by Heineken » Fri 14 Jul 2006, 13:47:27
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dukat_Reloaded', 'T')o the people who are arguing in this thread....to me propper grammer is nice but as long as the communication is expressed coherently using related words, the grammer is very very secondary. The way you people are arguing, it sounds like you've learn't skills watching reruns of fraiser, pretending to talk "witty" rather than having built real English skills though obtaining PHD's and teaching as you have claimed.
Skill in grammar (and all the other basic mechanics of writing) goes hand-in-hand with coherent communication, Dukat. It's folly to assert that any of the fundamentals of good writing don't matter to good written communication.
It's convenient to disparage good writing skills when one hasn't mastered them. I see this phenomenon all the time. Analogous would be someone who got F's in math saying math sucks and isn't really necessary or useful, or that it doesn't matter if you get the right answer or not. Granted, language is somewhat more forgiving than math.
To me the decline in writing skills parallels the failure of our educational systems and indeed the drunken reeling of our civilization. The same thing happened during the later years of the Roman Empire, when the bastardization of Latin was bemoaned by the scholars of the time.