I like this phrase: “…requires knowing the rules to be effective.” To me, this is a pretty key point. There are rules of grammar and usage, and they are subject to change over time. I don’t sweat too much over people breaking the rules, but I think that they should be aware that they are breaking them.
It seems to me that we are a raising a great many kids into adults without having managed to teach them fluency in their native tongue. And then we have the nerve to complain about their failure to speak it correctly.
Rules of grammar, which describe what is allowed and not allowed in a given language, and
Standards, which describe what is allowed in certain situations such as academic papers, SDMB, etc.
… and that these are not the same thing?
Examples of violations of the rules of English grammar:
“This yes that it is.”
“As is to cardigans, they are in style now not much.”
Examples of violations of standards:
In a college-level paper: “If one was to explore it’s origins, you would find…”
The Great Debates forum of SDMB: “You cg mg b***d”
If we can’t agree to that much, then we’re going to talk at cross-purposes forever.
As an addendum to my previous post, I’d like to also assert that speech/writing can be confusing, vague, or unintelligible regardless of standard, dialect, or register.
I’ve read too many academic articles and doctoral theses that use high-falutin’ language to mask a nearly complete lack of coherent thought.
As Hugh Kenner once said of such a piece of work, “That was a whole lot o’ nothin’.”
Sweet Jesus, yes. I remember most clearly an article on postmodern architecture that I struggled through in college; every sentence was an agony. At one point he mentioned a building “whose putative volume is ocularly quite undecidable.”
I read that about half a dozen times before looking up and shouting to my housemate, “You can’t figure out the goddamn size of the building by looking at it!”
And that’s one of the better examples: at least the thought behind it was coherent. There were other sections I could never decode, and I suspect that was deliberate on the author’s part.
On the other hand, as a writing tutor in college I discovered that a lot of students were using Jack Kerouackian prose to mask their lack of anything to say, and these folks were far harder to work with: their indecipherable twaddle was art, dammit, and they didn’t need no Agent of the Man telling them to put a comma here and remove a clause there. There was one fellow whom I forbid from using metaphor until he could figure out how to put the subject of a sentence near the front of the sentence. He’d write things like, “It was floating beyond the depraved river that entering into my ears the harmonious vibrations of the spotted thitzgrackle, so sweetly.” Only worse.