you write absolutely well, paul. i'm dismayed at how awful grammar is everywhere on the internet other than touamb. i must have had a holdout from when those pedagogical devices were in vogue, because i wasn't diagramming sentences thirty years ago - probably more like twenty-five. and yes, i know my grammar automatically has strikes against it due to my stylistic decision rarely to capitalize proper nouns or sentences; instead, i use capitalization like bold and italics, to indicate emphasis, timing, stress of voice, or humorous intent. that said, it's a rule i'm breaking on purpose, as a decision. i know when not to use this rule, for example, when i wrote a letter of complaint to the new york times today about their terrible new daily headlines email formatting. (wtf is wrong with plaintext? it formats itself perfectly on my phone and desktop.) but i digress.
i break this rule, and others when applicable, with a complete understanding of what the rule is, what it's meant to enforce, and what i'm losing by breaking it. my word choice and sentence structure, and therefor the communicability of what i write, tend not to suffer for it. people making the wrong call on pronouns or homophones or what have you don't appear to understand how their intent gets lost in the levels of "oh you're a dummy" that occur in the brains of people that know the rules and can tell that they're breaking the rules unintentionally.
i am the product of a public school system. my college experience had very little bearing on how i communicate, other than vocabulary. the tax-funded, free-to-participate education available to all and mandated to most might not be the best in the world, but goddamn it, it HAS to be better than what i'm seeing all over the web.
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Topic: Prescriptive grammar (Read 38938 times)