grandma's forehead or the smell of jasmine wafting over the piazza." Thus, sensory description is, to Lennon, a legitimate activity for a writer to expend energy on, but punctuation and sentence style are not. (I expect he would reply that what he was trying to communicate was the idea that a writer should, of course, pay attention to punctuation, but they shouldn't do so at the expense of evoking sensory details. That equation proposes a see-saw act between style and sensory detail that seems absurd to me: sensory detail is a result of stylistic choices about punctuation, rhythm, diction, etc. Writing is language first.)

I also think it's flat-out inaccurate to say that the breaks created by "conjunctions or semicolons or what have you" are the same as those created by periods. I certainly don't read periods the same way I do conjunctions and semi-colons. A hugely long sentence is a totally different reading experience for me than a bunch of shorter sentences, and I have an almost physical reaction to some types of punctuation -- works composed primarily of short sentences are just about unreadable to me; lots of short sentences make me feel like ants are crawling all over my skin.

What interests me here is not so much that Lennon is wrong (no, not THAT!), but rather the offense that he seems to take from Park's essay. My own rather strong response to his response may also seem a bit odd, because Lennon's post was clearly an off-the-cuff statement of preference, so why did I feel impelled to put everything aside and analyze it? It's not like there are lots of one-sentence-novel writers who are now going to become destitute because J. Robert Lennon said he thinks they're just hiding their incompetence -- which means, of course, that they aren't real writers, and don't deserve to be taken seriously, especially not by such a prestigious mainstream outlet as the Times, castle of the competent.

No individual statement like Lennon's is particularly meaningful or effective, and such statements might even be useful in inspiring contrary-minded writers to prove the asserter wrong. My own concern comes not because of Lennon or any other proselytizer, but because the assumptions that Lennon's post appears to embody are ones I see a lot, ones that promote what seems to me a narrow and unadventurous idea of what is or isn't an appropriate, legitimate, authentic way to write. Continued expression of such ideas creates a consensus and solidifies a prejudice about what should or shouldn't be valued.

Next thing you know, people will be trying to contact the nearest politician to propose a Defense of Multi-Sentence Novels Act...

Readercon Reflections

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore.

Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's.  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back.  I covet Liz's shirt.

And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

Hopefully...

I woke up this morning and thought, "I really need good ammunition against people who say that 'hopefully' can't be used to mean 'I hope'," because that's the sort of thing I tend to wake up thinking (yes, my paranoias are often about being mugged by style goons). I fired up my ol' computer machine and plugged into the intertubes and went immediately to Language Log, where I got a concise explanation of what I needed:

Speaker-oriented (or "stance") adverbial hopefully has been taking abuse pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see MWDEU). Linguists are mostly just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the American Heritage Book of English Usage, where it's noted that "hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth." But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language -- cf. frankly in "Frankly, this soup stinks" and surprisingly in "Surprisingly, this soup is delicious" -- and it provides a way of expressing the speaker's attitude towards a proposition which is both (a) brief and (b) subordinate: "I hope that S", "I have a hope that S", "It is to be hoped that S", and the like are wordier, and have the hoping expressed in a main clause (as the apparent main assertion), while what writers want is to assert the proposition provisionally, adding a modifier expressing their attitude towards it. So speaker-oriented hopefully is a GOOD thing, and it's no surprise that it's spread so fast.

That's followed by some excellent, concise insight about very, which everybody who's been told to never use that word should read as well.

For more on hopefully and ambiguity, see this and this.

Oh, it's a good day when it begins with sane information about style and usage!

Omit Needless Advice

Geoffrey Pullum, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, is not celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Strunk & White -- in an essay at The Chronicle Review, he writes:

The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.

It's a wonderful take-down, the best I've encountered since Louis Menand's examination of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves ("Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?").

The power and popularity of such books is astounding. Both books were quite popular in the high school English departments I worked at, and Strunk & White was often assigned to students. I'm not against teaching basic grammar (I've done it most of my years of teaching), but if you're going to teach grammar, don't teach from books that are, as often as not, incontrovertibly wrong.

"My Dear Emily" by Joanna Russ

I haven't even updated my course blog this term, so I feel a bit guilty writing here about a story I recently taught, but this story has dug its way into my head and I need to write down some ideas before I start babbling in Babylonian or something...

As I've previously mentioned, I am using David Hartwell's The Dark Descent in my "Murder, Madness, Mayhem" class. It's one of my all-time favorite anthologies -- beautifully organized, with a selection of stories from various genres and eras, many of the stories allowing all sorts of discussion-fueling comparison, making it not just a great read, but a particularly valuable teaching tool.*

I had the students read "My Dear Emily" on the same day they were to read J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". The idea was to talk about gender roles in the stories, since we've been talking about how writers use various elements in their fiction -- setting, plot, character, etc. (this course is, after all, supposed to be partly an intro to lit class). The students have become, even in a short time, more attentive readers, and now I'm trying to throw in some of the interdisciplinary elements required of the class, hoping to get the students to look at the texts as, among other things, cultural artifacts, since one of the main questions fueling the course is: Why would anybody write this sort of stuff? What do representations of murder, mayhem, and madness do, and why are they so common in so many different sorts of art? How do writers represent violence, and are there moral implications to those representations?

"Schalken the Painter" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" lend themselves well to such discussion, but though "My Dear Emily", a vampire story first published in F&SF in 1962, and reprinted various times (see the comments at this entry at Ellen Kushner's LiveJournal -- note Graham Sleight's information about the two endings; here I'm discussing the original magazine ending, since that's what's included in The Dark Descent, but I expect I'll be writing more about this story in the future...)

"My Dear Emily" has been well discussed from a feminist viewpoint by Jeanne Cortiel, so I won't venture into that territory here -- what interests me about the story at the moment is its use of pronouns.

I've had a strange relationship to Russ's writing, and much of that strange relationship comes, it seems to me, from exactly that -- her writing. Even in her earliest work (and "My Dear Emily" is relatively early), she is an extraordinarily precise stylist in a manner comparable to Thomas Disch and Samuel Delany, and I find myself responding to her work in a way similar to how I seem to respond to Disch -- a passionate admiration for some individual short stories and an inability to appreciate many of the novels. In fact, the techniques that hold my interest within the condensed space of the short fiction may be what prevent me from appreciating the longer fiction. The precision and care of Russ's prose, the intelligence of her formal structures, the intellectual rigor of her purpose -- these qualities carry me through certain stories, giving a real intellectual pleasure, while in a novel-length work they suffocate the pleasure I am able to draw from them, making the reading more dutiful than enjoyable.

But let's talk about pronouns. "My Dear Emily" opens with an excerpt from a letter (datelined "San Francisco, 188-") from a person who states, "I am so looking forward to seeing my dear Emily at last" and who refers to himself as "her dear Will". After the letter, the first sentence is, "Emily came home from school with her bosom friend Charlotte." The two are on a train (with Emily reading "Mr. Emerson's poems"). They talk about "savages" and being carried off, and our first moment of possible confusion occurs:

"The New England look," Charlotte snaps resentfully. She makes her opera-glasses slap shut.

"I should like to be carried off," she proposes; "but then I don't have an engagement to look forward to. A delicate affair."

Grammatically, the "she" in the dialogue tag of the second paragraph refers to Charlotte, but if we are used to the convention of starting a new paragraph for each new speaker, it's entirely possible that we will, on a first reading, assume it is Emily speaking about an engagement of Charlotte's.

Soon, Emily cuts her finger on the opera-glasses, causing her to get some blood on Emerson's poems, a moment rich with all sorts of symbolism that I'm going to ignore right now, because there follows a space break and a new scene that begins:

He wakes up slowly, mistily, dizzily, with a vague memory of having fallen asleep on plush.

Here we might say, echoing Beckett, "Who he?" Readers build possibilities in their minds at this point, and probably settle, provisionally at least, on Will, since he is the only man whose name we know at this moment in the story. The writing in this section is quite different from the writing in the first section -- two long paragraphs finishing with a short final one, as opposed to the short paragraphs of mostly dialogue in the first part of the story. The writing is interior, subjective, a bit overwrought, describing the thoughts of someone apparently buried alive, someone who rises only after the sun vanishes. The last paragraph is a marvelous mixing of tones:

"Alive!" he cries, in triumph. It is -- as usual -- his first word of the day.

The first sentence echoes the classic line from Frankenstein (the movie) and would not be out of place in a 19th century gothic novel. The second sentence is rather humorous because of the change in tone, the recontextualization of the exclamation from something apparently extraordinary to something routine.

The next section begins with the sentence,

Dear Emily, sweet Emily, met Martin Guevara three days after she arrived home.

On a second reading, we will know that the "he" of the second section is this very Martin Guevara, a man both dangerous and attractive (perhaps even revolutionary). On a first reading, though, we are stuck in limbo. The story will continue to present some moments of confusion, because though we have all of the necessary information, often, even up to the end, we don't yet know that we know what we need to know, nor do we know how to apply it. Emily and Martin Guevara talk to each other at a church supper (Emily's father is referred to as the Reverend), and their dialogue is enigmatic:

"The lady of the house," he says.
"I'm back from school."
"And you've learned--?"
"Let me go, please."
"Never."

It's wonderful dialogue -- sharp, intriguing, full of subtext. Emily seems to know Martin Guevara, to have encountered him before, to know something of him, to be used to his ability to appear and disappear with the stealth of a cat. She becomes upset. "Sweet William has to lead her to bed." Guevara, "head framed in an evening window", finds his way in:

"San Francisco is a lovely city. I had ancestors here three hundred years ago."

"Don't think that because I came here--"

"She doesn't," he whispers, grasping her shoulder, "She doesn't know a thing."

Pronoun trouble again. Who she? Emily? Charlotte? It's entirely possible that I have missed a subtlety, or am reading too much into this, but I don't think the question of this antecedent is ever solved. I'm inclined to think Guevara is referring to Charlotte, but it's also possible that, for his own nefarious reasons, his own pleasure in confusion, he has decided to talk to Emily about herself in the third person, to suggest some disassociation of personality.

Later, after Guevara has nuzzled Emily's "abused little neck", the word "vampire" appears for the first time in the story:

"Stop it!" she whispers, horrified. "Stop it! Stop it!"

But a vampire who has found a soul-mate (even a temporary one) will be immoderate. There's no stopping them.

Charlotte's books have not prepared her for this.

(We had learned earlier in the story that while Emily likes to read such things as Emerson's poems, Charlotte likes popular novels.) In the sentence "Charlotte's books have not prepared her for this," the antecedent to "her" is Charlotte -- and yet in the context of the story, it makes more sense for the antecedent to be Emily. It may simply be sloppy writing, but Russ is a fastidious writer, and it makes sense to me that this moment would be one more where pronouns and antecedents are in flux, where the antecedents are either/or and both/and. Throughout the story we are given little pushes to confuse Will/Guevara and Emily/Catherine.

Guevara frees Emily from Will. (And, perhaps, from will -- or at least the will of the society of her day, the will to marriage, the will to domesticity.) In their conversation at the church supper, Emily says to Martin, "If I had your trick of walking like a cat, I could get out of anything." Guevara replies, "I can get out of anything. Out of an engagement, a difficulty. I can even get you out of anything." Emily clearly does not want to be engaged to Will (earlier: "'I love Will dearly.' She wondered if God would strike her dead for a hypocrite."), and here Guevara seems to offer the escape of vampirism. Will infantilizes Emily, seems oblivious to her intelligence and strength, while Guevara engages her intelligence (comparing it, favorably to Charlotte's, who, he says, has "a plentiful lack of brains"), even if ultimately she is just a source of sustenance for him. And ultimately, yes, that is what she is -- despite all his talk of vampirism being the most passionate sort of love and desire, his conversion of her to undeath is a rape -- a sexualized violation of her will (if not her Will). At the end of the story, the other men in Emily's life (her father and Will) destroy Guevara by exposing him to the sun. Emily seeks refuge with Charlotte, who has herself become a vampire, and who warns Emily at an important moment not to go home -- though Emily does not recognize her, because Charlotte wears a veil. She lifts her veil, revealing herself, and then, at the end of the story, Emily flees, seeking help:

--She knows where she can get it. Three hundred feet down the hill in a valley, a wooded protected valley sunk below the touch of the rising sun, therre she runs through the trees, past the fence that separates the old graveyard from the new, expensive, polished granite -- Charlotte is her friend, she loves her: Charlotte in her new home will make room for her.

The pronouns and antecedents now all work together: "She loves her" is true of both Emily and Charlotte. Assuming Emily's optimism and trust are warranted, and there's no reason not to assume so, both women will, in fact, make room for the other. The help and safety offered by the men was an illusion; sometimes tempting, sometimes confusion, but always violent and destructive. A clear understanding of the relationships proved impossible: too much was hidden, too much was unspoken, too many words wouldn't quite line up. Charlotte will, Emily expects, resolve this for her. Their knowledge will align. Their words will make sense together.


*Some folks have asked which stories I'm using. I'd love to use them all, but alas need to fit in a bunch of other texts as well, so I had to make some painful choices, and, because of length or because of needs for comparison, I ended up having to throw out some of my favorite stories in the book. (To somewhat make up for this, I gave the students a paper assignment in which they have to write about a story of their choice that we aren't reading for class.) Anyway, the stories, in the order that we read them, are: Stephen King, "The Reach"; Harlan Ellison, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown" (which I got to teach in the town where Hawthorne died!); Lucy Clifford, "The New Mother" (if you haven't read this story, read it -- utter weird genius); Shirley Jackson, "Summer People"; Clive Barker, "Dread"; William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"; Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People"; Edgar Allan Poe, "Fall of the House of Usher"; J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "Schalken the Painter"; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"; Joanna Russ, "My Dear Emily"; Charles Dickens, "The Signal-Man"; Joyce Carol Oates, "Night-Side"; Fritz Leiber, "Belsen Express"; Robert Bloch, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"

One Story: Respect for Tradition

One Story is a marvelous magazine (and not just because they published me -- that should, perhaps, be held against them...) and I can testify that it makes a great gift for people who like to read but generally feel too busy to do so, because receiving a nicely-produced story every three weeks or so in the mail is great fun.

One Story now and then asks for donations, because the magazine is a non-profit and doesn't run ads. Clifford Garstang pointed out that a recent solicitation included this description of the "Editor" donation level:

Editor: $100 – I’ll pay one author for their story

Mr. Garstang notes that there is, according to certain interpretations of English usage, a problem with agreement between the one author and the plural pronoun their.

What he doesn't say, though, is that One Story is simply showing their respect for the history of English literature and the language itself. According to the indispensible Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, here are some of the writers who have used this construction:

Chaucer: "And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,/They wol come up..." ("The Pardoner's Prologue")

Shakespeare: "And every one to rest themselves betake" ("The Rape of Lucrece")

The King James Bible: "...if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses"

Jane Austen: "I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly" (Mansfield Park)

Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth" (Vanity Fair)

W.H. Auden: "...it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy" (Encounter, Feb. 1955)

For further exploration of this fine tradition, click here.

Even the Old Ones Say "Alright!"

I kill hamsters!*

I want to see them die!!!

I'm even bringing my (extended) family into this!

Say it one more time: ALRIGHT!!!

*Yes, John says God only pokes hamsters in the rear end when we use "alright", but here he is not being entirely forthright with us. "A poke from God" is a well-known phrase used by certain secret societies and cabals to indicate a particularly painful form of torture that leads to death. Just ask somebody at the Creation Museum. They know about pokes from God.

Alright Already!

Loath as I am to disagree with John Scalzi, I must note a difference of opinion with regard to the word "alright", which John proclaims is not even a word. And he thinks it's ugly.

Whether it is ugly is a matter of taste, and I shan't argue that. Whether it is a word, though ... well, it's definitely a word, since it has boundaries and is used to convey meaning, though I will grant that most American dictionaries of English do not accept it as part of formal, standard English yet.

I will also say here that I use the word "alright" much more often than I use the words "all right", and when an occasional copyeditor changes my alrights to all rights, I change 'em right back whenever possible. (Usually my sometimes-British/ sometimes-American punctuation distracts copyeditors from my other idiosyncracies, but not always.)

In terms of grammar, usage, style, orthography, etc., I am a radical liberal. I teach my students standard English, but also encourage them to make innovations whenever possible. I tell them they must learn standard English not because it is inherently better than anything else, but because pedants will yap at them, and they need to be able to defend their choices. Few things make people more pedantic than grammar, style, and usage, and most of the yaps of pedants are nothing more than pet peeves. We're all welcome to our pet peeves, and I certainly have some ("loathe" for "loath" annoys me, as does "disinterested" for "uninterested" -- the latter I can justify as a useful distinction, though), but I try to let my desire for a lively and vivid language overcome my occasional desire to battle the barbarians. And I have little problem with people deviating from standard English by choice. I wish more people did so, in fact.

Thus, I am stating here and now, in a public forum, that when I use "alright" I mean "alright" and not "all right". Sometimes, in fact, I use both, because I like the distinction that can be made between them, as pointed out by a commenter at this post who says:

The prosodic pattern of the two differs. In alright they are written as one word because they are articulated as one word, initial stress on ‘all’ while ‘right’ is unstressed. In all right the ‘right’ element gets stressed instead as it is the head of the constituent -- an adjective phrase, with ‘all’ as its specifier.

(I first decided to use both forms when I was writing plays, because I hear the two quite differently, and I wanted actors to be able to make a distinction.)

And here's a quote I'm stealing outright from this excellent overview of the controversy -- the quote comes from The Cambridge Guide to English Usage:

The spelling alright is controversial for emotional rather than linguistic or logical reasons. It was condemned by Fowler in a 1924 tract for the Society for Pure English, despite recognition in the Oxford Dictionary (1884-1298) as increasingly current. But the fury rather than the facts of usage seem to have prevailed with most usage commentators since. [...] Dictionaries which simply crossreference alright to all right (as the “proper” form) typically underrepresent its various shades of meaning as a discourse symbol. It may be concessive, as in Alright, I’ll come with you—or diffident, as in How’re things? Oh alright—or impatient as in Alright, alright!. None of these senses are helpfully written as all right, which injects the distracting sense of “all correct.” Those who would do away with alright prefer to ignore its various analogues, such as almost, already, also, although, altogether, always, which have all over the centuries merged into single words. Objections to alright are rarely justified, as Webster’s English Usage (1989) notes, and Burchfield (1996) only makes a shibboleth of it. [...] At the turn of the millennium, alright is there to be used without any second thoughts.

I'm a devoted reader of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and the entry for alright, all right takes up nearly two double-columned pages. Here are some tidbits: the first OED citation of the word in a context that seems similar to current use is Chaucer's "Criseyde was this lady name al right". Moving beyond Middle English we have a long gap where any form of the word(s) is unrecorded with its current sense until Percy Shelley in 1822 (where it is "That was all right, my friend"). "Alright" doesn't appear until 1893 (in the Durham University Journal). The Dictionary notes:

Alright did not appear in a Merriam-Webster dictionary until 1934, but several dictionary users had spotted its omission earlier and had written to us to urge its inclusion.

They cite a letter from "a New York businessman named William E. Scott" from September 25, 1913:

I wish you would submit to your experts the feasibility of putting the word alright into use. As a matter of fact it is used quite extensively without the authority of dictionaries because it is the quick common-sense way of doing. The cable and telegraph companies are the ones who profit by the lack of an authoritative ruling that alright is synonymous with all right

The Dictionary points out the argument for the different emphasis when speaking "alright" and "all right" and notes that that may explain why, when it is found in books, it is most often found in printed dialogue. Finally, they note that it seems to be more accepted by the British than the Yanks -- it is, they note, "the standard spelling in Punch, and the King's Printer at Ottawa officially sanctioned its use as far back as 1928. The OED Supplement calls it simply 'a frequent spelling of all right" They conclude: "It is clearly standard in general prose, but is widely condemned nonetheless by writers on usage."

Finally, two writers I don't mind having as predecessors:

...however alright well seen then let him go to her...
--James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

A success, a success is alright when there are there rooms and no vacancies, a success is alright when there is a package, success is alright anyway and any curtain is wholesale.
--Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914