Quote:
Originally Posted by ScalyFreak
You are, all of you, forgetting something very important about grammar: That it is about a lot more than the nitpicky details. Grammar is what makes words make sense once they have been made into sentences. It dictates what comes first, middle, and last, in a sentence. It tells us how many objects a subjects refers to. It is how you know whether the action I'm telling you about happens now, happened in the past, or will happen in the future.
In the example that came up earlier ("Let's eat, grandpa" and "let's eat grandpa") we know that those two sentences have a different meaning only because we know the grammatical rules that tell us that.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's impossible to get your message across if you're not fluent in the grammatical rules of the language you have chosen to write in.
Or, as my old English teacher used to say, grammar is the difference between knowing your s---, and knowing you're s---. 
No, but that is only one sentence out of many. If the person saying "I like coffee. I don't like cake." normally speaks in long flowering sentences akin to a Jane Austen novel, then the sudden change in sentence structure can be used by the writer to subtly accentuate what they are trying to say in that particular paragraph. The person may be very tired, or may be upset at something.
The ability to use the rules of grammar to accentuate and emphasize, as well as ensure that the right message goes through, makes a good writer a better writer. |
And that's the same point I was trying to make in my original post about the Dr. and Lawyer. The proper use of grammar ensures that the proper context is understood. Without that basis they wouldn't be able to do their jobs properly. Would you trust a surgeon who hadn't been able to read his text books but just operated on his own common sense and what he'd picked up in the dissection labs? Same goes for the Lawyer. Who would trust a lawyer who was unable to look up case law much less articulate what they were trying to achieve in their motion before the Judge? Good grammar isn't just needed in order to read for pleasure but to read for accurate information as well. If you're trading IM's the two people who are doing the texting understand the context of the messages because they know each other personally. That isn't the case with an author and his readers most of the time. The reader depends on the author making him/herself clear in their writing so they can understand what is going on.