[Magdalen] "Formal Speech"

[Jay Weigel]

I don't care too awfully much about split infinitives or ending a sentence
with a preposition, but there are some things that drive me absolutely
nuts. "Between you and I" will just about make me scream out loud, and
"between she and I" makes me want to hit someone or something.
"Irregardless" is merely irritating, but "flaunt" instead of "flout" is a
teeth-grinder. And don't get me started on spelling errors, especially
online ones....obiously proofreading is a lost art.

On Saturday, March 7, 2015, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:;>> 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
>