11-03-2011, 10:24 AM
You put it very well, Mr or Mrs Touchstone.
Certainly, it is not a crime not to have been exposed to tuition, and the teaching of grammar seems to be patchy. There is also the question of one's natural speech -- I have written one or two in Cockney, using rhyming slang and so on, and the grammar of this, is slightly different from Standard English. The same would apply to, say, poems in the Shetland dialect, which is practically incomprehensible to me.
Certainly, it is not a crime not to have been exposed to tuition, and the teaching of grammar seems to be patchy. There is also the question of one's natural speech -- I have written one or two in Cockney, using rhyming slang and so on, and the grammar of this, is slightly different from Standard English. The same would apply to, say, poems in the Shetland dialect, which is practically incomprehensible to me.