[Sussex] Grammar (was Gnupg and it's use)

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 12:52 +0000, Al Girling wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 09:42:33AM GMT, Simon Huggins wrote:
> > in a mail entitled Subject: Re: [Sussex] Gnupg and it's use
> >                                                    ^^^^
> 
> Simon, I must thank you for bringing to my attention my misuse of the
> apostrophe within it's.  The subject field should indeed have read
> 'Gnupg and its use'.  I promise I shall soundly thrash myself with a
> damp copy of a Microsoft NT manual while chanting, 'I must endeavour to
> improve my English grammar', this evening.
> 

Al,

I was most amused to read your note. As hopefully the archives will
attest, I cannot recall ever having posted a "grammar flame" on the
list.

Speaking as a part-time programmer, though, I can understand the
annoyance that poor grammar causes. When a key skill in the day job is
the ability to spot and correct mistakes in formal syntax, it can be
very hard to turn that mental subsystem off when reading human-readable
(sic) text.

When it comes to human-readable stuff, however, my view is that the
ability to communicate effectively is far more important than the need
to communicate with perfect syntax. An extreme example of this might be,
of all people, John Prescott. Whenever you see his quotes written down,
then they come over as bizarre and unstructured. Whenever you seem him
talking to camera, however, you are left in no doubt as to what he
meant, nor that he is passionate about his committed beliefs. As such, I
admire his communication skills rather than berate them (much as I
disagree with his politics.)

The other filter I use is "how much does person X contribute to the
list". For example, I would forgive Steve Dobson almost unlimited abuse
of the apostrophe, the semi-colon, and even the Oxford comma, because of
his vast technical knowledge, and his willingness to help people by
sharing that knowledge. (In Steve's case, the matter seldom arises in
any case - his use of language is well above the "easy to parse"
threshold :-) )

Regards,

Mark