Slashdot Mirror
Does Grammar Matter Anymore?
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?"
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.
"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.
My work here is dung.
The difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.
Let's eat Grandma!
or
Let's eat, Grandma!
Yes, grammar is still very important.
Grammer is meaning less. All your bases are belonging to US now...
Yes it don't matter to anyone not looking to never make any conversation.
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".
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Reading comments by internet posters about a story discussing bad grammar on the internet is truly delightful, from a certain point of view!
Just like size matters, it depends on the context.
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.
Silence is a state of mime.
Oh, look, there's a girl on Slashdot.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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.
Umm . . . that's "Grammar Nazis," oh Candidate for Apostrophe Abuse.
Grammar does matter.
It shows quite a lot in general about the writer of any message. Good grammar put into something written shows also the clarity of the idea that needs to be conveyed by the written piece. You can possibly understand that "Me now go home it now is very late" really means "I have to go home now as it is very late for me", but if I saw any of the two on a CV for employee selection, I would definitely consider the later one first.
In japan the importance of language education is on yet another higher level. They use 3 different alphabets there, hiragana, katagana and kanji. The exact same pasage can be written by using hiragana and katagana alone, but also by using all three. The more kanji you throw in, the more it is considered that you are well learned and educated, the more everyone will grant you respect-points.
It is not a matter of feeding your written piece to a spell checker or grammar corrector. This is what this process has succumbed to. The importance of grammar is really what you put into written pieces immediately as you think about it. Correcting yourself with those is always a good thing, but relying on those to fix and covers errors which you know you have in your written piece, that's what will keep you going in the short term of course, but sooner or later your inability to articulate will be discovered. That moment is usually not a very comfortable one.
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?)
I really think that grammar is important. But from what I have noticed in my native language (Spanish), there is also a "non-evolution" of it. Sure, new words are included every day, but there is not evolution to try to make the language and written communication easier. I was hoping someday that the "v" will be deprecated and all words starts using only "b" :)
I helped jack off his donkey.
vs.
I helped Jack, off his donkey.
The version with the comma makes no sense - a comma almost always separates clauses or sub-clauses which each have a subject (a major exception being as a delimiter in lists). "off his donkey" contains no subject, and hence is syntactically invalid. The actual difference in this example ("I helped Jack off his donkey") is the capitalisation of Jack.
Grammar is just an aid to clarity- when the two conflict, geek rule is that clarity trumps grammar.
For example, consider the old format:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that"?
versus the newer:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that?".
The first form, although "grammatically correct" according to S&W, is ambiguous - did the speaker state that Helen asked a question, or ask if Helen did so? The second form is unabiguous; the speaker states that Helen asked a question.
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.
-Styopa
What's with the comma in the second example?
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.
Proverbs 21:19
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.
I think those of us who care often make the mistake of banging on about grammer instead of clarity. Grammer is stupid rules about infinitives and prepositions. Clarity is something we can all agree is good. Bad grammer usually lacks clarity, either by being meaningless or by being a roadblock to the reader.
[FUCK BETA]
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.
As of late I've been noticing and commenting to friends about a growing disregard for spelling, grammar, and proper English as a whole. In school I was taught to never use contractions when writing a "professional" piece; I see that constantly now. I was also taught to avoid "familiar" language and colloquialisms, to spell out any number ten or lower, and things like this. It seems to me that "Tweetspeak" and shorthand common to texting and Facebook messaging are now considered acceptable to journalism editors, particularly online.
Has this caught anybody else's attention?
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 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 because its rules are illogical and inconsistent. Isaac Asimov blamed our inconsistent grammar and spelling system 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. Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic spelling system 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 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.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
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.
Can't... help... myself...
..and Grammar affect the quality...
There. FTFY.
Ahhh. Better now.
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.
R.Mo
Exactly. It's capitalization that makes the difference there.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
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.
The English language is a hodgepodge of inconsistent and somewhat nonsensical rules. For example, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" (Split infinitive) vs. "To go boldly go where no man has gone before" (Equally bombastic, but grammatically correct).
Grammar and punctuation rules should be followed where they make sense. In a 140 character tweet, they are sensibly dispensed with (Oopsie! Preposition at the end of a sentence).
But don't get me started on spelling and semantic redundancy. (Gasp! Beginning a word with "But" or "And!")
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I believe that the importance of grammar in text is proportional to the number of consumers of that text. Poor grammar slows down the reader, so if something is going to be read by many people, it is probably worth the extra time to get the grammar correct as the smooth reading benefit, requiring less time to read and digest, will be multiplied across all the readers and if there are enough readers, this more than compensates for the time required by the author to write a grammatically correct message.
It's not even a comma splice, unless the intended meaning is "I assisted Jack. Now, kill his donkey."
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.
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.
English is not a strongly structured language. That is why there is an entire discipline called Structured English.
Its a language used for communication between people. People are smart the brain is flexible. The stand that should operate for obedience to spelling and grammar rules is "Can the recipient understand the message content completely and correctly without the effort required to interpret the message distracting from the message." or so said my high-school English teacher.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You would think that the WSJ, being a leading business publication, would have made the point that once you get to court there's no such thing as informal e-mail. In that situation, it's not a hallway conversation, it's a discoverable document. And those messages can get you in serious trouble. For example, Microsoft's "cut off Netscape's air supply" enjoyed a prominent place in the judge's order (later overturned) to break up the company.
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...
Haha, no. Desktop apps like Word are for producing formal documents, which includes helping to limit human error. Google apps are based around Google's task of handling a range of input, from the formal to the informalist of the informal. It's about content production, vs. content handling. As much as Google branches out into social networking and whatever, they're still about content handling, not content production.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Here are some examples of bad grammar that I see all the time from native speakers. It doesn't matter what country they went to school in, I still see them.
.
1) The belief that "could of"/"coulduv" or "should of"/"shoulduv" are real words instead of "could've" and "should've"
2) The belief that "prolly" is a real word and that "probably" is a made up one. My nephew, who is currently attending college and is genuinely smarter that average, told me that. He claimed that he had never in his life seen "probably".
3) The belief that any time a speaker is puzzled or surprised by something that he or she can just put a question mark at the end of it. For example, "That was the biggest dog I ever saw in my life?" is an example of what now passes for a question. This has become so prevalent on the internet that now even non-native speakers of English with excellent English comprehension have picked it up.
After talking with recent high school graduates (I live in the USA) I have learned that high schools don't teach grammar any more and at best the last time a kid maybe got a grammar lesson was in the 8th grade. I've decided that we're probably at most a few years away from college papers being somewhat similar to mobile telephone messages in terms of spelling and grammar.
Good grammar (and spelling) is the protocol for human communication.
Since there is redundancy and words like "is & are" when a mistake is made the rest of the sentence can be used to reconstruct the true meaning.
If we don't follow the standard, then there is increased processing needed to interpret the communication, which is unfair to the recipient.
Find what percentage of people arguing "grammar does not matter anymore" write perfectly formed full sentences with correct spelling and the percentage of people who defend the importance of grammar make typos and grammar mistakes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
1) If you want to be understood. Can you imagine a judge issuing a decision in a case with bad grammar? It only inspires hundreds of unnecessary future cases, to litigate "what the judge really meant." Grammar represents the social rules of how literate people communicate. And, intentional violation of grammatical rules is the stuff of art: You represent the school teacher in a novel by giving their lines grammatical correctness; you represent the village idiot with the LACK of good grammar. Legal documents, professional publications, technical manuals are all most productive of positive outcomes when writter within the accepted grammatical rules of the language. See "Strunk & White." (And, yes, grammar changes over time, which is why so many people fail to appreciate Shakespeare in the original.) 2) If you want to be perceived as credible. Ah kin skribble to mah kin, but do you think those are the words of someone you'd trust to invest in? Business plans, project proposals, provocative ideas, scientific papers are rejected by readers if the authors' text is ungrammatical, because they project the writer's image as one with little reasoning power (with Mark Twain and WIll Rogers as credible exceptions, because of the obvious intentionality behind the text), and therefore render the entire text as unreliable. Imagine where Higgs' Boson would be if Einstein had--despite writing in other than his native tongue--written in poor grammatical form, Would it even have a name? So, argue against rules of grammar all you want, make fun of the grammatically accomplished...and live your life impoverished in the process. --Carol Anne
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.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
If someone is lazy enough not to learn how to correctly form a proper sentence, they are likely lazy enough to do a crappy job at their other responsibilities. As a hiring manager for a global company, I check grammar in resumes and applications as well as speech during interviews. I don't want to have an employee unable to properly communicate with other regional offices or any publicly-facing entity as a representative of the company.
Grammar seems to have become a lost art to an entire generation. Good luck to them, but I'm not hiring any of them.
"There *IS* no patch for stupidity" -www.sqlsecurity.com
The only people that want to think it doesn't matter are either illiterates or Republican who think schools should be funded from pennies out of a water fountain.
There is nothing wrong with making a mistake in tweets or comments on forums but for a business having mistakes on their sites. It just makes me think you cut corners and don't care about quality fullstop.
For example: http://www.google.com/nexus/#/galaxy/features
A little over half way down is a heading that says "People everywere". It' been that way since the site launched and it's been talked about on the web and yet Google can't be fucked to fix it.
It just reminds me of all those Android bugs that lasted between numerous version. For a bunch of people that are supposedly the smartest of the smart, they do a pretty shoddy job, imo. So that's why I don't buy Android goods and more and I am transitioning off their web products. I can only assume if quality matters so little elsewhere then who knows how god their web security is. I'm not going to risk it.
Without grammar *of some sort* our ability to communicate would be hobbled. You'd be able to point to a mammoth and say "big!", but nobody could be absolutely sure whether you meant "The girls back at the cave will be impressed when we bring that home!" or "Better pass on this one, he'll kick our ass!"
Most of what we call "ungrammatical" is just non-standard grammar; it is neither consistently better nor consistently worse than standard grammar. African American Vernacular English has a "habitual be" construct missing in Standard American English: "He be taking her to the Friday dance," doesn't mean the same thing as "He *is* taking her to the Friday dance," it means that "He takes her to the Friday dance every week." Oddly enough, SAE while lacking a present tense habitual mood has a *past tense* habitual mood: "He used to take her to the Friday dance."
Their are two reasons to write in standard or prestige dialect. The first is to demonstrate your education, as in a job application cover letter. The second is that sometimes the standard usage is more clear.Consider, "Mary loved Ted more than me." This sets of a lot of muddle headed argument about whether "than" is a preposition and thus takes the objective pronoun ("me"), or a conjunction and thus requires a subject pronoun ("... than I", is short for "... than I do."). In the dictionary "than" is classified as both a conjunction and a preposition -- along with many other words. The problem with this sentence is ambiguity. It's not clear whether Mary loves Ted more than she loves *me*, or whether Mary loves Ted more than *I* love Ted. In the latter case I should write, "Mary loves Ted more than I."
There's no good solution for saying "Mary loves Ted more than she loves me," in a more compact form, because informal speech uses "me" both ways. You have to figure it out from context. I tend to think that "Mary loves Ted more than me," compares her feelings for Ted and for me, but few people would parse the sentence "Mary drinks more Diet Coke than me," the same way. Humans use grammar plus context to understand what's being said.
So, write so that your meaning is as precise as possible without sounding strange. Most often applying the rules of standard grammar will result in more precise writing, although there are times where you'll prefer commonplace grammar that's less precise. Writing fictional dialog is one example. It's more important to make people sound spontaneous than to make them sound correct.
Also be aware that grammatical rules are subject to misapplication. For example the rules say you can't end a sentence with a preposition, and "over" is a preposition, but the sentence "When I read the promotion list I discovered that I'd been passed over," is perfectly grammatical. The reason is that "over" doesn't function as a preposition, it's part of the phrasal verb "passed over". Nonetheless, many misguided grammar prigs would correct that sentence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.