[Magdalen] "Formal Speech"

Jay Weigel jay.weigel at gmail.com
Sun Mar 8 00:59:58 UTC 2015


And I just made one of my own, thanks to this keyboard....obviously.

On Saturday, March 7, 2015, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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>
>> 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
>>
>


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