Does Grammar Matter Anymore?

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Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 9, 2012 @12:50AM from the pretty-talk dept.

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?"

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It's like this. by dtmos · 2012-07-09 00:50 · 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.
1. Re:It's like this. by udoschuermann · 2012-07-09 01:12 · 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!
  
  --
  --Udo.
2. Re:It's like this. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-09 01:13 · 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.
3. Re:It's like this. by necro81 · 2012-07-09 01:31 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Similarly, I make an effort to write clearly and use decent grammer.
  Oh, the irony...
  No, making a spelling error while professing to use decent grammar is not an example of irony.
4. Re:It's like this. by bedonnant · 2012-07-09 01:37 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Grammar used to be something that you learned in school. Using correct grammar means that you can express your thoughts clearly, which means that you can think clearly. You can use tools to catch typing mistakes, but if you need them to correct grammar, the problem lies with you.
  
  --
  ~~~ Paf. Le chien.
5. Re:It's like this. by Legume · 2012-07-09 02:02 · 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.
6. Re:It's like this. by gorzek · 2012-07-09 04:55 · 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.
  
  --
  Check out my world simulator thingy.
7. Re:It's like this. by Pseudonym · 2012-07-09 14:17 · 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.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Grammar, by benito27uk · 2012-07-09 00:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

The difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.
Grammar is Extremely Important! by El+Fantasmo · 2012-07-09 00:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

Let's eat Grandma!
or
Let's eat, Grandma!
Yes, grammar is still very important.
Brain bandwidth by goodmanj · 2012-07-09 01:31 · 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.