Quote: "Comet, I enjoy your presence as a forum member, but your outspoken and potentially offensive behavior on minor matters like this disappoints me."
Oh come on, this kind of thing is fantastic. The best way to get a response on the internet is to insult people. As you can see it's working
Besides, this discussion is more than name calling. I have my reasons for saying the things I've said and I am trying to explain them.
@Seppuku Arts
Quote: "I made reference to Lynne Truss and her army of sticklers in a previous post, in her book she attacked a green grocer for his misuse of the apostrophe"
Nice reference, well played.
In response to the whole dialect and language history discussion and this quote:
Quote: "But I am sure there is some level of correlation between intelligence and language, but not a straight line, probably a very wiggly one, however, as I am sure you are too a man of science, correlation does not necessarily mean causation."
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it's too relevant to my original objection to these blatantly false grammatical errors. And I'm not even complaining about the more complicated errors, what I'm complaining about is
basic elementary school grammar. I don't care if you can't spell onomatopoeia correctly, but failing at correctly using "your" or "you're" is like failing at walking. It's unacceptable and it blows my mind how common these mistakes are. The line gets squiggly when the grammatical errors are more advanced. I see a very clear line when a person makes basic errors.
(Please read the very last response I wrote to DJD64 at the end of this post.)
Quote: "But I am glad that you mentioned engineers, my job involves working with engineers and I read engineer reports on an almost daily basis, and they're that often well written, but still tell us what we need to know. Some of them are fine, others are full of grammatical errors. Grammar isn't a pre-requisite for being a good engineer. I also work with our technical departments and even senior engineers, not all of them have a good grasp on using "proper" English. "
If a person of higher education makes basic grammatical mistakes, something is very wrong with either that person or their education. I don't know much about the reports you read and where they come from, but the papers we write at university and the reports we write for our projects are nearly free of grammatical errors. The same is true for the reports I've read from the R&D department I work at.
How would you feel as a reader if the majority of research papers were full of elementary school level grammatical mistakes? It's downright unprofessional, not to mention it would impact the institute and the people who wrote it negatively.
If anyone is to be judged harshly on their grammar, it should be those with a higher education, because those people are the ones who should know better. That is why I mentioned engineers or architects.
Quote: "The "should of" versus "should have" to me doesn't not scream "illiteracy"."
Given that it is blatantly false, it sure does highlight a certain lack of literacy. Perhaps this is the fault of the education system (or lack thereof) this person went through, or perhaps this is also the fault of the person themselves. Either way, such mistakes really shouldn't be made, and if someone makes them, I will regard it negatively. As previously mentioned, there are obviously other qualities a person can have to redeem themselves in my eyes.
And finally, in regard to native speakers vs non-native speakers: I think there can be no exceptions with native speakers. If a non-native speaker is learning the language, then I will cut them some slack, but it also depends on how long they've been using the language, i.e. the longer they've been writing English the higher I will hold my grammatical expectations.
@Dark Java Dude 64
Quote: "I internally agree with this statement (the second sentence in particular), but it's not something I would ever say to someone's face, because I realize this sort of expectation is irrational. Why? See, "lazy and stupid" and "you should be ashamed of yourself" are detrimental descriptions to give to a person, and incredibly strongly so. When you tie failing at basic rules with those descriptions, you establish an expectation, just as strong as those descriptions, that the person be able to apply the basic rules. Is failure to follow the basic rules a bad thing? I think yes, but to not nearly as great of a degree as telling a person to eliminate all self esteem."
The response to such statements as "you should be ashamed of yourself" is entirely subjective. Some will regard it as motivation to better themselves. Others will take it very personally, get offended, and probably cry. I personally think it's important to be upfront about things, so yes, I am someone who will say these things to your face because I usually don't care for political correctness. Political correctness just gets in the way of everything.
Quote: "why are you so hell bent on this mistake in particular?"
This might sound incredibly pretentious, but bear with me, because this whole discussion leads into a bigger issue.
I'm hell-bent on all basic elementary school level grammatical mistakes because it's degrading. Not just to ourselves, but to all humans and to everything we represent. We are a fairly advanced species focused on improving ourselves. We improve ourselves by creating standards, teaching those standards to everyone, and slowly raising those standards over time. When a lot of people start failing at fulfilling basic human functions, it means the standard has been lowered and we as a species have taken a step backwards. Something somewhere has gone wrong.
If your attitude towards these basic mistakes is:
"Meh, I don't really care because I can get the point across anyway at the expense of the reader having to do some more legwork to interpret my mess" then
you are part of the problem. That's like burning spaghetti and saying:
"Meh, it doesn't really matter because my stomach doesn't care about what the food looks like. I don't want to put in the effort to learn how to cook better." This attitude is destructive and disgraceful. It demonstrates that you have no pride in yourself or in your species, you probably have a very low self-esteem, and worst of all, it's contagious. Other people in your immediate surrounding might pick up on this attitude of yours and start behaving the same way. You are literally the reason why we as a species have taken a step backwards.
If someone then comes up to you and tells you off for not being able to cook spaghetti, and you get all pissed off about it, then perhaps you should reflect on your attitude towards cooking spaghetti rather than making up excuses and denying that you can't fulfil a basic human function.
Leading back into the original issue: The use of "they're/their", "should of", "its/it's" etc. is a basic human function. If you fail at this, you have contributed to lowering the standard on written English.
