Quote:
Originally Posted by Norm K
Unless the author(s) of the policy testified as to what they intended it to mean, then it means what the punctuation says it means. Heck, even if they had testified, the policy means what the punctuation says it means.
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Absolutely.
Language is an agreed upon form of communication. It has rules, upon which we have agreed. Those unable to follow those rules will eventually, and must eventually, suffer the consequences. Neither ignorance of those rules, nor laziness in following those rules, should be rewarded. Allowing such would only serve to ensure the slow degradation of our ability to communicate.
I hate to digress, but we are "blessed" with a few of our very own examples of this right here on PPOT and, more egregiously, over on PARF. One particular young man stands out as our shining example of the breed - he is notorious for his lack of punctuation and bad grammar. He blows off any criticism he receives for this laziness and ineptitude regarding his grammar and punctuation as no more than distracting attacks on the "points" he attempts to make, assuming, in his ignorance, that he has left his critic in the dust with nothing better over which to criticize him. His rapier wit has won the day, and the stodgy old farts here, unable to keep up, resort to low-brow criticisms of his grammar and punctuation...
Those criticisms (emanating from those stodgy old farts), are, of course, not unfounded - he reads and writes at less than an acceptable fifth or sixth grade level within the public school system in which I was taught. And yet, somehow, he attained to a college degree of some kind. That absolutely baffles me - how on Earth??!! Clearly, he was pushed through by an endless succession of public school "teachers" who were terrified of his failings - because, in our modern public "education" system, those are seen as
their failings. So they passed him along, with him unable to competently do the work at any stage of the game, at any grade level. All the while putting smiley faces and gold stars on his below passing work, telling his parents how "bright" and "creative" he was for pursuing his "alternate" path...
So, yeah, people like him are writing important documents to which others will be held accountable. Legally accountable, by people who know the "rules". The low intellect laziness of these authors, which has been brushed off as "unimportant" criticism leveled by "stodgy" old critics, is going to come back to bite these organizations, these companies, in the pocketbook. As well it should.
I minored in English. Granted, often hard to tell here, where I do get kind of lazy at times. One of the most important influences in my life was a prof in junior college, a trained engineer, who told me "the brightest engineer in the world is useless if he cannot communicate his ideas. Learn to communicate..." So I did. And I wrote for two college papers, and have a fair number of internally published papers at my old employer - all of which are imperative that they be clearly understood and thereby executed by the end users of the processes they describe. Many of those papers have a bit more riding on them than someone's overtime pay, by the way... So yes, grammar and punctuation have demonstrated themselves to be rather important, at least to me. "Your mileage may vary"...