Comments on: Good Grammar is Credibility

By: Carol

Carol — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 01:16:44 +0000

What really Drives Me Crazy is using Random Capital Letters and way too many exclamation marks just to make a Point! As in, “this Meeting is Mandatory!!!”

By: kelso

kelso — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:57:15 +0000

Well put, Barbara. The art of Critical Thinking (dare I say Logic) should be a mandatory course in every high school. Better, the Trivium should be mandatory: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. We are made in the image of God. If we do not exercise our intellectual faculty we dishonor the Logos who made us.

By: Barbara Jensen

Barbara Jensen — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 13:52:22 +0000

Precision in use of language indicates precision in thinking. Sloppy use of words–where words can mean anything that you want them to mean–indicates very poor thinking. This makes real thoughts and sharing of ideas almost impossible to communicate. When one sees a program such as ‘The View’ passing as conversation and sharing of ideas, one sees how far our culture has distanced itself from thinking. The falling away of good grammar in this present age is part of the cultural downfall of real thinking. The general public does not know how to communicate because it no longer knows how to think.

By: Mike Melendez

Mike Melendez — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 12:56:40 +0000

David, Did you have to drive Beth crazy?

By: Max

Max — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 02:56:31 +0000

Am I the only person who is more than just a little annoyed at the gratuitous and superfluous use of “as well”? Several times already I have heard media people utter something like the following: “The president is also going to speak in Michigan as well.”

By: Beth

Beth — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 01:06:58 +0000

Touche’, David!

By: David Nickol

David Nickol — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:39:44 +0000

I saw only a couple of minutes of Romney’s acceptance speech, but I happened to hear him say, “But if you ask Ann and I . . . . ”

I had of course been planning to vote for him, but now I just can’t.

By: Beth

Beth — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:50:19 +0000

Good luck with finding people who use good grammar. Even supposedly educated people cannot get their subjective and objective pronouns right. If I hear one more person say “just between you and I”, I’ll go crazy. Lay and lie are other words that people use incorrectly. I don’t think grammar is taught much any more.

By: David Nickol

David Nickol — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:39:54 +0000

I would put it the other way around. Bad grammar detracts from credibility. Here on First Things, good grammar is the norm. Almost all of the people I most disagree with (contributors and commenters) write extremely well, as do almost all of the people I am most likely to agree with. To steal a line: If only some people here could think as clearly as they write!

By: pentamom

pentamom — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:57:08 +0000

This is true within certain limits. I cringe when I see people try to undermine the credibility of people who fail on fine distinctions or very technical, non-clarity based rules such as the split infinitive nonsense. But I don’t think that sort of nit-picking is what this article has in mind. I think it’s aimed more at the basics — subject-verb agreement, the difference between adjectives and adverbs, avoiding very simple mistakes like they’re, their, or your, you’re, coherence across clauses, and so forth. And on that point, I agree — if you haven’t managed the fairly low level of attention to detail necessary in order to write grammatically at the basic level, after twelve years of free education that is supposed to emphasize those skills above almost all others, your reliability in other areas is at least called into question.