The grammar debate revisited

This is just a quick follow up to last week's post "To boldly get it wrong" in which Linguistics Professor and co-editor of the Cambridge Grammar of English, Michael McCarthy argued that grammar rules are only as useful as we make them.

In this response to the Cambridge Grammar, "Dot Wordsworth" (a pseudonym, apparently) in the Telegraph attacks McCarthy's descriptivist attitude:

Without a knowledge of grammar, the young will be no more able to write down their thoughts coherently than they could text-message without knowing how to use a mobile phone. This will frustrate them, and relegate written English to the same kind of ghetto of incompetent self-expression with which we are familiar from graduates of art schools who have never learnt to draw.

Meanwhile, the whole issue was debated last week on Radio 4 and should be available to listen to again here

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates