Is "the way how" wrong?

I was correcting an ESL learner who said "It is the way how we write."

I realize "It is the way we write" is correct and "It is how we write" is correct, but "It is the way how we write" looks wrong to me, despite that when I say it out loud it sounds perfectly normal if I'm speaking fast. What I mean is, if an ESL learner said it, it would sound wrong. But when I say it as a native speaker, it seems okay though not felicitous. So I can't tell.

Is it grammatically wrong?

Solution 1:

It’s not grammatically wrong, just unconventional. Most people would use the connecting word that:

It is the way that we write.

You could also see:

It is the way in which we write.

You can, for example, compare the relative frequency of these phrases in print using Google Ngram Viewer. The chart below compares “is the way how”, “is the way that”, and “is the way in which”. It appears from the chart that “is the way how” is virtually never seen in print. The other two are seen regularly, but for the past 200 years “is the way in which” has been more popular.

Click on the chart to interact with it. You can, for example, separate the results for British and American English.