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> Come on, Tony M.; you're fighting a losing battle.
I think it's time to lay off Tony. First, he didn't write the paper
he was quoting. He asked if people thought it had validity. Second,
none of us have seen the paper, have we?
IF the paper is talking about prescriptive "grammars,"* it may be
quite valid. These serve almost no good purpose. There is a HUGE
difference between following a standard of usage and expressing
concepts and ideas clearly and accurately.
A fairly large subset of native English speakers are capable of clear
verbal expression. A smaller subset of those are capable of clear
written expression (written language is something of an artificial
language, and as such, is more susceptible to failure.) Now if you
were to draw a Venn diagram illustrating this concept, you could
probably illustrate the intersections of these groups and the group
of those who had memorized a set of usage rules by closing your eyes
and scribbling all over the diagram.
The propagation of the capricious usage rules that most of us are
taught in school is one of the most obscene wastes of human
potential I've seen.
There are some guidelines you can use to help ensure that your
written words are not ambiguous, but, alas, these guidelines have
little or no overlap with the rules we learned in school. We could
create new rules, I suppose, to make up for the lack of, say, tonal
rules in written language. As a matter of fact, I once wrote a paper
in college describing the tonal rule that governed whether a
quantifier was universal or existential and how a prescriptive rule
might be necessary in written language to clear up the ambiguities
caused by this. Of course, there are many thousands of other rules
that we'd have to make up, too, if we are to have a logical grammar.
For now, I think I'll stick with using common sense.
Rote memorization of a bunch of arbitrary, pointless "rules" does not
make you a good writer. If you are a decent writer, you probably have
the common sense to see when something is ambiguous or unclear. If
you are not a decent writer, no amount of "rules" will make you a
good one.
Lisa.
lisarea -at- lucent -dot- com
*Yes, I can defend the fact that I am semantically conservative and
syntactically liberal. So: Neener.
