Spare me from Gloating English Conventionalists

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Cartollomew
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Spare me from Gloating English Conventionalists

Post by Cartollomew » 23 Jan 2012, 17:56

http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... ingle.html

(For the record - I don't leave double spacing between sentences. Never have, never will. Don't care.)

Sigh @ people who get wood from following the conventions of long dead pamphlet writers.

When it comes to grammar in particular, certain conventions fall by the wayside - prepositions and split infinitives come to mind. But the proponents of these conventions are always the loudest pedants - usually in some comment thread where a well-written and insightful post has had its content ignored and cast aside so that the grammar nazi can write a smug, single line correction.
In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.
Yes, we do. And we do it on a keyboard layout that is identical and serves no purpose other than to avoid a brief period of confusion caused by switching layouts (and in fact, other keyboard layouts -I'm looking at you, dvorak - haven't been shown to be significantly more efficient).

Also: Everyone began to type wrong? Really? Pray tell - given there was literally no other way to type than by using those machines, how were they supposed to type?
At best, they were typing incorrectly by today's standards. Which is still a generous statement to make, given that you're supposed to be arguing that very point in the damn article.
Besides, the argument in favor of two spaces isn't any less arbitrary. Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach. Why? Because that's what she's used to. "Primarily, I base the spacing on the way I learned," she wrote me in an e-mail glutted with extra spaces.
Oh Jesus, stop with the hyperbole.
For starters, the opposing argument being "no less arbitrary" than your own isn't doing anything good for your argument.

And secondly, how is her teaching kids to double space sentences based on how she learned any different to someone teaching that one should never split infinitives? Better for her to teach flexibility and coherence - write for the intended audience.

Convention is important for two reasons:

1) It allows formal pieces of writing to be consistent, which aids comparisons and readability on that level.
2) It allows general pieces of writing to be consistent, for the same reason.

Hence, two levels of convention - or fifty, if you really want a salad fork for every bloody salad - to use in every day, and to use for your resume or essay, or formal letter to the queen.

What many of the conventionalists seem to forget is that much of the convention they were taught in Mrs Archer's year 3 English class ("I've been taught that there is no such thing as a Q without U word, and I will not be moved on the issue!") is for formal use. I don't go cheerfully splitting my infinitives in a formal document, but including split infinitives in day to day writing doesn't inhibit others from understanding it (and I would argue can often aid in expressing a tone).

Ending a sentence with a preposition can look odd in formal writing - which is often constipated prose anyway - but is perfectly natural in everyday speech or writing. In fact, restructuring a sentence in everyday text so that the preposition isn't at the end can make the sentence look out of place and do more damage to its readability.

There aren't really any hard or fast rules for this sort of thing beyond spelling and some punctuation. Okay, yes, we've all read the article showing that people can read words with the letters jumbled up as long as the first and last ones are in place - but try reading a longer text like that. Have fun.
Clearly, we to following spelling, grammar and punctuation rules enough that our work is comfortable to read and clear in meaning. What that means from person to person, in each publication and publishing medium and to each audience is largely up to them. If the work you write isn't readable to most of your audience, it's not going to be read.

Double spacing is a minor annoyance at best. It's somewhere down the list, well below someone typing an entire email in Comic Sans or replacing all the instances of a hard "i" with "y". It might be wrong from an aesthetic viewpoint. It might even be wrong according to a bunch of long dead grammarians and convention authors.

But if your major complaint is that its proponents belief in its correctness is just as unfounded as your belief in its incorrectness, then I have a hard time sympathising with your view.
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