Grammar Gripes and Other Psycholinguistic Squawkings

I typically prefer egalitarian sex play. The whole female domination thing is kinda ridiculous given most of the women I've slept with can barely do ten pushups. I can't get into that kinda silly fantasy.

"Whip me, beat me, I need love... slap with your leather glove." Pfft! Cracker, please. Only time I've been turned on by an aggressive woman has been in a martial arts setting.

You mean my pants?

HEY-OH!

...

Punctuation in text messages is the reason why I'm with my current girlfriend.

I loathe getting the brick of shorthand from my younger friends that I'm supposed to decipher on the go.

 

"mouth hole"
Why?
Mouth was fine, pie hole a little colourful but mouth hole? No imagination.

 

Journalists are guilty.

 

Some news stories are written under a deadline, waiting as long as possible for additional news is common.
Breaking news is reported ASAP; no time for proofreading by the reporter.
Some reporters are good news hounds, but not such good writers.
None of the above excuses sloppy writing when there is time to proofread and rewrite.

 

I've been away from 'writing for a grade' for several decades, and my adherence to grammar rules has become very lax. It isn't helped by the amount of fiction that I read. I find that many novelist write to make the story entertaining, not to follow (sometimes archaic) grammar rules. And for the most part I'm fine with it.

A mini-rant regarding academic writing:
While much of it might be grammatically correct, much of it also suffers from run on sentences, run on paragraphs, rigidity (no effort to mix short, medium & long sentences to break up the monotony), etc.

 

I have some experience with abstracting which covers a wide variety of fields (academics, law, medical, scientific, etc.).

Many times the original article, paper, or document is dry & boring. The bad news is that 'stiff' writing can eventually rub off on the people who write abstracts (good writers start imitating the writing style that they're constantly subjected to, which might also partially explain bad academic writing). The good news is it's better to read a boring abstract than have to read the complete boring document (provided the abstract accurately captures the useful information in the document).

To be fair, many abstracts are written 'production' environments. The writer reads the document as quickly as possible, identifies the essential information (not as easy as it sounds), hammers out the abstract as quickly as possible (no time to give much, if any, thought to style), and repeats the process many times during the day. Personal note--I was good at the quick reading reading & comprehension, but sucked at typing (still do) and my brain moves faster than my fingers (way too many typos when I write in a hurry).
--- merged: May 30, 2014 at 11:22 AM ---
I have some experience with abstracting which covers a wide variety of fields (academics, law, medical, scientific, etc.).

Many times the original article, paper, or document is dry & boring. The bad news is that 'stiff' writing can eventually rub off on the people who write abstracts (good writers start imitating the writing style that they're constantly subjected to, which might also partially explain bad academic writing). The good news is it's better to read a boring abstract than have to read the complete boring document (provided the abstract accurately captures the useful information in the document).

To be fair, many abstracts are written 'production' environments. The writer reads the document as quickly as possible, identifies the essential information (not as easy as it sounds), hammers out the abstract as quickly as possible (no time to give much, if any, thought to style), and repeats the process many times during the day. Personal note--I was good at the quick reading reading & comprehension, but sucked at typing (still do) and my brain moves faster than my fingers (way too many typos when I write in a hurry).

 

My grandmother and grandfather were both published scientists.
They said the most difficult part of their job, besides getting funding, was having to read their colleagues papers.
Grandpa insisted that every scientist should have to take at least a couple of years of advanced Composition and Lit.
He said the papers written by scientists who had ESL were often better.

 

In most of my engineering lab courses, lab reports were sent to the English department and received a second grade with copious red ink and comments.

We were told "It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't express them clearly".

 

When I started at the UH, they had recently started requiring all students to take core requirements, which included 12 hours of English. I was told by several people, some in administration, that one of the main reasons was employers complained that the engineers graduating from UH couldn't write a basic paper.

EDIT--How the heck did I merge my own post?

 

I got a work-related email from a coworker the other day that contained a few text-speak abbreviations. I understood exactly what she was saying, it didn't bother me one bit, and I shed not a single tear for the future of written language.