[Magdalen] "Formal Speech"

[Scott Knitter]

A lot of this depends on what genre of communication one is doing, of
course. There are "house styles" for various publications that do
employ various selections of rules that are no longer universally
applicable: some may have a conservative style that would use "whom"
(which I think is still a rule, if one is writing something formal
like a dissertation or a documentary piece in The New Yorker).

I'm on the editorial board at Hewlett-Packard; our main job is to
update the HP Writing Style Guide every summer. We argue about things
like our standing rule against using "over" when you really mean "more
than." The chairman doesn't even care about this rule anymore, but
it's been kept mainly to facilitate translation (aka "localization");
more precise English helps translators translate more quickly and
correctly.

Other things that have often been thought illegal, like split
infinitives, aren't forbidden in our style guide, but I do fix them if
they sound bad and the fixed version would sound better. It's easy
enough to change "The system helps users to more quickly create
documents" to "The system helps users to create documents more
quickly."

More and more people are making case errors lately, like "Obama paid a
visit to we who worked on his campaign," and that just sounds nuts to
me. Case is much simpler in English than in many other languages, and
that's one rule, or set of rules, worth keeping. Mainly I think that
error comes from misjudging which part of the sentence is the main one
and which is the relative clause. Diagramming still helps!

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Ann Markle <ann.markle at aya.yale.edu> wrote:
> It must be that I'm in a different universe.  There are grammatical rules,
> yes.  But it has been acceptable to end sentences with prepositions for
> DECADES.  Where have some been during those decades?  Evidently not reading
> nor writing, nor communicating with 20th and 21st Century grammarians.
> Nobody uses "whom" anymore.  That's not about sloppiness, it's about
> evolution (slower, but inevitable).  I am not an English class dropout, but
> someone who keeps up on the (current, late 20th Century) formal rules of
> usage.  Stay current, or accept one's status as a dinosaur!  Sorry, and no
> disrespect meant to my (not so very, but also not very current) elders!




-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA