Does Grammar Matter Anymore?

theodp writes "A lighthearted 4th of July post pointing out how Microsoft Word could help Google CEO Larry Page catch typos in his Google+ posts turned out to be fighting words for GeekWire readers. "Grammar is an important indicator of the quality of one's message," insisted one commenter. "You shouldn't have disgraced yourself by stooping to trolling your readers with an article about what essentially amounts to using a full blown word processor for a tweet. Albeit an rather long example of one," countered another. A few weeks earlier, the WSJ sparked a debate with its report that grammar gaffes have invaded the office in an age of informal e-mail, texting and Twitter. So, does grammar matter anymore?"

Re:Concurrence Is My Fort Which You All Belong To

[therealkevinkretz]

You're confusing subjective preferences for style with objective rules for grammar.

Poor grammar and spelling certainly detract from a a poorly-communicated opinion. Are some people using technology to 'fix' what would otherwise be evidence for educational or literacy shortcomings? Sure. That doesn't make those who aren't using them any more educated or literate.

I think that people with a poor grasp of grammar and language rules don't recognize or assign as much weight to their absence. Including, judging from your words, you.

Re:It's like this.

[dtmos]

You're completely missing the point. We should be talking about the quality of Google's tools here.

If I'm missing the point, why does the submission end with the question, "So, does grammar matter anymore?"

I would say that was the point.

Re:Does grammar matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

So your example to show us that grammar matters is to construct a grammatically incorrect sentence? A comma splice is usually frowned upon in many writing styles, but even if you ignore that the use of a comma splice is only valid for conjoining independent clauses. "off his donkey" is a sentence fragment and not an independent clause.

Re:It does - within limits

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm . . . that's "Grammar Nazis," oh Candidate for Apostrophe Abuse.

Re:Does grammar matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I helped jack off his donkey.

vs.

I helped Jack, off his donkey.

The version with the comma makes no sense - a comma almost always separates clauses or sub-clauses which each have a subject (a major exception being as a delimiter in lists). "off his donkey" contains no subject, and hence is syntactically invalid. The actual difference in this example ("I helped Jack off his donkey") is the capitalisation of Jack.

Re:Does grammar matter?

[supercrisp]

What's with the comma in the second example?

Re:Does grammar matter?

[HarrySquatter]

It's either trollbait for grammar Nazis or he's a grammar Nazi that fails at grammar. A comma splice, within the English language, is not a universally accepted construct. Some consider it to constitute a run-on sentence and many style guides disallow its usage.

Re:It's like this.

[gmuslera]

still depends on the recipient. If he doesn't care or don't know the proper grammar, won't matter a lot. In fact, "wrong" grammar could be a part of a subculture where the proper one is bad. And is not just for english, i'm very aware about how this is going for spanish, and probably other languages suffer the same problem too.

Re:It's like this.

[bedonnant]

For private conversations, maybe. At work, though, bad grammar always makes you look like an idiot. How would you like to hire someone who can't even spell correctly on their resume?

Re:It's like this.

[marcello_dl]

Google tools may not have anything, but there are Firefox extensions like "after the deadline". I don't know how functional it is, but that's the right way to address the problem.

Copypasting to word? Even if it were FOSS, it would be terribly inefficient.

Re:Grammar,

[RaceProUK]

In English, capital letters have a grammatical function. They identify proper nouns, which cannot be confused with verbs. No matter how you spin it, capitalising 'Jack' makes it 100% certain that Jack is a person, not an action.

Re:First things first...

[L4t3r4lu5]

This discussion is about grammar. Pedantry is three doors down, on the left.

Re:Does grammar matter?

[blueg3]

It's not even a comma splice, unless the intended meaning is "I assisted Jack. Now, kill his donkey."

Re:It's like this.

[michael_cain]

From a grammar perspective, the last one, indicating a pause to suggest irony or a hidden meaning. Typographically, it depends on which style guide you use. The MLA's style guide, for example, insists on three dots with a full space separating the dots themselves and the text before and after. That's almost impossible to do in HTML, as most of the layout engines will strip out some of those spaces, even if you use the non-breaking space glyph. By the way, the plural is ellipses.

Re:It's like this.

[gman003]

Correction: it should be "ellipses", not "ellipsis". Ellipsis is singular, ellipses is plural.

Re:It's like this.

[asylumx]

anus' was meant to be possessive, as in it belongs to the person, not as in there are more than one

Um, that's still the incorrect usage.

but most of the time, if people relax their anus' a little

In this case "their" takes care of the possessive for you; all you need to do to your anus is pluralize it. The apostrophe in your example is actually giving your anuses ownership over "a little."

Re:It's like this.

[dwye]

Actually, the double negative behaving in a Boolean manner rather than an intensifying manner (as with most Indo-European languages) is a fairly recent thing. Chaucer would not have dreamed of it, and I doubt that either Spenser or Shakespeare would have been to sure which way was "correct" -- blame the 18th century dictionary writers for creating/codifying rules in a more complicated fashion to allow more complicated thoughts (on paper, at least -- in speech it just gets confusing).

French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.

Re:It's like this.

[icensnow]

The GGP has a .sig that identifies a UK domain name. Use of plural for corporate names as collective nouns is the most common form in British English, or at least it is far more common than in American English. Rather than arguing about what is correct, it is worth noting that grammar is a social consensus that drifts with time and varies with location.