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A Point About Grammar

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Renegade:
Am I the only one that's annoyed by the seemingly decreasing quality of language in "professional" news, articles and general writing?

I really don't care about people making mistakes in forums or informal writing. A lot of people don't speak English as their first language, and that's not a problem. What I find annoying is "professional" media that simply don't know how to use English properly.

e.g.
* Statistical "outlyers". It's "outliers". Sigh...
* "mass nouns" -- They're called "countable" and "uncountable", not "mass".
* Verb agreement

The list goes on and on.

It's just jarring to get "hit" by grammar, spelling, and word choice mistakes that there really is no excuse for.

It's one thing for it to be "the odd time", but it's not. It's all the time.

Am I just super-anal? Is poor grammar really acceptable in professional media?

timns:
Am I just super-anal? Is poor grammar really acceptable in professional media?
-Renegade (March 01, 2011, 08:43 PM)
--- End quote ---

No, you are not. No, it is not.

housetier:
When language is a tool, poor grammar (=poor or even wrong usage of the tool) for me is a sign of not-so-professionals.

You wouldn't trust a carpenter who only uses wallpaper paste, would you? So when those professionals are employed despite their poor handling of their tools of the trade, it shines a bad light on the employer who might make bad judgment in other areas as well. It is not very trust-inspiring to me.

And I don't think that's being overly anal at all.

Renegade:
Do you find the same thing? That there's an increasing amount of content with poor grammar? It seems to be getting worse and worse. Like I said, the occasional blooper is ok, but all the time?

housetier:
I found the opposite: spam is getting better at language. Especially in Germany, the spam emails are using better vocabulary and almost proper grammar.

They might fool my spam filter but they cannot fool me  8)

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