The relevance of grammar

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Friday 08 August 2003 3:10 pm, Kris Bodenheimer wrote:

> There is a fundamental nature to email that many of us grew up on.  That
> is, grammar, in an email, to a technical list, is truly meaningless.

Okay, maybe the kind of minor transgressions that have been used as examples 
aren't significant, but they're symptoms of a problem.

Illiterate geeks are incompetent geeks, not just geeks who can't be bothered 
to care.  As has been repeatedly pointed out, if you can't follow the rules 
of english to create a proper sentence, how can you expect people to think 
that you can follow the rules of a more obscure technical language to create 
proper code?

Sure, your compiler will catch the obvious stuff - but I strongly suspect that 
eloquence in writing and elegance in coding are not unrelated.

It's not meaningless.  There have been posts to this list that were so badly 
written none of us had a clue what the writer was asking about.  Some of us 
took a shot in the dark, some of us asked for clarification, and the replies 
were as unrelated as they were uncomprehensible.  I believe he's given up and 
stopped posting, as most of us gave up and stopped replying.

English is the currency.  Without it, you can't make the transactions, you 
can't interact, even if you're only interfacing with the machine.

Yeah, it's a petty obsessive who trips over a badly constructed phrase and 
can't look past it to an obvious intent.  At the same time, it's not 
reasonable for us to be expected to decipher sloppy crayon-scrawl if you want 
us to answer your question.

The origin of this thread was that you should have good, clean cover letters 
and resumes.  If you don't practice here, how can you be expected to know how 
to create them?

How about a completely different example:  Have any of you ever had an 
instructor who's English was barely comprehensible?  One who essentially 
relied on the chalkboard and textbook to teach the course, because the 
majority of his students had no idea what he was on about in his lectures?  
Does _his_ grammer matter?