http://www.unfoldingoflanguage.com/

Decay (in the sense of decreased grammatical rigour) is only half the story…

Yes, homonyms can be a blogging bane – spell checker can’t help you when you misspell a word into a correctly spelled other word, that as your own editor you don’t catch by reading the post aloud since it still sounds right.

I am often known to overuse commas, mainly because I am inserting conversational-style pauses into my writing – and especially my blogging.

In my industry (computer science), we all too often play “buzzword bingo” where we are supposed to know what all sorts of acronyms stand for (and most people are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid).

It always reminds me of that scene from the movie Good Morning, Vietnam: “Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? Because if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put out in KP.”

Whenever I want to be sure I am getting grammar right, I just do whatever Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) tells me to do – it just makes my writing life easier, and she actually makes grammar fun!

As for there not being one English – I completely agree. Blogging has brought my writing to parts of the world it wouldn’t otherwise have been able to reach. Just the differences between American English and British English are enough to lead to whacky exchanges even when both sides of the conversation are “grammatical correct in the English language.”

Thanks for sharing a great post.

I lived in France during one of the “linguistic purity purges”–e.g. trying to force “le weekend” out of the language. It may have worked for newspapers like Le Monde, but had no discernable effect on my native French speaking friends.

Language is for and about communication. Good communication is getting your point across, understanding and being understood…I only correct a non-native English speaker’s grammar IF ASKED to do so, and even then will do so judiciously. In my experience, Grammar Nazis often come off as elitist and, to put it bluntly, show-offs. Again, conversation/communication suffers.

Tying good grammar to one’s socio-economic class is annoying at best and racist/bigoted at worst. Being interupted for using an “I” instead of a “me”, especially when one commonly hears both, does not constitute rewarding conversation. When the implication, whether implicit or explicit, is that the middle and upper classes speak English (or any other language) perfectly, and common grammatical errors are only found in the lower or working classes, is elitist. (and untrue–who does set the standard for perfect grammar? what is the infallible source of proper, ever expanding, organic English? and what about the differences between written and spoken language?)

@ spanish classes: Standardized verb conjugations are important, but nouns change a great deal from country to country. I learned “popote” meant straw (drinking straw) which is fine in Mexico, but unknown in Spain. Durazno (peach) is great in Mexico and unknown in Spain (melocoton). Gua-gua can mean bus in one country and baby in another. I’ve traveled a lot in many different Spanish speaking countries and constantly learn new nouns. Ditto for English–lorry for truck, boot for trunk in the UK, etc.

Language is used to communicate. Effective communication does not depend on exact and “proper” grammar, but on the principle of, “am I making my point? am I understanding you?” That is often difficult enough without complicating conversation (or blog comments, or Twitter tweets) with the added stress of internally checking your grammar before speaking, or vetting your English via a dictionary before conversational writing. And there is no shame in asking for clarification, or being asked for clarification.

(Off soapbox!)

When my son sends me a text message, it’s private, he knows his audience, and what he writes (and the way he writes it) isn’t going to tell me anything about him that I don’t already know.

On the other hand, when someone I don’t know writes — not only writes, but publishes — something, those words are often the only connection I have with the author. And if my only interaction with someone is a demonstration that the person did not care enough to even check the spelling and grammar of a document, I’m necessarily going to infer that he or she probably doesn’t care enough to check facts, or to base opinions on anything meaningful, either.

Established grammar is a common ground where all may gather. Vernacular excludes those not in the subset of people who use that vernacular, and your argument that it “doesn’t much matter to me” is dismissive of others. It may not matter much to you if you drive 95 miles per hour on the highway. No one else cares if you’re doing it on your private land, but doing it on public roads shows recklessness and a lack of respect to other drivers, as well as a lack of respect of the “rules”. Are the rules correct? The point is moot. They are the rules. If you have an argument to change the rules, that’s a different issue. But arguing that they shouldn’t exist at all, or shouldn’t apply to you because they’re hard to follow is specious.

“…none of the experts can really agree on sentence structure, punctuation and proper spellings and capitalization of things like the Internet…or is it the internet…or maybe they prefer the Web.” What you’re referring to here a matter of usage or style, which most grammarians and editors will fume about forever. Usage and style are the grey (gray?) area were there is no absolute right or wrong, there’s only right or wrong within a particular context. I’m confident that no professional editor would agree that misspellings, typos, or botched grammar is ever all right in any context. Usage and style, on the other hand, they’ll argue about until the cows come home.

All this explains why publishers employ editors. If nothing else, it shows respect for the reader, as well as respect for what you have to say. If you want other people to respect your writing, you have to show your writing — and your readers — some respect, first.

Thanks for the post. I screw up and make all kinds of grammatical mistakes all the time. I re-read my posts and don’t always catch all the errors. But I would like to think that my posts are readable. I do agree that we have to have rules or anarchy rules. On a few occasions, I stopped reading an article or blog post because it was filled with spelling errors and grammatical errors. The writers didn’t have even the basics. Maybe I am being unfair and a bit of a snob, but in each instance it was taking too much energy for me to decipher what was being said. I just didn’t have that kind of time.

I think a certain level of competency in writing is expected, but what that level is is debatable.

Avil Beckford

http://www.twitter.com/avilbeckford