hidden-metaphor

Manx Genealogy Archive 2

Re: help needed please
In Response To: Re: help needed please ()

I'm not a grammar nazi nor wish to educate those who have no interest - a quote by Louis Menand (in a New Yorker critque of Lynn Truss's book) sums up my interest -

"Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships—the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words."

I wish I could write as clearly as that - certainly the precision of good writing adds much to the enjoyment of reading, but I suspect that view is the sign of someone educated in the school system of a half century ago where an excuse of laziness in front of the nuns in my primary school would have had quite painful consequences! Such precision certainly helps others in deciding what it is you asked, but as you say, kind people are usually willing to struggle to make full sense of some posts, which struggle could be eased given a little more thought on the part of the poster.

Re dyslexia - my own experience in education is that it is much rarer than claimed.