This is my Powerpoint and text about the topic 'Good English and Bad'.

English

Hello everyone, let's start with a little bit of Latin. The difference between Latin and English is that, in Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections but in English there are only five. For example: see, sees, saw, seeing and seen. But often it is only three: hit, hits, hitting. Latin and English have very little in common, although English is based on the grammar that they use in Latin. Bill Bryson said that it is like letting people play baseball with the rules of football. The question now is, What is good and what is bad English?

The labels we give to words are mostly meaningless because take for example the verb to drive. The present tense of drive is drive, but we also use that in sentences in the past of future like: I used to drive… or I will drive and in the present we will almost always say I'm driving. It is a lot to think about also what is a sentence? In dictionaries it is explained as a group of words containing a subject and predicate as a minimum. But what about the sentence: What? Or How? Well those are called Ellipsis. They contain words that aren't there. What did just happen? How is this possible?

The best you could do to explain the difference between good and bad English is to use the terms prescriptive and descriptive speech. Prescriptive speech is seen as the good English, it contains the rules that you need to follow to speak correct English. Through the years many grammarians and other people who study the language made rules and wrote them down in books such as A Proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue written by Jonathan Swift. Prescriptive is how you should speak.
But descriptive on the other hand is how the people talk. Gonna, wanna ain't are allowed here or when you say we're good instead of we are doing well, these belong to descriptive speech. However it is viewed as bad English, this is how people mostly speak. Maybe eventually ain't will be seen as something that is correct and then it will belong to prescriptive speech.

English is really a complex language, even authorities make mistakes.

For example:

'Prestige is one of the few words that has had an experience opposite to that described in 'Worsened Words' ' (H.W. Fowler, A dictionary of Modern English Usage, second edition)
It should be 'one of the few words that have had'.

'Each of the variants indicated in boldface type count as an entry' (William and Mary Morris, The Harper Dictionary of contemporary usage)
It should be ' each… counts'

Early authorities used the grammar from Latin as their model to make the English grammar. For a long time it was taken entirely for granted that the classical languages must serve as models.
But in 1660 Dryden complained that English had 'not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar so our language is in a manner barbarous.' He thought that there should be an academy to regulate English usage. Many followed his vision so in 1664, the royal society for the advancement of experimental philosophy formed a committee to improve English tongue, but nothing has come of it. 33 years later Daniel Defoe asked to oversee the language and in 1712 Jonathan Swift joined with his book, which I mentioned before.
In 1780 John Adams wrote to the president of Congress to set up an academy for the purpose of refining, correcting and improving the English language. So in 1806 the congress considered to institute a national academy and in 1820 it was formed, American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres by John Adams, though again without any resounding perpetual benefits to users of the language.

It is hard to say what exactly is good or bad, even prescriptive and descriptive speech is not the best way to describe it. Because then you say only them who use the rules are speaking correct English, however the biggest part of the people speak descriptive English, which is not wrong. English is a fluid and democratic language. Which means things can change and shift in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees.

The source I used tells a bit more about the prescriptive and descriptive speech.

Thank you.