A Relative Truth

I have constancy with my opinion about it being fundamental for us to be able to adjust punctuation, grammar and spelling to a text. A writer always has a purpose. Without being able to adjust these things, there wouldn´t be a more interesting way of giving clues to the reader about the purpose of the text.

In ¨Which Language Rules to Flout. Or Flaunt?¨ Robert Lane Greene and Bryan A. Garner have a confrontation about the use (proper or not) of language. Extensively surrounded by logos, both articles argue that they are correct. If I were to select an article as the best, I would give it to Bryan A. Garner. Although I am not in accordance with his ideals and he´s somewhat tight and penny-pinching, he is who uses his arguments as a shield, making his point of view fully understandable.

As soon as I typed the title´s article in Word, it told me it was a fragment. Is it, really, a fragment, word? There. Microsoft Word is totally prescriptivist. Who are you to say it is or it isn´t? And even if it was, it wouldn´t matter that much.

I´m going to pull the ¨everything is perceptual and relative¨ here. Take art, for example. Contemporary art is completely free and permits random and what would be antiquely considered pointless to be a form of expression. The same thing happens with writing. In fact, writing is a form of art. With writing, we need prescriptive-determined errors. As well as it serves as a way of rhetoric, it gives tone to what is being said.

Ensayo sobre la ceguera, a book that doesn´t contain a single point throughout the whole book, certainly was written this way for a reason. Looking at is through a prescriptivist point of view, the whole novel would be a very long sentence. Thus making the novel utterly and unquestionably wrong, conveying no special message. What I’m trying to say, is that prescription takes away the purpose, leaving the text with the sometimes bitter taste of logos.

Going back to my Einstein moment, writing, as well as art, are both conceptual. What shapes a text is not entirely the words. The path to comprehending a text is by looking at the syntax, diction, punctuation, etc. We gather all of this information to understand what is being said. And most importantly, the purpose.  

Although I do have to say, that if it were not for the basis of written language, we would not be able to make these opinions. To break the rules, you must know them and have followed them previously to be conscious of what you are doing.

Teachers must tell us what is wrong and right in our fourth grade-essay papers.