Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
English-speakers are not taught much grammar or punctuation in school because the language is written the way it is spoken, and it's a pretty simple language. There are few conjugations and no genders or cases.
Compare this with a language like French where to say one is able to write it well is a badge of academia.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I can still diagram a sentence with the best of them.
English pronouns have cases.
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I can assure you of one thing, Rizla--
correct fiction and non-fiction writing
is most certainly NOT written the way that English is spoken, and proof of that is no further away than the nearest digital Indy eBookstore. In fact, this entire thread has been a display of that very aspect of the language. The way Gregg wants to write it is the way someone might say it, if they were musing aloud, to themselves, or thinking it. However, reading it that way is at best clunky. And nobody would say the sentence that way, certainly not in the company of someone else within earshot.
The whole POINT of learning to write dialogue properly is to avoid this very issue. If we wrote dialogue the way people speak (replete with the uhrs, ums, and y'knows), nobody would read that crap.
You're correct in that we don't have gender issues (in the mother tongue, that is); but the English language is tricky in many other aspects (homonyms, for example, which trip up so many non-native speakers). There are many things that are abused--the ubiquitous over-done comma, for example. The Oxford comma. The Serial comma. AP Style list. People who think that semi-colons, emdashes and ellipses are all interchangeable, or worse, people who think that an emdash indicates a trailing off in speech, whereas the ellipses means to break off abruptly (the topic of a 10-page thread at the KDP, believe it or not); I could go on for ages.
@issybird: hmmmm...not sure if I still could diagram a sentence. A simple one, yes. Very complex...I'd have to give it a go. More power, you!
Hitch