Does Grammar Matter Anymore? 878
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?"
It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether grammar matters or not depends on the recipient of the message, not the originator. As anyone who has designed a compiler will tell you, it's an error-prone PITA to have to pre-process input before it is in a useable form. If the recipient can do this, no harm is done, except that the recipient is aware that the sender gave him more work to do than was necessary -- something usually not considered a compliment.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Informative)
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:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
"Don't grammar matter no more"
Fixed.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
"Don't grammar matter no more"
Fixed.
Knock that off, or I'll stab you with an exclamation point!
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
Will the castration of grammar succeed in amputating the infighting amongst the monks? Or is this a falsetto dilemma?
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your (and a whole lot of others') refusal to use the shift key hurts mine. Do you realise how uneducated it makes you look?
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
ps, i weep that you will never know the beauty of an e e cummings poem
Speaking only for myself, I happily accept nonstandard grammar, spelling or punctuation if there is a clear attempt at creativity behind it. It needn't be anywhere near as good as E.E. Cummings' poetry or James Joyce's prose; few are capable of that. A good use of language does not have to be a correct use of language, where "correct" is measured against your favourite style guide.
I also don't have a problem with nonstandard language to overcome a limitation of the medium, such as the 140 character limit or the ergonomics of many mobile devices. I also concede cultural conventions, such as the conversational characteristics of comments. In addition, you often can't assume that someone is writing in their native language.
Having said all that, using "correct" language is fundamentally a matter of courtesy. By using "correct" spelling, good grammar and correct punctuation, you are saying to your reader that you understand that they don't have to read what you say, and so you are going to do them the courtesy of making it easy for them to do so. If you, as a speaker or writer, signal that you don't care about me, then I don't care about what you have to say.
I don't mind a creative writer who plays with language. They, at least, are trying to reward me for the extra effort I have to expend to read it. If it's not my cup of fur, I appreciate that others will enjoy it and I appreciate that you tried.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
English's Germanic roots are great. The problem was when the French Normans invaded Britain and fucked it up by merging their language with the Germanic language that was in place there.
Putting a French language together with a Germanic language is like putting ketchup on a chocolate cake. And this is why English is the way it is now.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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?"
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's grammar that matters, not tools that pick up a handful of borderline grammar issues and false positives over and over again, while missing many more important problems. I'm pretty good at spelling, but spell checkers still catch me out several times a day. I'm only okay at grammar, but I can't remember a single instance where Microsoft's tool has been helpful.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used MS Word's grammar checking capabilities, and I agree that they can only be a supplement to someone who already has solid writing skills. It has prodded me to rewrite long sentences, fix subject-verb agreement, get rid of passive voice, other things of that nature. It's also caught my occasional typo and duplicate word--errors that are easy to skip over when you're re-reading your draft for the tenth time.
If someone is a poor writer in the first place, all the spelling- and grammar-checkers in the world won't fix that. They'll just paper over the more obvious defects. People should never, ever count on a software tool to fix their writing. It can only be a modestly-helpful guide, not a blunt tool to do the work for you. Natural language processing is just not very good. Even online translation tools do little more than find-and-replace words with their foreign language counterparts, then try to rearrange them into a grammar consistent with that language. You can usually get the general idea of the original text, but a human translation by someone fluent in both languages is almost always vastly superior. The bottom line is that computers are very bad at semantics, and even worse at "reading between the lines." This is not a fault of computers, either, but of software researchers and the industry as a whole.
Lay people often get the mistaken impression that because computers are now good at pattern recognition (picking out faces, analyzing voice samples into text, etc.) they are also good at figuring out the "meaning" of these things. They are not. Pattern recognition and semantics are totally different areas of research.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it doesn't mean that at all. The fact that some posts could be improved by Microsoft's tools doesn't mean those tools would be a net gain. In each new version of Word, I generally spend a little while trying out the grammar check function -- and it does occasionally catch grammatical errors. But, when used by someone who knows what they are doing, it more often misflags correct grammar, and it tends to be a net productivity drag, which is why after a short try-out period, it ends up getting turned off.
If something is important enough to have someone proofread, you should do that. If it isn't—and you have any grammar skills of your own to start with—you're probably wasting your time using an automated grammar checker.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Martin Blank opined:
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.
The thing is, none of the errors you list are mistakes of GRAMMAR. Instead, each of them is a USAGE error, as distinct from a grammatical one.
Grammar, per se, is structural in nature: basically, it's the rules of sentence construction. In common usage, grammar is often conflated with such topics as spelling, usage, capitalization, and punctuation, but they are, in fact separate issues. Tthe fact that you, yourself, conflate them is an indication of the size of the gap between what "everybody knows" about language, and what the technical terms they bandy about actually mean.
Those of us who care about such distinctions are vastly outnumbered by those who don't - and the disparity in numbers is growing. Texting is a contributor to the problem, as is the dismal state of public "education" in the U.S. So is the perceived casual nature of email and blog commenting, where errors of grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation and capitalization are so commonplace that they have become the new norm - and fuddy-duddies like me, who insist on employing grammatically-correct, properly-spelled-and-punctuated Engilsh, paying careful attention to usage, are looked at as dinosaurs, at best, or, less charitably, as elitist snobs.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably none of them, but if one were, it would be the one between "these" and "ellipsis", but you probably wanted "ellipses" there anyway.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Complex or not, the post you replied to is very correct. It's not about "awe, these rules are hard" it's about being able to articulate thoughts to as many recipients as possible, as clearly and concisely as possible.
One must also consider the medium being used. Twitter has a very low character limit. I am way more tolerant to someone saying "B in L8 car broke down waiting for tow truck" than I would be if someone sent that same email.
No language is perfect, and every language has complexities. Those complexities evolved over time to accommodate clarity. I'd be very surprised if suddenly there was no need to be clear with communication any longer.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
It depends. Some grammar rules are quite complex and few people actually know them. For instance; which.. of ...these ... ellipsis.... is...used... correctly?
They're all correct if the speaker is Captain Kirk.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Informative)
Correction: it should be "ellipses", not "ellipsis". Ellipsis is singular, ellipses is plural.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, punctuation may also convey meaning , but has a much shallower effect than grammar.
I beg to differ. Something as small as a comma can make a huge difference in the meaning of what is written. For example:
I'm not sure I would call that shallow. It may be a silly example, but it applies to real-life sentences as well.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're spot on. If someone writes and uses bad grammar (and spelling) it takes time to translate the message to normal [insert language here]. Not using correct spelling and grammar shows disdain for the receiver, wether intentional or not.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
...disdain for the receiver, wether intentional or not.
Whether. Or was that intentional?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
When reading content on the net I try to assume the author isn't a mad skillz 733t grammar professor and that possibly people make mistakes, It shouldn't detract from the message. I'm also not the greatest speller in the world, so I appreciate it when people over look my minor typos.
I think the real issue is when people aren't willing to over look a typo or a missing comma and instead of focusing on the content of a message they focus on the formatting. Often I've seen someone post a comment where they're entirely correct, but get torn down because they used "their" instead of "they're" or "loose" instead of "lose" in a context were the intended meaning was evident. You'll see plenty of "let's eat Grandma!" and "I helped uncle jack off his horse" examples below demonstrating the importance of grammar, but most of the time, if people relax their anus' a little, it's easy enough to tell from the context of the situation what the author's intended meaning is.
It's important to communicate ideas and, to me at least, the people who spend more time degrading others for the misuse of a rule are the stupid ones because they lack of ability to process and interpret content. We don't consider computers to be very smart, their tools that require very specific input. Think about what it would be like if the response to every other word you said or wrote was "segmentation fault". We as humans have the capability to derive meaning and understand abstract ideas, if a person is going to focus on syntax and formatting and ignore the message they're no smarter than a machine.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Informative)
Um, that's still the incorrect usage.
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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'?"
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Proper grammar is definitely contextual. When speaking to your peers, grammar may vary based on what is acceptable among them - so that one doesn't "stand out" or come across as trying to be "above" them. It's ridiculous that this is necessary - that speaking intelligently among any group can get you singled out as not belonging - but it's hardly new.
During my couple years as a landscaper after high school, I quickly learned that speaking proper English ain't no way to earn the respect of coworkers. (And - trust me on this - correcting them was *definitely* not the answer.)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily an idiot, but ignorantly uneducated and aliterate. Ignorance != stupidity.
No, "aliterate" wasn't a misspelling or typo.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
You're forgetting the part where using improper grammar makes you look like an idiot.
I was wondering when you grammar nazis would get around to sending a regiment our way but I see you felt alarmed enough by that headline to scramble an entire panzer corps.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
You mean the part where if the speaker weighs as much as a duck, she must be a witch? What does that have to do with grammar.
[For those who can't tell that I'm joking: the duck test is "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is." Very true for users of poor grammar. The duck test I am referencing comes from Monty Python [youtube.com].]
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Use of proper grammar is an indicator that the originator of the message cared about the message, and would rather have the message be heard loud and clear, than allow presentation to distract from its poignancy.
Whenever I read things like "id like to by a new car," I cringe inside, imagine some grunting ape who happened across a keyboard, and move on without thinking about the attempted message. If that was the intended effect, then "buy all means," have at it, folks!
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who are you communicating with? I toss resumes with grammar mistakes. Yup, I'm an asshole. However, I've got plenty of resumes, and I want programmers who can communicate clearly. Similarly, I make an effort to write clearly and use decent grammer. Perfection isn't the point; clarity of communications and the perception of competency, are.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Funny)
Similarly, I make an effort to write clearly and use decent grammer.
Oh, the irony...
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, making a spelling error while professing to use decent grammar is not an example of irony.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
Similarly, I make an effort to write clearly and use decent grammer.
Oh, the irony...
You must go to the Alanis Morrisette School of Irony.
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
However, claiming someone is insulting or dismissive simply because they failed to notice an error is pompous. It implies malice where logically none exists.
On the contrary, it implies stupidity, ignorance, a slapdash attitude, or combinations of these. Neither are traits I favour or reward.
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't tell the difference, then your writing is probably so poor that it "doesn't matter" to you. To everyone else in the world, it probably does matter, because you're likely confusing the hell out of them and looking unprofessional at the same time.
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?
Re:It's like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the problems of misinterpretation and ambiguity.
Not understanding the message is one thing, but understanding it as something that wasn't intended is worse. And when correctly parsing the message and the result is completely different from what the author intended, it's worst of all.
Not only do people use reduced vocabularies and lackluster grammar, but they use words and phrases wrong, so unless the recipient also does it wrong, the same way, misunderstandings are very likely.
In short, I think it boils down to people not caring much anymore. There's no pride in anything one does. The "whatever" generation is taking over.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It's like this. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we should start making scary sounds when someone uses poor grammer in a conversation, just like compiler warnings.
Concurrence Is My Fort Which You All Belong To (Score:3)
"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.
Yeah he is being right about criticizing the example being an too long one. Why Jack Kerouac's On-the-Road is stream of conscious flowing but my posts, the ones that have the similar validity of writing or of grammar, are the same quality for some reason make you mad while his wins awards? Society has the double standards if we're going to talk about any of.
Re:Concurrence Is My Fort Which You All Belong To (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3)
Proper Spelling and Grammar does have its place. Usually when communicating with a larger group of people, who use proper Spelling and Grammar as a common ground for understanding.
However I usually get quite annoyed at people who think that Spelling and Grammar effect the quality or correctness of your message.
But Grammar isn't perfect as well, and it needs to be broken, sometimes. I remember a Hell class with a teacher who was a Grammar Nazi, She had one sentence for a question for a 10 page paper. I re
Re: (Score:3)
Unsurprising, given the quality of your efforts:
Break grammar by
I'm sorry! (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't... help... myself...
..and Grammar affect the quality...
There. FTFY.
Ahhh. Better now.
Re: (Score:3)
It's one of the reasons why Mac OS X rules. The system actually has system-wide spellchecker so it works everywhere. Things like that are missing from Windows and Linux and that's why you need to use apps like Word. Google's online tools are completely missing these things.
On the other hand, they're universally present in modern browsers - even on mobile devices they're common - so if you're using a browser to type a message, you get spellchecking automatically.
On the third hand, TFA was about grammar and not spelling. And no OS or browser has integrated grammar checking.
Grammar, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, only those who have a reasonable grasp on grammar seem to care.
Re:Grammar, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Grammar, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Grammar, (Score:4, Insightful)
You're the third one with this example, and you're the third one to stick this fucking comma where it shouldn't fucking be.
You three should just shrivel up and die, you fucking victims of Muphry's law. - See, here's the comma where it should be.
In your example it makes no fucking sense. It's not an enumeration, neither it is a vocative, a parenthetical nor a separate clause. The only thing that example points out is importance of capitalization.
Ain't it great, discussing (and modding discussion about) importance of grammar while knowing fuck all about grammar in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Grammar, (Score:4, Informative)
Grammar is Extremely Important! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's eat Grandma!
or
Let's eat, Grandma!
Yes, grammar is still very important.
Middle POST! (Score:4, Funny)
Grammer is meaning less. All your bases are belonging to US now...
yes (Score:3)
Yes it don't matter to anyone not looking to never make any conversation.
First things first... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I believe proper grammar to be very important, as it's the only way to be absolutely clear as to what the original person intended to say. For instance, this humorous example of why capitalisation is important:
I went to the family farm, and while there helped my uncle Jack off a horse.
Now drop the capital "J".
Re:First things first... (Score:5, Funny)
I went to the family farm, and while there helped my uncle ack off a horse.
Yes, grammar does matter. So does saying what you actually mean to say. Like change the "J" to lower case.
Re:First things first... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:First things first... (Score:5, Funny)
This discussion is about grammar. Pedantry is three doors down, on the left.
Is that my left or your left?
Yes, it does matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some good examples:
"Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."
"My interests include: cooking dogs, reading, poetry, fishing and music."
"Goats cheese salad ingredients: lettuce, tomato, goats, cheese"
"Butcher's sign: Try our sausages. None like them."
Of course there is always engrish [slashdot.org].
Not it may yes matter (Score:3, Interesting)
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?)
No, really, it doesn't - trust me (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe that it's ok to use tweetspeak and such in emails and electronic communication for business, etc. - then please, be my guest.
I sincerely doubt that any amount of persuasion from me is going to convince the people who already do this to change their habits. On the contrary, I invite people to use WHATEVER language they feel is appropriate in their communications with management, coworkers, and customers.
When I get your email, I'll treat you with the respect and professionalism it appears to deserve, and I look forward to watching your progress in the workplace/marketplace.
The important thing is being understood. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Grammar yes, however... (Score:4, Insightful)
Grammar checkers can die a miserable death.
I turned off MS Word's after too many false positives such as eliminating the passive voice - I don't need some bullshit rule telling me my thoughts are invalid.
The problem even extends to "journalism". (Score:4, Interesting)
Has this caught anybody else's attention?
Brain bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Bear with me if this seems offtopic at first: Reading and writing are powerful not just because they store things permanently, but because they amplify the speed of communication. I can read five times faster than I can listen to someone talk. (This is one reason why video blogs, Youtube howtos, and other videos which are nothing but people talking are so annoying: it's frustrating to wait for someone to flap their mouthparts to make ideas come out, when I could get those same ideas much faster if they'd written them down.)
So reading is like a high-speed downlink to the brain. BUT, it only works if the author has taken the time to spell and use grammar properly. I can still read badly-written text, but puzzling it out slows me down, to the speed someone can talk, or worse. There's a tradeoff here: it takes a little more time for someone to write something down, and write it properly. But that pays dividends each time someone reads it, and with the exception of PhD theses, anything worth reading is read by multiple people. So if you make a video message instead of writing, or you don't take the time to write properly, what you're telling me is that your time is more valuable than mine. So don't be surprised if I'm insulted at your arrogance.
We seem to be heading toward a postliterate society. I have no problem with losing the art of writing per se: the problem is that by losing *reading*, we lose the single biggest accelerator of human thought ever invented. You've heard of the "last mile" problem: this is the "last two feet" problem. In a world where data flows through wires faster and faster, the last hop from screen to brain is getting slower and slower as we lose the art of writing well.
Now, all of this is only true if everyone reads faster than they can listen to someone talk. Sadly, that's not the case. The problems of a postliterate society are invisible to people who aren't all that literate to begin with.
Grammar and Spelling Rules are Nonsense Anyway (Score:3)
Grammar only matters to a point because English grammar is an antiquated inconsistent mess of silliness whose chief purpose is keeping English teachers employed. Many great minds over the past few centuries have argued that grammar does not matter. Seymour Papert cites studies showing that children who are good at math can be turned off to English [mxplx.com] because its rules are illogical and inconsistent. Isaac Asimov blamed our inconsistent grammar and spelling system [mxplx.com] for illiteracy in America. Richard Feynman argued that if kids are having problems with grammar and spelling then there are problems with your grammar and spelling standards [wordpress.com]. Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic spelling system [mxplx.com] arguing that our current alphabetic spelling system would become like Chinese characters, devoid of an phonetic meaning if we did not implement reform. China implemented spelling reform to simplify its characters in order to improve literacy [wikipedia.org] with quantifiable results.
I'm approaching this as someone who majored in English in college before going into programming. I couldn't get a job working for a newspaper because the editors would take one look at my BA and say, "Sorry. You know how to write." It took me years to understand what they were talking about. Grammar is important to the point of being able to properly communicate ideas, but that's all. Grammar-nazism is all about job security for elitist journalists and English teachers at the expense of increasing literacy in America. It's like the imperial/metric debate or qwerty/dvorak keyboards, just another out-of-date standard that could be fixed in one generation if that generation could get over the fact that "through," "coo," "do," "true," "knew," and "queue" all rhyme nonsensically but spelling them "throo," "koo," "doo," "troo," "nyoo," and "kyoo" simply looks silly despite being logical.
Does grammar matter anymore? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The thesis (Score:5, Insightful)
So the thesis for the "no" side is that grammar matters less now that writing has become a much more important day-to-day communication medium.
That makes perfect sense.
welcome to the internet age ! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
A typo is not the same as "bad grammar" (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading the first 100 comments on this post, I don't think a single person actually clicked-through to see the actual story and Google+ post being referenced.
The mistake is not a case of "bad grammar" *AT ALL*. It is a simple typo and is totally obvious to anyone reading it. I make typos in tweets and posts all the time - sometimes the spell-check catches them, sometimes it does not. A typo is not "bad grammar", it is a simple mistake.
It isn't the end of the universe because it's not a professional document.
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, look, there's a girl on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:Does grammar matter? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does grammar matter? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Does grammar matter? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not even a comma splice, unless the intended meaning is "I assisted Jack. Now, kill his donkey."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Umm . . . that's "Grammar Nazis," oh Candidate for Apostrophe Abuse.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:incorrect use of "anymore" (Score:4, Interesting)
Anymore and nowadays. Special thanks to Philadelphia (origin of "This car needs cleaned") for slowly spreading the virus of using "anymore" when "nowadays" should be used. It's taking over the country. Ten yrs, you'd never hear a headline like this. It should be "Does grammar even matter nowadays?"
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.
Re:In the post-PC era... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:It is real simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, do you think in grammatically correct sentences?
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.