It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

That's prescriptive, rather Procrustean, grammar!

Could I show you something at Can, could or may ? - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary

 

Whoa! What was that? A Darth Vader snarl in a dark and stormy night. Wield it or lose it or be defeated by the force. Knowledge is power, language is power, I wonder what is not power anymore if everything can be forged into powerful weaponry. You are not unabashedly but amusingly prescriptivist. I come from corporate jargon so we flout the traditional grammar rules by verbing nouns and nouning verbs. You might recoil in error if you cast your eye on my office emails.

Battles are never lost, a side switches over and peace reigns. Which side switches over is drawn out in a gruesome war of the words between the prescriptivist and descriptivist army with Google Ngram playing the referee. When was the last time prescriptivists held ground in this bloody battle of grammar? They always fret and eventually disband their garrison to commingle in the descriptivist dominion.

You still have time. Change sides, as you eventually would.

 

Wow! I am overwhelmed. What is good writing and how does one do it? Search me. Discovered this thread only today, thanks to Gauri. Shall follow it. Would love to learn the skill of good writing. I often tend to ramble on - a tendency I'd love to curb.

Reminds me of precis writing in school. I used to hate it. We were told to reduce the text to 1/3 it's length. I now wonder if anyone read what I had written because lazy me used to choose every third sentence or word and reduce the text to 1/3 the length!!! Wonder what sense the text made.

 

Free verse is only passion and no prosody.
You can croak, sing, thunder or blunder
Only when you compose Italian or English sonnets
You run into octaves, sestets, quatrains and couplets
When not competing for Pulitzer
I say, burst in a cacophonous geyser
Talent and aptitude are nice to possess
But they can be acquired, must I confess
Billy Collins drops a mouse in a poem
Roald Dahl sells a wonka in his tanka
With such guidelines who gives hoots to order
Go dare, bend the stanza border
Chop chop, a poem or a ghazal
No more of this tussle.

References:

Dahl's Wonka
Collins' Mouse

 

Just love the 'wonka-vite' poem. Thanks Ira.

 

Ha ha! Wonk-vite is the new buzzword between us now.

 

@sokanasanah

Hey, you, the tambourine or theremin man!

It may be too early to declare a victory but I have incorporated few suggestions on how to organise and structure a write-up gleaned from your insights in this thread and also ramped up my evernote usage to keep track of my tags. Few weeks ago, someone mailed me, "Hey I love your counter-arguments and your style of writing". I owe that "tiny" recognition to you. It is customary for prodigal members to withdraw and then approach saying, "Here is my update on following the recommendations on this forum". So, here is mine — thank you. It is extremely rare to find people who can squander that time and effort to guide and discipline others with no kinship or alliance. Thanks for being that eccentric lighthouse at times. There are several clueless people with passion, interest and enthusiasm but missing that spark of guidance. I am sure this now-dormant enterprise of yours will aid other aspiring souls like me. Good stuff!