Grammatical nous has been found to give students a broader understanding of their own language and a key to learning others. The problem is, teachers aren’t being equipped to teach it.
The survival of the apostrophe is vital to the comprehensibility of our language. If those who have protected it are hanging up their red pens, it’s time we all do our bit.
Grammar pedantry recently contributed to the downfall of World Bank chief economist Paul Romer. But ‘grammonds’ are people to be celebrated not vilified.
A badly written law cost a US company US$10 million, when a judge ruled that a comma missing from a statute meant 75 truck drivers were owed four years of unpaid overtime wages.
For centuries, written communication was tinged with formality and finality. But since the emergence of casual forms like texting, using proper grammar can be fraught with misinterpretation.
Perfect spelling, vocabulary, usage, grammar, punctuation and style do not necessarily correlate perfectly with intelligence and competence, but most people infer that they do. Thus perception is reality.