You will find my punctuation and correct grammar usage posts on here, personally I think they should have a prominent place at the top of each page.
I did a whole thread once on the dots in the ellipsis and of course if you have problems with these and the accents, I can tell you how to get them so easily on a Mac — alt ; for example gives you a perfectly spaced three dot ellipsis — so that when you use it at the end of a sentence, followed by a period, I can tell you know …. See, you can see the change in the size and spacing! I hope you noticed the difference in length of the dash, from the hyphen: — – and then of course the minus sign -. See, they are all different.
The two things that stop my reading posts are the content — does it have the hook that makes me want to read it — and after that, is it broken into paragraphs. If someone is writing in a rush, or uses more colloquial language than I would, I can cope as long as I understand the message. It certainly doesn't bother me. Yet, if they write for lines and lines with no breaks, it certainly does, I simply won't read what they had to say.
Though it is some time since Somerset Maugham said that “The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible,” it would be dreadful, if the last time we used it were to say, "Others have decided that grammar and syntax do not matter. So be it!"
Does it matter. To a pedant such as myself, grammar and syntax do; for our udnrstenaindg of the lnagugae. Spilleng, not a lot, you can udnrstenad bad spiellng, podevrid the fsirt and lsat leertts are cecorrt.
If you have something really important to say on a public forum, you would normally express it in a fairly formal language. If you are discussing it with friends around the kitchen table, your language is usually informal, so the grammar doesn't matter and you certainly won't be bothered by the spelling.
Common mistakes irritate many of us. Amonst them, the new found verb
to of. You could not
of done anything, when you clearly could
have done something. The use of of, in places where one should have had have should not cause too many problems with understanding, just make the speaker sound like a
Suvvener. The
newspeak copied from american media can actually be confusing. There are many
problems that people have with horses, but unless you are American, you shouldn't have any issues with them. An issue, to those of us speaking european english, is something that we may disagree about and is open to discussion. You should not be discussing your problems with a horse.
The meaning of issue is very different
from the meaning of problem. Who'd say, "How does an egg differ
to a chicken?" Everone I know would say, "How does an egg differ
from a chicken?" If they would never use the incorrect preposition after the word differ, why use the wrong one after different.
Is it just me? Of course, that's not right for a start, but it's a
figure of speech so I can hope to get away with it. If it mattered, I'd change the sentence to "Am I the only one who …?" But am I well or good. My health is always well, though I may be good tomorrow if I've finished all the chocolates.
Does it matter? Well legal documents that you hoped might infer a certain meaning, may loose a world of unforseen consequences if you lose the right words and use the wrong ones. Even a livery contract is a document that should tell you what your rights and obligations are, so we can all be required to understand one and from time to time, may need to write one.
If 43% of the population are going to end up with degrees, don't we want our children's teachers to speak and teach the language they use correctly. In our local secondary school, one history teacher has a poster on the wall that says, 'There
is always two sides to every story.' In another room, the english teacher had asked pupils to bring in examples of incorrect use of grammar and spelling, on the wall, amongst the apostrophes in plurals, was a picture of a book cover from
The Compleat Horse! Surely an english teacher should know that in 17th century Britain
The Compleat Horse-Man, and Expert Ferrier was spelled that way.
Then, of course the teacher concerned was probably told never to use a preposition to end a sentence with. Whom did he get that rule from? It is a perfectly correct
Latin rule, but english has quite different ones. Like Winston Churchill, up with such nonsense I will not put!
On where we draw the line, it is difficult to gain consensus. In practical situations it needs to be drawn higher than it has been. I tried to explain to a geography teacher, writing reports, how it was easy to know when to use practice or practise and advice or advise. "You put them in alphabetical order and match them to noun and verb in alphabetical order too," I said. So if you remember the alphabetical order: the c goes in a noun and s in a verb. It wasn't that simple, I was shocked at his reply. "We never learned nouns and verbs when I did english in school!" I didn't realise that when they banished the grammar schools, they abolished the grammar they taught there as well.
If the majority of british people doesn't think correct use of language matters, then foreigners who learn it, will understand the grammar better than we do. If you don't think that matters, then why should we be considered inferior and uneducated by the rest of the world, who use our language better than we do. Visit your local school and ask the teachers, who is the best at grammar in the class. You won't find a Pole, Eritrean, Bulgarian or Roumanian who doesn't know their grammar, imagine what they think of the indigenous Brits.