Grammar Police

[Manouschka 0]

A person who possible can be seen as more or less important in the forum wrote some lines in the live chatbox.

One of the sentences seems to contain a grammar mistake.

 

Quote

OpaQue23 Aug 7:08 PM

myCENT system broke when our forums were upgraded to new Version... Every time invision do a major update, our myCENT program breaks.

The second part of the message contains the word: 'do'. It seems this version of the verb is used for a majority of actors. The verb is connected to the word 'invision'. It is not clear if this is a single actor or if this word indicates a single version but refers to a couple of actors.

 

This leads to the question wether or not it is advisable to point out possible mistakes in grammar somebody thinks to notice on the internet.

Such behavior can be easily seen as negative. A positive side is that the original writer might learn from the teaching and she or he might improve her or his grammar skills. A positive attitude would be that such a reaction is not meant to critise the writer. It can be seen as a trial to teach the writer of the original post some grammar rules.

 

One of the critical elements of a reaction to a possible grammar mistake is, that the reaction itself needs to contain a grammar mistake too. This prevents from being seen as a wise guy or girl who thinks he or she knows it all.

 

This pondering leads to the question wether or not to react to a possible grammar mistake on the internet.

 

 

Edited August 26, 2018 by Manouschka (see edit history)

[yordan 10]

OK, you are asking a nice question.

I would even say that this question has several aspects, concerning grammar teaching, helping people, politeness/kindness, and even our forum rules.

First of all, you are talking about a word posted in the shoutbox. Each line in the shoutbox vanishes when other people shout. So, a mistake there is not very important because it's supposed to disappear after a short period of time, except if you take a screenshot and post it in a topic, like you just did it.

Secondly, I feel this as "artist's freedom". Opaque should have said "Each time Invision people do ". However, he omitted the word "people", so Invision is not clearly started as a multi-person character. I feel a big organization, Invision for instance, as a collection of persons, so I would naturally use the plural form of the verb. However, maybe a collection of people should be stated like a single set of persons, so the verb should have a singular form.

The third part is the "being useful to others" part. Some people ask for help improving their English writing skills, and our help is welcome. Some other people will not appreciate seing their name clearly shown in a topic explaining how poor their language is.

And that leads to my fourth point here. I think that you should not show so visibly the name of that guy. Your topic started with "a person", I would have continued that way, sticking to the strictly grammatical point of view, and not showing the name of that guy.

And, by the way, how do you feel my syntax? Did I also do a lot of grammar errors in the present answer?

Regars

Yordan

[OpaQue 15]

Quote

SDASD

CODE CODE CODE

Thank you Yordan for the explanation.

@Manoushka,  My sentence "Every time invision do a major update, our myCENT program breaks." means,

Everytime, Our Forum Software (created by : https://invisioncommunity.com/) whom I refer here as just Invision (my bad.. It is actually "Invision Power Services, Inc.") .. I hope, according to you,  this first mistake of mine is now clear.

Secondly, the use of the verb "do" is specifically because as long as this software will continue to exist, Invision Power Services, Inc. will continue rolling out new updates and features. Sites like facebook, google etc also keep rolling new updates and many of these updates .. just a simple example like emojee's icons are now found to be common among major companies and they are possible due to updates. 

If this forum was entirely coded by me, this issue would not have happened. Long time back, I did make a separate script called the lofi version. I had created my own version of code from scratch to display a seo optimised version of the forums.

Due to a lot of upgrades by Invision Power Services, Inc., I need to re-code the myCENT script from scratch.

[M6NEN 2]

An old topic, but since I have been absent here for a while (the body wouldn't co-operate as much as it should have), I might as well cut in.

"A certain person" ? uses "artist's freedom" which is really called "poetic license", however, I do not see the issue with using the word "do" in the given context.

At first, I wasn't sure, but I assumed "Invision" referred to a company, which has now been confirmed.

In that case we are dealing with something which you learn about rather early in school called a "collective noun", ie. a single word which refers to a collection such as a company, a football team, a school, etc.

In tha case, grammatically, that noun can be used in the 3rd person plural ("they") as, although we are talking about the one object as if we would be addressing one person, this one object still comprises a number (collection) of people, hence the name collective noun.

So, it is perfectly correct to say "Celtic play a good game today" or "Celtic are playing a good game today", because, although we are referring to one football team, we are still talking about one team that has 11 players in it, that is why we use a plural form.

 

Hope that clears up a bit of confusion.

 

Edited January 4, 2019 by M6NEN
typos (see edit history)

[yordan 10]

Now it's clear, thanks a lot for this explanation.

Quote

"A certain person" ? uses "artist's freedom" which is really called "poetic license"

I would rather use "poetic license" in the case of a poet writing some words.

The expression "artist's freedom" I heard the first time from an artist performing a drawing. When I asked the question "why are you doing this that way, I expected you to do something else" the answer was "artist's freedom". So, the way I feel it, is that "poetic license" has to be used concerning written words, and "artist's freedom" for the other types of artists.

Simply adding my two cents to a "grammar police" topic  ... ?

Regards

Yordan