Re: grammar & workplace writing

["Jeanne H. Simpson" <csjhs@ux1.cts.eiu.edu>]

Gail

I am not even sure we can generalize much about academic writing as
opposed to corporate writing.  I've encountered on a little in other
disciplines that much resembles the literary essay.  And even Shakespeare
commented (wasn't it he?) that brevity is the soul of wit.

With regard to grammar....
Generally, I would not wear a black evening gown into an operating
theatre. Nor would I wear greasy mechanics' overalls to tea with the
Queen.  Conventions of grammar and punctuation are like conventions of
dress--suitable according to the occasion.  Somehow, they've been
translated into rules.  The Queen might not like it a lot if I showed up
in the greasy overalls, but if she knew that was all I had to wear, her
attitude might change.  And the point is to have tea together, not to make
judgements about who is wearing what (otherwise, I might say something
about those hats....)  So it is also with  the
point of writing: to transmit my idea in such a way that you understand it
the way I wanted it understood.  Ultimately, all conventions are supposed
to support that goal.  It is our belief that the conventions are rules,
owned by someone, and our belief that someone (us? oh, dear...) is in
charge of enforcing them that is the problem.   

I think that the conventions of writing which have evolved around e-mail,
in which some markings are not available--italics, underscore--and in
which the correspondents do not have internal images of the persons they
are talking to, speak to the matter of how language conventions actually
develop.  People invent them to address a need.  And when the need
vanishes, so does the convention.  Language is a gloriously democratic
thing, and that is why people try so hard to control it.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu