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#196536 01/25/11 12:26 AM
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http://m.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c60799c-24e2-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html
Interesting article. Though I am still for Strunk and White, despite the fact that the line about "nutritious writing" made a lot of sense.

Avy #196541 01/25/11 02:28 AM
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Interesting food for thought! wink

What is the knock-on effect?

Jackie #196554 01/25/11 07:52 AM
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Indirect or secondary effect? possibly unforeseen?

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Geoff Kloske........ says, “More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.”

I'm guilty.

Candy #196566 01/25/11 12:05 PM
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Knock on effect is like the dominoe effect...you do one thing, that thing leads to another, which leads to another and so on...


----The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false----
Avy #196573 01/25/11 02:27 PM
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Strunk and White

The problem with The Elements of Style is that people who worship it have turned it into the inviolable laws of writing. Geoff Pullum and others over at the Language Log blog (link) has written many entries on Strunk and White, and his conclusion is that it does more harm than good. My favorite bit of statistics is that White in his own writings totally ignores the that-which restrictive non-restrictive clause rule. Then there are the death to adjectives people one mets online and in style guides. They have misinterpreted the whole write concisely style suggestion as some kind of adjectival-adverbial zero-tolerance exceptionless law. This probably strikes a sympathetic chord with the need many have of finding a single word for some thing rather than using a phrase. And finally we have blaming it the Internet, which in the '50s was blame it on TV, and before that who knows what. The language is never in a state of perfection, for it is always in a state of fall and disintegration. The Cassandras who think this way always hearken back to the halcyon days when grammar was beaten into students with a wooden ruler and small style guides masquerading as books of grammar.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
zmjezhd #196581 01/25/11 04:26 PM
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Wow, do I remember the days when Grammar was beaten into
my head: good old Sister Mary Georgia.


----please, draw me a sheep----
zmjezhd #196630 01/26/11 01:06 AM
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I agree. It comes back to "too much of anything good is bad".

Avy #196653 01/26/11 11:30 AM
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In junior high I finally managed to convince my English teacher that I understood grammar just fine, it was the rules for diagramming sentences that had me baffled. He stopped making me do it.

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Memory of those horrid grammar text books in elementary
school. And then being assigned 3 pages of work for home.
Took well over an hour of "home" time. As a Freshman sitting
at my desk in English class, paying little attention, the
prof mentioned looking at his grade book for a moment, and
he would announce the top "scholar" in the class. And it was
me. I almost burst milk thru my nose had I been drinking milk. From that time I've enjoyed it somewhat, but never to
the extent that it made all those hours worthwhile. I mean
who wants to be top in the class in English at age 15?

Last edited by LukeJavan8; 01/26/11 03:56 PM.

----please, draw me a sheep----
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