Stephen Fry went on record in 2010 as saying that grammar and punctuation are not very important, specifically that he describes pedantic correction of language as joyless and rather irrelevant.  His view has met with widespread approval.

No one likes being on the receiving end of pedantry. Typically, the only thing implementing that feedback protects one from is other pedants, and so a pedantic response is often nothing other than unattractive.  Despite that, Fry’s arguments did not sit that well for me, and I have finally decided to let the tip off my tongue trip of the top of my palate to say so. Or at least write it on my iPad.

It is certainly true that the point of language is not to get grammar and punctuation spot on.  No one said of Jane Austen that she was a master of the semi-colon, that her use of the apostrophe was unimpeachable.  In a sense, at the distance we now are from her, it does not matter whether she knew how to use punctuation marks or not. We rather assume that she did, because whoever wrote Pride and Prejudice was clearly very intelligent and so was almost certainly capable of grasping the difference between possessive and diminutive, and that neither was necessarily a plural.  It does not matter to us whether or not she knew this, nor showed whether or not she knew it.  The rule that gives the full meaning to girls’ bags, remains.

In fact, any deviation from this simple rule is capable of moving the meaning to something that either renders the sentence incomprehensible or for it to sound as though it means something other than what was intended.  There are of course countless instances where it probably does not matter to the meaning the writer wishes to convey, at least to those sufficiently competent in the language. A common argument against this lugubrious language use is that it is at best lazy not to polish, and at worst, inconsistent and difficult for non-native speakers.

As someone who writes a lot about science, I typically make an effort to get it all right.  This partly comes from the experience that so many people see my copy before it gets published that someone will correct me if it is wrong.  Either that, or they will correct it to what they think it should be, which results in a poor piece of writing (cf. death by committee).

In the last two years, I have been living in a European country where English is the lingua franca and so I have learnt about attitudes within and towards other languages.  This has shifted my perspective and allowed me to articulate my view about why arguments that ‘it doesn’t matter if your grammar and punctuation are wrong, no one cares’ do not sit well.

It is because language relies upon rules to be understood.  I agree with Michael Rosen that English is formulated more from patterns than from rules, unlike many European languages in which any deviation from the set order results in confusion, and where sentences therefore have an unambiguous meaning.  It is hard to apply that to English—the use of tone means that we can make the same sentence mean five different things.  That makes written English by definition a bit ambiguous.  Widespread use of a common rule book is therefore impossible—English is intractable.

However, I question whether that is a strong enough argument for tacit acceptance of not following the pattern, especially where it leads to ambiguity.  Another way of thinking of this is that although patterns can be broken or remoulded in a way that rules cannot, the fact that someone clever does it, does not really give all of us licence to do so.

I broke the rule about not starting a sentence with a conjunction or a preposition twice in the first paragraph of this article, and I probably got away with it.  The way I constructed the paragraph meant that I could probably get away with it.  Was it really worth breaking the rule, though?  Did I use it in an elegant enough way to justify alienating pedants and confusing those who are doing battle to make sense of this rule-less tongue?

Probably not.  And that is really the point, if it does not have a purpose, is it really fair on the reader?