Re: grammar

[Eric Crump <eric@serv1.ncte.org>]

Dave,

Easiness is relative. There's another factor at work here: Time. I have to
be fairly desperate for advice about a particular construction to justify
spending 5-10 minutes looking for it in a handbook. And in business, time
is *really* critical (we in education are used to a comparatively placid
pace, I'm afraid). 

Besides, to look something up in a handbook, you first have to suspect
there's something wrong. I imagine most people who commit grammatical
atrocities to paper do so because their 'ear' for the language doesn't
pick up on the problem. And they don't have a teacher scouring their work
for errors, nobody to circle the offending words. 

Seems to me that grammatical competence has to be *primarily* intuitive.
That is, few people have the time or inclination to chase down precisely
correct constructions. Correctness has to just *happen* most of the time.
Which is the more reason for helping people become competent in context
and from experience. Nobody develops intuitions by studying handbooks
(IMHO).

--Eric Crump