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I've worked in magazines as a writer and sub editor since the 1980s. Grammar, spelling and usage are my job. But it doesn't have to be boring!
I once met a chap at a party who mentioned someone had written a history of his firm. "But it was terribly badly written!" "Oh dear, in what way?" I asked. "Well, sometimes she put two spaces after a semi-colon, and sometimes she only put one!"
That's not my idea of "badly written". Bad writing is full of cliches, garbled cliches, misused words, mixed metaphors, long wandering sentences that lead nowhere, parentheses that go on so long that by the time you reach the end you've forgotten the beginning of the sentence, and much, much more.
Journalist Simon Heffer has just (September 2010) written about about linguistic correctness. He talks about it in the Daily Telegraph here. He says:
[A publisher] asked me whether I would write a book not just on what constituted correct English, but also why it matters. The former is relatively easy to do, once one has armed oneself with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and some reputable grammar books by way of research materials. The latter, being a matter for debate, is less straightforward.
He's an expert – he's studied the subject at university. He goes on:
We have had a standard dictionary now ever since the OED was completed in 1928, and learned men, many of whom contributed to the OED, wrote grammars a century ago that settled a pattern of language that was logical and free from the danger of ambiguity.
It is to these standards that I hope Strictly English is looking. Our language is to a great extent settled and codified, and to a standard that people recognise and are comfortable with.
All my book does is describe and commend that standard, and help people towards a capable grasp of the English tongue. We shall always need new words to describe new things; but we don’t need the wrong word to describe the right thing, when the right word exists. Also, English grammar shouldn’t be a matter for debate. It has a coherent and logical structure and we should stick to it.
Sorry Simon, sorry readers, I disagree! Friends of mine sing a similar tune, with the recurring words "rules", "standards", "correct" and "logic". And strictly! We pretend to be a nation of free spirits and individuals, but we love rules (and a bit of strictness).
I think understanding grammar is like having a musical ear. Does your sentence mean what you wanted to say? Is it easy to follow? As somebody said (I think it was novelist Iris Murdoch), "Grammar is thinking". I'd rather people used their brains instead of learning a set of rules. Why do I get the impression that Simon Heffer wants to send his children to a free school where they're taught etiquette?
I find the Web's pedantry sector as repellent as the LOLcats sector.
I'll be adding a lot more about grammar, but I'm still working on it.
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