Now drop the capital "J".

Not flying happy grammar discuss message deliver clear structure understand.

(NOte: this is not off topic. It's an example of terribly bad grammar. Does it not matter?)

Grammar may not be all that important in informal communication, so long as one's message can be understood. There is an accounting manager where I work who has terrible grammar. He also sprinkles his emails with business buzzwords. Consequently, I can never make heads or tails out of what he is trying to convey in his emails, and always have to schedule a face-to-face meeting with him to figure it out.

On the other hand, there are some people I work with who, though they have poor grammar, are still able to make their needs clear. Their grammar gaffes are forgivable because they can still make themselves understood.

I don't think you're missing the point, but I do think WhiteHover makes a valid point.

If you're asserting "yes, grammar does matter" - then yes, you've answered the original question. But I would venture to suggest that if the answer is "yes", then the very next question has to be "Okay, given that grammar is important - and given that Microsoft have had desktop applications with built-in grammar check since around 1997 - how come Google don't?"

Several psychological studies (the earliest and most quoted I am aware of, being by Albert Mehrabian) list the actual words and grammar used in a message as carrying about 7% of the meaning the message recipient picks up in verbal face-to-face conversation. The rest is about 38% tone of voice, and 55% body language.
Written communication, stripped of the tone of voice and body language, means the recipient is relying on only 7% of the normally available information to determine the content and meaning of the message, giving 93% guesswork.
If the message sender includes poor grammar then that 93% guesswork will be compounded by the tendency of the message recipient to make assumptions about the intended message and the relative inability of the recipient to get immediate feedback about the meaning of a specific sentence.

"I don't want nothing from you", and "I don't want anything from you" have grammatically opposite meanings, but in verbal communication are usually taken to mean the same thing, especially with the recipient's ability to query the message and interpret the message sender's tone of voice and body language.
It is easier for a person with bad grammar skills to correctly understand a message from a person with good grammar skills, than for a person with good grammar skills to understand a person with bad grammar skills, but the possibility for misunderstanding is there in both cases.

As for the price of poor grammar, In October 2006, a contract dispute between Canadian cable company Rogers Communications and telephone company Bell Aliant revealed that a misplaced comma can be worth $2 million.

The contract said:

"This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."
Rogers Communications believed the placement of the second comma stated the contract was good for at least five years, while Bell Aliant said the comma indicated the deal could be terminated before if one year's notice was given.

In the end, Canada's telecommunications commission sided with Bell Aliant. They stated the comma should have been omitted if the contract was intended to last five years in its shortest possible term. As a result, Bell Alliant was able to save over $2 million by ending the deal early.

This.

An otherwise competent writer may still not know when to use "which" vs. "that", why not to use a comma splice, or when precisely to use "whomever", and as a result may not see the value in following those grammatical rules. Someone who knows when to use an apostrophe, when to use "they're", "their" and "there", and when to use "John and me" correctly might consider themselves perfectly competent even without knowing the difference between an em-dash and an en-dash, or when to use a semicolon.

There arrives a point when one deserves a brand of linguistic competence but may not actually be perfect. Then there is the issue of style guides; When do I use numerals? When do I uppercase the first letter of words in titles? To serial-comma or not to serial-comma? Broken parallelism, anyone?

What, indeed, is perfection?

It depends. Some grammar rules are quite complex and few people actually know them.
For instance; which.. of ...these ... ellipsis.... is...used... correctly?

Complete nonsense. The interrogative usage appears to be standard based on its OED entry (1a). What you're thinking of is the fact that "anymore" is generally considered a negative polarity item, which requires an interrogative or negative context to license its use (example: "Clothes are expensive anymore," meaning "...nowadays," acceptable only in certain dialects; compare with "I can't afford clothes anymore," a negative context which should be fine for everyone--except, of course, nutty prescriptivists who recite "rules" that are completely baseless and which they themselves often don't understand).

Even in the regional or colloquial, non-NPI context there's nothing "wrong" about it--in fact, it appears to be standard in Irish English. For what it's worth, the OED dates this usage back to at least the 1800s--certainly not within the last decade, and not originating in Philadelphia. But most importantly, what is part of the "standard" variety is completely arbitrary (and perhaps even somewhat abstract). There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of "anymore" to mean "nowadays," even if you don't accept it as part of the "standard" variety.

I am residing in South-East Asia for the last decade or so. You must come here (even for a short holiday) to witness yourself how little natives over here care about English grammar and/or sentence structures. Apparently, there are local dialects such as Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish (Malaysian English). Give or take, both dialects are quite similar; and as far as the origins goes, it is direct word-to-word translation of Chinese phrases into English; though they have evolved over time with many more borrowed words and expressions.

Some interesting examples being:

English: "Would you like to join us for lunch now?"
Singlish/Manglish: "You wanna go lunch or not?"

[in a situation you disagree/reject something]
(E): "I do not agree with your suggestion"
(S/M): "Cannot one!"

[giving a lift to your friend]
(E): "I will come and pick you at the library, and drop you at the railway station"
(M): "I fetch you from library, then fetch you back to the station"

Search youtube.. there are plenty of Singlish videos.

Though I find these dialects are an energy efficient way of speaking English, and somewhat amusing to listen; I must confess that I find them nothing more than a nuisance, especially in a professional working environment. I often have communication issues with colleagues who are proficient in these dialects. Most of the time, they do not understand what I am talking about, and gives me strange looks. Then, I happen to run into the problem of misunderstanding instructions from my bosses, now that was pretty bad and costly.

I am finding it difficult to tell natives "Your English sucks!" to their face. Partly because it is rude and such remarks could go down quite horribly. On the other end, they them selves have this high esteem that they speak proper English, since most of them spoken or studied in English medium since a very young age.

Though I admit I am not perfect (after all, English is still my second tongue), I always thrive to write grammatically correct English, even when I am sending a text message. All in all, getting the right message delivered is much important than anything else in any form of communication. It puzzles me why internet age kids do not pay much attention, nor put effort in proper communication skills these days.

Poor grammar always makes people look like an idiot to you. To another "idiot", it might make them look like a kindred soul. Dig?

By the way, spelling and grammar are two distinct concepts. In order to avoid looking like you don't know the difference, you should have said something like, "How would you like to hire someone who 'ain't never missed no work in 2008-2012'?"

Not only an indicator they cared about the message, but that they care about how they present themselves.

Does grooming matter? Does proper attire matter? Does body scent matter? Does posture matter? Does makeup matter?

In a world where more communication is text based rather than face-to-face, I'd suggest grammar matters even more.

(But please don't encourage those who don't value themselves to deceive.)

PS: Even in an MMO grammar and spelling matter, those who can't communicate effectively don't get invited for runs, don't interact as much with others, and don't make the same progress, as those who do, regardless of skill level, ability, and other attributes.

I'm part of the moderation team of an online forum for a (now dwindling) community.
and
We've always been rather strict about spelling and grammar

If your online forum is not based on grammar and spelling, maybe that is why people are losing interest.

I read and participate in specific forums because I am interested in the subject material, not grammar. Ignoring a portion of the population that uses bad grammar means you are missing things that are on topic and possibly informative. Car analogy here.. I'm installing a turbo on my car and I have a question about my timing curves. I'll take advice from someone that has experience what I'm doing regardless if he/she posts it in all caps and misspells every other word if I know that person has done what I'm I'm trying to do and has proven themselves in the forum and in real world experience. If I used only proper grammar as an indicator of knowledge and experience for something not grammar related, I could get burned.

People put WAY to much emphasis on proper grammar and try to relate that skill with other skills. It's like trusting a salesman because he is wearing a suit.

Ellipses are punctuation, which is important in prose. Grammar on the other hand is not a mere symbolic identifier. Grammar establishes the rules of the language from which meaning is derived.

Yes, punctuation may also convey meaning , but has a much shallower effect than grammar.

When I read something poorly written, whether it's grammar, spelling, or just unclear communication, I question the literacy of the writer. To me, it's an indicator of their intelligence and education, or the lack therof. They just don't know any better - they're ignorant.

We seem to be returning to an earlier time where spelling and grammar were personal preferences or guesses. Try reading original text from the 18th century and you will notice wildly different spellings of common words. The industrial revolution brought education to many people who would not have had the opportunity in the past. Once, a good education was a status symbol and you demonstrated it with your writing and speech.

English is a particularly difficult language to write. It masquerades as phonetic, but there are many possible spellings for the same sounds. , An example is the word 'ghoti', which is pronounced as "fish": The gh as in enough, the o as in women, and the ti as in nation.

Once there were classes devoted to spelling, grammar, and composition, and the teachers corrected errors. These days many of our teachers can not recognize the errors, let alone correct them.

I think a contributor to the spelling issue is our changed pronunciation. We no longer enunciate clearly. If there is no difference between "are" and "our" when we say it, then the sentence "are work is guaranteed" makes sense to the writer.

For me, the saddest part is what we read and see in the media. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound in print. Poor pronunciation, awkward phrasing and mixed metaphors are common in radio and television programs. If our parents, teachers, peers and the media all give us incorrect examples, how can we learn?

The answer is that we don't learn. We use our spelling and grammar checking software and just rely on the answers it gives us because we assume it's right; we don't know for sure.

It's not just spelling and grammar either. Other basic skills like arithmetic are also in decline. A cashier once gave me $94 in change from a $10 bill because that's what the cash register told her to do - she didn't know any better. She didn't realize there was a mistake, so it didn't occur to her to check if she had mistakenly put in 100 instead of 10.

Spelling and grammar checkers are tools. Calculators are tools. Hammers are tools. If we don't know how to control a hammer, and just let it fall, we hit our thumbs and it hurts. If we don't know how to control our software we hurt ourselves and others with our mistakes.

It's not the post-PC era, it's the post written-word era. Yes, Slashdot TV included.

Language is all about pattern recognition. To use correct spelling and grammar, you have to be able to spot your mistakes. You need to train your mind to do that by reading a lot. Nowadays, rather than reading the newspaper's science section, people watch TED videos on the Internet; rather than reading a book they go watch a movie or play a video game, and rather than reading and writing several page paper letters to their friends, they talk to them on the phone. And so, after all this listening instead of reading, their writing starts to resemble speech.

To me, it seems that the key problem is not with the lack of proper grammar or formality in communication though. I'm more worried about the underlying issue of a lack of understanding, and a lack of thinking things through properly and precisely. Perhaps that's simply because today's world is so complicated that in many situations a carefully thought out course of action is not going to be much better than "whatever seems right at the moment", but that's scarcely any consolation...

You may be one of the rare few that can truly tax Word's grammar checker but the overwhelming majority of people who believe that it's useless are flat wrong. I see this at work basically every day. I work with people who have degrees and should be able to write fairly well (at least well enough to not lose a grade on grammar) but neither properly capitalize nor know the common homonyms. There is also the unnecessary capitalization of words because people think they're acronyms: I see "WEB" and "FOB" (access tokens) all the time. That the lose/loose problem is spilling into the workplace is an even bigger sign of the problem. I'd love to be able to blame it on the new Internet generation, but as I see it among older professionals who don't really spend much time online, I suspect it's just something working its way through the culture.

I don't flag it for people because it starts arguments more often than not. That doesn't stop me from cringing when I read e-mail from people who should know better, especially when they're sending out formal notices that really should go through grammar checks before being sent.

What I posted above is a modified excerpt of a longer essay I wrote a few weeks ago. To keep things to Slashdot attention spans, I left out the paragraph where I said that video is great when it's more than just speaking to camera. If your goal is to communicate how a machine moves, or the pattern of sunlight through tree leaves, or the ironic quirk of an eyebrow, then absolutely use video. But if your goal is to communicate words, take the time to write, and write well.

And why do you think that anything worth reading is going to be read by multiple people is some kind of advantage over recorded video, or audio?

It's not. The point is that the extra time taken to write and write well is worthwhile because the time saved by reading is multiplied by many readers. If an idea were only written and read once, it'd be a wash.

Do you really think that the rate at which we consume information is any sort of limiter on how intelligent our society is?

"Intelligent", maybe maybe not. "Educated", yes. We've all got a fixed amount of time to learn things, and the faster we can do it the more we can learn, and the more time we can spend putting that knowledge to work.

Do you really think this indicates that the author is somehow contemptuous of the value of our time, or that it could be better explained through text?

Not all ideas are best explained through text. But if you choose to use words, take the time to craft them into legible text. If you don't care about communicating your ideas enough to do so, why should I care about them enough to read them?

when you write diatribes like this it sounds as if you'd like to eliminate every other form of communication.

You're reading far more than what I've written.

Actually, I think your rhetorical question actually raises a fairly good point. Most people, writing quickly, will write how they think. I am in fact writing this the exact way that it came in to my head, deliberately trying to ignore any rules of grammar and so on. I'm putting commas where I pause, and just letting the text flow from my brain through my fingers and on to the screen.

I would contend that this is a common way of writing for many people, and so those who write very poorly do in fact use the same structures in their thoughts. My personal opinion on this is that such people (assuming they're writing their native language) are less mentally capable than those who can form a comprehensible sentence - however harsh that may sound.

How is it that you learned to read in a different manner?

Practice. I read at least a book a week between the ages of 5 and 21. Now I read even more, but more online text and fewer books. I should mention that my wife reads faster than I do: for her, a 400-page novel is a couple of hours' distraction. (And don't say she's skimming rather than reading, she's not. I've quizzed her on details to make sure.)

Once upon a time, this wasn't unusual. Literacy is more than just knowing how to read, just like playing basketball is more than knowing the rules of the game.

I've seen some of their barely-readable resumes, and I wonder how they got hired in the first place.

Maybe that's the problem: your company attracts people who can't write worth a shit, and it's a feedback loop (the people doing the hiring can't write, so they hire more people who can't write, and the process repeats itself). Maybe you need to just switch to a different company; I really haven't seen this level of bad writing at the places I've worked. It has been my experience, however, that every company, big or small, has a certain culture about it and ways of doing things, and tends to attract certain types of people, and those who don't fit in don't last long. It sounds like you're not a very good fit for that company.

You just reminded me of something I haven't seen yet mentioned in this thread: the issue is mostly about depth of use of language.

Some people skate by with communication, misusing idioms, filling their sentences with cliches, not caring whether words are spelled correctly. They don't care, and they don't care if others do it. Why? Because it communicates as much as they're used to communicating.

It's like people living their entire lives by candle light. They see nothing wrong with doing everything in this manner, and can't see why other people get annoyed when they hand them a candle to do some task. They have no grasp that there is a higher resolution available.

Then others do everything under high intensity flood lights. They see the detail of everything around them all the time, whether they need to or not -- expending vast amounts of energy to ensure that they miss nothing. To them this is normal. If they visit someone who only has candles and then presents them with a famous painting to examine, they're insulted that the person thinks so little of them as to present the painting in such bad light. The candle person then gets affronted because their candle "isn't good enough" for the flood light person.

In return, to attempt to explain the situation to the candle person, the flood light person then unexpectedly turns on their portable flood lamp to show the candle person what they're missing... which of course does nothing other than hurt the eyes of the candle person and make everything so bright that nothing is truly visible.

People who take grammar, style, spelling and word choice very seriously tend to do so because to them, saying "a flame can be hot" is vastly different to saying "a flame may be hot". Their internal narrative of the world is much more complex than that of someone who doesn't really understand the difference.

For another illustration, there are some people groups in Central America who have no word for pink. This doesn't bother them; they don't ever have a reason to use the word, as they have no need to differentiate between pink and red in their daily life. Compare that to a graphic artist, who has very specific words for distinct hues and shades of colour. Neither people group is necessarily more intelligent Get them both to look at a pink flower and one will say it is red, while the other will say it is a pale dusty rose with a hint of burnt umber.

The same goes for grammar.

Ooh... another illustration. Imagine what would happen if someone who had never done any computer programming was asked to write something in, say, Python, using as much sample code as they wanted, but having to actually write it out themselves? You can bet that at the least, it would fail due to improper indentation. You can't really say that the compiler is a "python nazi" or that it is elitist or stuck up about the author's use of the language. It just can't understand exactly what is being asked of it, because there are key details missing or too vague to actually understand what is being asked.

Similarly, those who use language lightly generally don't put in as much work as those who plumb the depths of the language, and so aren't tripped up by all the "did they really mean to say that?" moments. They just assume everyone thinks like them and will get their meaning -- where observation clearly shows that even with a precise grammar and lexicon, two people need to use flow control and error correction in their conversation to have any hope of having an approximate comprehension of what is being discussed. But when disparate comprehension is "good enough" for what is actually being attempted, why bother actually trying to understand?

Dead on right. It's all about peers. At a good (top 10) firm I joined, in the first week two senior people asked me to review a) the mail one was about to send, and b) the math in a document. The culture was seriously "we look professional, we do not let mistakes get out into the wild."

Now I'm at a much larger firm. Some of the mail I receive sounds as if it were penned by someone with final stage rabies. Makes me think the author's entire management chain isn't doing its job.