Grammar Nazis Unite!

[JaNell]

This is really a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I've also found a few good websites pertaining to Grammar.

The Grammar Nazi
Tomato Nation, while Grammatically Dubious itself, expresses fairly well how I feel when I see someone using Klown Hukker Speek and actually expecting to be taken seriously.
Guide To Grammer & Writing from Capital Community College in Hartford, Conneticut.
I wrote that last "Capital CUMmunity College" the first time.

[Mother Mo]

Back when I used to teach, I taught two separate classes, Latin and World Mythologies. In my Latin class, I was a strict task mistress. The work was hard, you HAD to study regularly, and you'd better damn well get the long marks done correctly! Of course that was a foreign language, and the credits they received helped them get into college. If I hadn't taught them well, I'd have been doing my students an injustice.
Then there was the Mythology class. We watched movies, I read them stories, and we had lively discussions about whatever the class wanted to talk about. There was NEVER written homework, but reports or essays were accepted for extra credit. The school was an alternative high school, so enrollment was a maximum of about 30 to 40 students. All but 2 or 3 came to my Mythology class, while Latin had less than half a dozen students at any time.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while necessary to a good education, grammar and syntax aren't the most relevant or, by any means, popular areas of study and practice. When I read the reports on the mythological subjects we covered, I wasn't concerned about how they were spelled, or if the sentence was structured properly. I was looking for an understanding of the material.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions about any subject, of course. For me personally, I have found that fighting only the battles that are truly important saves lots of time and energy. When I read something written by a professional writer, I expect it to be grammatically correct. When I read a note from a friend, I look for the message that is being communicated, and respect them enough to not correct their errors. After all, being intelligent and being educated are two very different things, aren't they?

Please forgive any grammatical errors I may have made. I, too, suffer Lysdexia!

[jenna]

:::Jenna sneaks covertly through the early morning deserted streets of the KnoxGothic forum, bravely distributing leaflets produced by The White Rose of Free Expression explaining the evils of the Grammar Nazi Movement and the crimes they commit against the English language. Glancing nervously over her shoulder for fear of discovery by the gestapo, she then takes a round-about course to her home-page in case she is being followed and goes to bed:::

(A history of and explanation of the beliefs of The White Rose of Free Expression can be found on the "A new child is born(Poetic thoughts of my Insanity)" thread.

[JaNell]

Yes, I did read it, and thank you for supporting my points!

[white_darkness]

Actually being able to understand what someone is talking about can be quite handy, and even then it's hard enough to get the right meaning across....why make it more difficult?

[littlepockit]

generally, in reports, papers ,emails and the like, i am a stickler for details and everything must be correct, capitalization, spelling, puncuation , etc. but when it comes to posting and chat, i could really care less. although misspelling, not typos, really bug me. i am bad about getting my letter inverted, but i know im an excellent speller. i always thougt bad spelling was due to laziness and the lack of caring. sort of like stupidy vs. ignorance. i can tolerate stupity, that sometimes can not be helped, but i can not tolerate ignorance-that is learned.

kimmie

[JaNell]

I love it when it's so easy to predict who will vote what in the polls!

[Jack]

I will reiterate my assertion that there is an huge difference between the following two mindframes:

1. Having knowledge of grammar, spelling and punctuation and intentionally disregarding them for creative expression (something I have done myself in my own writing).

2. Not using grammar, spelling or punctuation because you can't be arsed to do so.

The former is creative expression. The latter is laziness. Know the difference.

The world is not black and white. Just because someone prefers some vague semblance of grammar, spelling and punctuation doesn't instantly make one a "Nazi".

And I don't think anyone here is arguing that we should all use exactly perfect grammar, spelling and punctuation. Just that we should generally use enough of them to ensure clarity of communication.

(I just violated at least two grammatical rules, so please stop insisting that I'm a Nazi about them. If I were, I wouldn't violate them myself, n'es c'est pas?)

Have a nice day.

[JaNell]

It's scary when we agree...

Most of the name-callers missed what I was saying entirely - I guess structured, uncreative thinking just makes you more prone to understanding (not-so-subtle) differences.

The gist of my opinion, for the B&W thinkers, is:

IF you are attempting to communicate, even on a board, please do the best you can to follow standard spelling, grammar, and punctuation so that other people can understand it (humor being an exception). Expecting other people to magically "get it" is just masturbating all over the board.

Notice I said, "the best you can". That's all. Not perfection; the best you can. Have I said it slowly enough yet?

And yes, there is creative rule breaking. You have to have mastered the rules first to pull that off. Randomly using spacing and such isn't it, and there's no way to justify that no matter how many degrees your mommy or your seventh cousin has...
It's just laziness, or shouting to the world, "Ooooh, look at me, I'm creative, aren't I?"

Expecting the reader to "get it" out of all that mush is a vile form of intellectual elitism, since the only people who can interpret it are highly skilled readers - everyone else needs those visual clues to understand what you're saying.

Anywho, call the names, throw out the "structure killing creativity" stuff, push some kid into a locker, pick your nose, and move on.

[Celestial Dung]

Eh I get one more say don't I?



I don't consider myself elitiist in my grammer position. I feel that it is my duty to try and understand what style other people write in more then it is my privlege to write whatever and expect people to understand.

People are different are perform better when entitled to live up to these differences. I feel that modern society expect to much conformity. gotta dress this way for that job, gott talk that way for that interview, gotta write this way for that publication. I can't buy into it. Instead of trying to get people to conform to one standard we should try to understand all the standards. I realize that it's harder to read some people then others but I think that effort is well spent.

The "lazy writer" vs. "creative writer" argument is sort of mixed to me. I know what JaNell and Jack are saying. Their is a difference between breaking rules for effect and breaking rules out of indiference. But I think that difference is very slight. By nature anyone who follows their own path is being creative.

Besides, I have Shakesphere...Shakespear, Sheakespeare..on my side

Sorry about those Nazi comments. I personally try not to slam a person with the Nazi stigma as I consider that word to mean to much. Very few people today really know what a Nazi is to the fullest extent.

[darkvader]

And I think I'll throw another curve into the mix here. (How's that for silly cliche mixing?)

Legal documents are very frequently written with absolutely flawless grammar - and are among the most difficult reading there is.

Good grammar does not equal ease of comprehension, any more than good spelling does. In written communication, horribly bad grammar can make you look like an idiot, but it's also important to keep in mind that English is not a dead language, and therefore has room for change.

I personally have a problem with some of the standard punctuation placement rules, particularly regarding quotes and parenthesis with other punctuation, and I frequently violate the standard rule in the interest of improving the language. For more information on this, check out this section of The Jargon File.

So, I suppose my conclusion is that breaking the rules is fine, if you know what rules you're breaking and why, and can accept that it's going to annoy some people that you broke them.

I do consider clarity to be important in something that I'm reading. I just don't have time to dig through someone's attempt at cleverness with the language to get a meaning from their writing that I likely do not care about in the first place. I'll admit to a bit of obfuscative writing at times, but it's generally with intent.

[Seraph Antaine]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the Anti-Expression Nazis, or the Anti-Individual Nazis, or even the Anti-Typographical Error Nazis. It's the Grammar Nazis, associated closely with the SS(Spelling Sticklers).
Waving the flag of Free Speech over a horde of illiterate, bohemian slackers will not transform them into the shining army of down-to-earth, creative-thinking eloquents some here are endorsing or imagining. As a native, I know the education here in Tennessee is not of the highest caliber. It only follows logically that many of us will grow up to be poorly educated, if we are educated only at school. Fortunately, there are groups like the Grammar Nazis, and individuals like you and me who may, in some measure, stand to offset, if not counteract, this educational deficit.
We all understand that there are those among us who cannot take command of their faculty to the effect of literate discourse. There are children, who have not been with us long enough to learn the skills. There are people of all ages who are afflicted with learning-impediments, such as ADD and lysdexia. However, I have yet to meet one individual, within our community, who truly lacked the faculty to engage his fellows in common, literate discourse(with the exception of the occasional shit-faced drunk). I believe the real problem here is some combination of apathy, laziness and vanity. If one does not care enough, or is too lazy to express oneself in a manner intelligible to his literate fellows, how can one expect his fellows to care enough to listen or to respond? The WILLFUL ILLITERATE, in the VAIN belief that he is special, expects his literate fellows to shoulder the responsibility of investing their effort in the decryption of his profoundly jumbled gibberish.
Willful illiterates take heed! Only your fellow illiterates will be willing to tolerate your vain apathy in the long term, and they will probably lack the faculty to properly understand you, or to respond to you in a way that you will be able to understand. This will ultimately leave you completely sundered from your native culture. You will find that you are forced to huddle with other illiterates, watching the currents of literate life fly past you in a mystifying blur, none of you able to express your bewilderment to the uniquely illiterate individual next to you. If you cared enough to listen, your 3rd Grade English teacher probably told you that illiteracy would lead to the decline of civilization. You want to make yourself understood through creative expression? Take responsibility for the literacy and utility of your expressions, or no one will ever care. 'Nuff said.

EDIT> (Translation) Talk good so we can listen good.

[iblis]

I have no remorse for making whatever linguistic changes necessary, be they grammatical or syntactic, to communicate my thoughts as they appear within my own biological hard drive.

Unless I am writing a story, and then often only if I intend it for consumption by other people, I do not consider it my responsibility to make certain that anyone else can parse through the information that I have submitted. Sounds elitist? Damn skippy. Stretch your mind; we can all use a good synaptic workout every now and again.

[Seraph Antaine]

I have no remorse for making whatever linguistic changes necessary, be they grammatical or syntactic, to communicate my thoughts as they appear within my own biological hard drive.

Unless I am writing a story, and then often only if I intend it for consumption by other people, I do not consider it my responsibility to make certain that anyone else can parse through the information that I have submitted. Sounds elitist? Damn skippy. Stretch your mind; we can all use a good synaptic workout every now and again.

Thank you for volunteering to illustrate both apathy and vanity. As it takes a little effort, we may not have any volunteers for illustration of the laziness factor.

[iblis]

I have no remorse for making whatever linguistic changes necessary, be they grammatical or syntactic, to communicate my thoughts as they appear within my own biological hard drive.

Unless I am writing a story, and then often only if I intend it for consumption by other people, I do not consider it my responsibility to make certain that anyone else can parse through the information that I have submitted. Sounds elitist? Damn skippy. Stretch your mind; we can all use a good synaptic workout every now and again.

Thank you for volunteering to illustrate both apathy and vanity. As it takes a little effort, we may not have any volunteers for illustration of the laziness factor.

You're quite welcome. If I were Good™, I wouldn't be me.

[jenna]

i had some thoughts today on the whole grammar debate, and i'd like some feed-back on them if others would be so kind.

As far as reasoning behind either being on the pro or anti-grammar side of the arguement, i don't think that either elitism or illiteracy are the actual reasons that anyone would be on either side. Arguements can be, and for the most part have been, made to support the belief that both the pro-grammar's and the anti-grammar's beliefs stem from both elitism and illiteracy. It makes no sense that both sides somehow manage to both be elitists and illiterate at the same time.

My current theory on the matter can go one of two ways, either nature or nurture.

If you go by the theory that human behavior comes from genetics, it would make sense to me that the pro-grammar types would be left brained and the anti-grammar types would be right brained.

If you go by the theory that human behavior comes from environment, i would expect to find that the pro-grammar types learned to read and write in an environment that focused on the direct instruction (phonics-based teaching of individual sound parts first) approach to teaching reading. However, the anti-grammar types would be more likely to come from a background where they were taught to read using the whole language approach. (teaching style where reading is taught the same way a native language is learned, constantly exposing the child to reading material and letting them pick it up naturally)

i am both right brained, and learned to read in a whole language environment. So, both theories would seem correct in contributing to my view-point on the subject at least.

[white_darkness]

Interesting thoughts jenna.

Personally, there is no division on the nature/nurture question.

Both sides are equally valid in the shaping of the human mind.

Genetics lay the base groundwork and environment does the rest.

For the genetics argument, one could point at all the seperated twin IQ studies that have been done, and how the twins typically fall in within a certain range of scoring with each other on IQ tests.

Of course, IQ is only one potential measurement of intelligence, and many IQ tests are culturally biased.

There are variations in those above, and I'm sure someone will be dredging up some articles on these. One of the key issues is that would have to be determined would be the quality of the environments said twins experience in development and the quality level thereof.

Then we step into nurture...

A good environment vs. a bad environment does have an affect on a child's IQ as the child develops.

Which the effect of the environment is determined by the subject's personality which is potentially initially determined by genetics, but is affected by the environment in turn.

Nice big circular argument going there personally.


The differences between left- vs. right- brained individuals are documented and quite dramatic however.

Right-brained individuals however are frequently a law unto themselves more so than left-brained. To quote a book "Every left-hander is different"

Handedness is normally a fairly good indicator of which hemisphere is dominant, left or right. The best indication of handedness is still writing which is one of the most complex and intricates task humans do daily.

Combining the two arguments, yours and mine, places me on the other side of the spectrum from you, but with the same qualities.

I'm left-handed (using above points of mine therefore right-brained), and learned reading in a similar environment (basically I just started at the age of 4, with The Hobbit and read voraciously from that point onward.)

However, I'm definitely a pro-grammar person,

Vader raises an excellent point with legal documents. Typically a legal document is utterly incomprehensible to but yet they frequently have excellent grammar. Except from what I"ve seen daily with one exception. Lawyers do not use correct sentence structure as hammered into us in English.

Lawyers communicate in fragments and run-on sentences, but every comma, semicolon, colon, period, and even the choice of words used affect the end result of the document as a whole.

Maybe why this is all so insoluble is that we're missing the real issue here, Everyone can go back and forth over whether grammar is good or whether it is bad till we all have grey hair or Vader locks the thread (whichever comes first), but the issue seems to be more when is grammar appropriate for usage (or lack thereof) in what forms of written communication and how so.

On a purely non-thoughtful note, I hate comma rules. The term comma rules is an utter joke, since everyone of said rules has an exception. Whoever thought the damn things up had to be on some good drugs.

[Jack]

Actually, the notion of people being either "left brain" or "right brain" has been almost universally debunked and discarded.

Here's a good article explaining why it's nonsense:

http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_features_leftbrain.html

[ophelia]

I have to raise my arm in salute and join JaNell in the Grammar Nazi ranks.

[Hardcoregirl]

I have to raise my arm in salute and join JaNell in the Grammar Nazi ranks.

Hmmm...I just was realizing the similarities between Gemini's and Nazi's....veddy interesting....