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<<An editor's job is to correct other people's work. To me, that presupposes
a sophisticated understanding of grammar.>>
The parallel to that statement: "A technical writer's job is to write
intelligibly about some product. To me, that presupposes a sophisticated
understanding of rhetoric and style." In fact, both are normative
statements: it should be that way, but it ain't necessarily so--witness some
of the questions on techwr-l, most recently the one about appeasing the
contractor/consultant.
<<Someone who goes by a set of rules - including some that are arbitrary and
incomplete - is not operating at a level that inspires much trust in their
competence.>>
Agreed, yet isn't that a fact of life in any profession? I even once met a
doctor who refused to believe in anaphylactic shock in response to
penicillin--and unlike writers and editors, doctors are supposed to be
regularly recertified to confirm their competence. I think this plus
understanding the distinction between rules and styles is the techwr-l tie
in, since Eric is going to jump on us pretty soon if all we do is engage in
sophistry about what constitutes grammar.
<<Acceptable punctuation and structure can vary considerably according to
your purpose and your audience, and yet still be accepted. To give a simple
example, a contraction is perfectly acceptable in an informal circumstance,
while, in formal circumstances it would be generally considered improper.>>
Ah, but that's a matter for style, not grammar; grammar tells you the
acceptable uses of punctuation and suchlike, and style tells you which of
the acceptable uses you choose to actually use. The problem here likely lies
in how all-encompassing you consider grammar to be; much of what many
writers consider to be grammar (e.g., the prohibition against split
infinitives) is in fact a matter of style, and does not appear in any
competent grammar textbook. Even when you use punctuation and abbreviations
judiciously to achieve a certain stylistic effect, you're still following
specific rules of grammar. You can't arbitrarily redefine verb accord and
still call the result grammatical; you can certainly muck around with verbs
("it ain't so") and remain comprehensible, but even in the most informal
writing, that's not a grammatical statement. In the case of punctuation,
you'd still use commas to indicate parenthetical clauses whether you're
writing formally or informally; similarly, you form possessive contractions
using apostrophe-s whether you're writing formally or informally. Whether to
use parenthetical clauses or contractions of this sort is a matter of style,
not grammar, but once you choose to use them, you're still bound by the
rules of grammar. In effect, style is nothing more than applied grammar.
<<If you ignore such contexts, then you're forgetting that the purpose of
grammar is to aid communication.>>
Which is why _grammatical_ rules are invariant.
<<You can easily construct sentences that are correct by the strictest rules
of grammar, but clumsy and ill-formed: Winston Churchill's "That is an
imposition up with which I will not put (his - or someone's- reply to the
statement that a sentence shouldn't end in a preposition) being a deliberate
example of this fact.>>
Which is why _style_ rules aren't invariant.
<<It's not that the rules are unimportant - it's that knowing how to apply
them is equally as important. And that's what I meant when I said grammar
was partly a matter of circumstance.>>
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