And she was like, ummm, and I was just like, you know, umm, no way, really, like, yeah, and when she was like that, I was just like..umm....
Another cry for meaningful and plain language. This time, somehow surprisingly, coming out of Harvard Business Review.
Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.
How internet impacts the evolution of punctuation.
No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn't say whether terrorists did it.)
Harsh critique of Strunk and White.
The myth that none takes only singular agreement on the verb lives on despite many refutations. Serious handbooks of grammar and style don't represent it as ungrammatical. (Of course, the idiots Strunk and White do in their clueless book The Elements of Style; but they get almost everything wrong.)
Highlights of few quirks of English language mixed strong opinion on Strunk and White.
The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.
A talk on English language by the author of On Writing Well.
