More better grammer and speeling please.

[Jdsk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Denni ... on_Denning

He wrote the most direct English that I've ever read. He could maintain it for complex legal arguments. Many students revere him.

Some examples selected by Henry Brooke:
https://sirhenrybrooke.me/2017/05/04/lo ... -examples/

Jonathan

[Paulatic]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Denni ... on_Denning

He wrote the most direct English that I've ever read. He could maintain it for complex legal arguments. Many students revere him.

Some examples selected by Henry Brooke:
https://sirhenrybrooke.me/2017/05/04/lo ... -examples/

Jonathan

Seems like a fair member biggest surprise is he wasn’t born in Yorkshire
Perhaps relevant to Ms Rayner he said

I avoid long sentences like the plague because they lead to obscurity.

[661-Pete]

I avoid long sentences like the plague because they lead to obscurity.

Curious observation - is it a quote from Denning? But he was a judge, was he perhaps alluding to prison sentences....?

All right: probably not.

To my mind a sentence is like the proverbial piece of string - it can be any length. But I admit that the one my English master at school told us to study - something out of Macaulay I think it was, spanning several pages - was utterly unfathomable. If Macaulay had still been alive, I would have willingly 'thrown him in the moat'.

English wasn't my favourite subject!

But I am careful over grammar and spelling. To me, good sentence construction is more important than length, or lack of it.

[drossall]

I'm sorry but the conveyance of ideas far outweigh the etiquette of "good" grammar. Obviously these OP won't agree with that.

There can be value in following rules that make distinctions, even they don't seem entirely necessary. It's really easy to think that you are being explicit, and still have the other party take away an idea somewhat different from what you intended.

For example, "Today in town, I met Harry and John's mother." Now, if the person hearing you knows that Harry and John are brothers, then the only possible interpretation is that you met one person, the mother. If your hearer isn't sure, it could be that Harry was with John's mother and you met both of them. You may make the wrong assumption about what your hearer knows.

If everyone stuck to the formal rule that the first case should be "... Harry's and John's mother", all the time, then the few cases where misunderstanding is possible would be avoided.

So for me, the problem is that abandoning grammar reduces the information content of statements. That's consistent with something I read somewhere. I'm not a student of philology or linguistics, but I understand that languages tend to decay over time, as the number of people speaking them expands. In effect, nuances of grammar and speech are only maintainable if the population using the language is limited. That may not be quite the right way to explain it - as I said, it's not my field.

An example of ridiculous grammatical matters. My primary school age child is learning grammatical concepts both my partner and I were never taught at school. Indeed my partner taught English to adults and they never got taught it neither. Some of the grammar our child is learning she even has to jog her memory about. Yet we are both understood both with spoken and written English.

When my kids were at school, 20 years ago, we had the opposite problem. Once they started to learn foreign languages, they had no tools with which to understand how language works, because they had been taught no formal English grammar. This made it impossible to discuss with them their questions and problems with other tongues. In my understanding, one's first language is learnt by hearing and speaking. However, especially where immersion learning is not practicable, second languages are quicker with some structure of declensions, moods, tenses and the like.

[Jdsk]

I'm not a student of philology or linguistics, but I understand that languages tend to decay over time, as the number of people speaking them expands. In effect, nuances of grammar and speech are only maintainable if the population using the language is limited. That may not be quite the right way to explain it - as I said, it's not my field.

Languages both "decay" and grow at the same time. The best description of this for the nonprofessional that I've ever come across is Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language".
https://newlearningonline.com/literacie ... f-language

Highly Recommended.

Jonathan

[Mick F]

Not long after marrying and moving away, Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.
Friend hadn't got a clue about punctuation of any sort.

A newsy letter of a couple of pages or more would contain no capital letters, no punctuation and no full stops, and not even paragraphs breaks.

Hard work to read.

[thirdcrank]

Not long after marrying and moving away, Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.
Friend hadn't got a clue about punctuation of any sort.

A newsy letter of a couple of pages or more would contain no capital letters, no punctuation and no full stops, and not even paragraphs breaks.

Hard work to read.

Going online to criticise other people's grammar is risky. Reflect on that first sentence.

[Mike Sales]

A newsy letter of a couple of pages or more would contain no capital letters, no punctuation and no full stops, and not even paragraphs breaks.

Hard work to read.

That is, of course, why we should use consistent grammar and spelling: it makes it easier for the reader to understand us.
I do not mean to claim that I always get these things right!

[Jdsk]

Going online to criticise other people's grammar is risky.

It is.

I recommend that the forum adopts a scheme of donations to charity based on Skitt's Law...

... of course that only applies when you're criticising others.

Jonathan

[Mick F]

Not long after marrying and moving away, Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.

Going online to criticise other people's grammar is risky. Reflect on that first sentence.

Tell me, what's wrong with the first sentence?
Ambiguity?
It doesn't matter.

We married and moved away, and so did they, and and Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.

[Jdsk]

Not long after marrying and moving away, Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.

Going online to criticise other people's grammar is risky. Reflect on that first sentence.

Tell me, what's wrong with the first sentence?
Ambiguity?

It's ambiguous. Had Mrs Mick F and her friend married each other or someone else?

(That didn't say it's "wrong".)

Jonathan

[Oldjohnw]

Great example of grammar and syntax.

In this case you could guess the meaning but it isn’t always so obvious.

[thirdcrank]

Not long after marrying and moving away, Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.

Going online to criticise other people's grammar is risky. Reflect on that first sentence.

Tell me, what's wrong with the first sentence?
Ambiguity?
It doesn't matter.

We married and moved away, and so did they, and and Mrs Mick F and her friend used to write to each other.

I should have written "Reflect on that first sentence in the context of the rest of your post."

I fancy that had you mentioned Mrs Mick F's friend's poor literacy directly to that friend, then had she remained a friend her reply might have been that you, or at least Ms Mick F, knew what she meant (in lower case without punctuation, of course.) IMO, one of the reasons for the success of English as a widely-spoken language is that it's easy to convey what you mean, especially with good will on the part of the reader or listener. Now, I knew exactly what you meant because of my existing knowledge and in other circumstances I'd not have given it a second thought, but you do seem to set yourself up as an authority on English grammar.

Incidentally, the ambiguity inherent in depending on others understanding what you mean is where our learned friends make a lot of their daily bread, both in exploring the ambiguity of what's already been written or avoiding it when penning something new. In general, in the latter circumstances, they often avoid punctuation altogether: like Mrs Mick F's friend.

(For anybody who spots errors in my efforts, I don't claim to be an authority on English grammar.)

[kylecycler]

A newsy letter of a couple of pages or more would contain no capital letters, no punctuation and no full stops, and not even paragraphs breaks.

Hard work to read.

youthinkthatsbadiiusedtogettextsfromsomeonewhoneverevenusedspacesitsurewaswashardworktoreadthembutquitegoodfun

[drossall]

Languages both "decay" and grow at the same time. The best description of this for the nonprofessional that I've ever come across is Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language".

Thank you. I read the link you gave, but I think you mainly meant the book, which I had not come across before but easily found by a Web search. So I've just added it to my Kobo library I'm currently reading three or four books in parallel, but I'm sure I can handle one more

I came across the idea in connection with the way that classical Greek was still being looked back to, and used for formal writing, four hundred years later, when koine or common Greek had evolved for day-to-day use, as the language had spread around the Mediterranean. Although I don't imagine that exactly the same version of koine Greek was in use everywhere!