Sometimes the message is more important than the words

True, Charlotta. Hemingway said (and I paraphrase): 'write as if you were sending a telegram and paying for every word yourself'. I used to rub this into my mature students - not always with conspicuous success.
Greatnan, I used to read a great many semi-literate job applications from young teachers with a very weak grasp of grammar and punctuation. And some of those were English teachers. Oh dear!

Its unreadable. I learned at Creative Writingg classes that you have to cut out unnecessary adverbs and keep your sentences precise enough to hold the reader's attention. All that just about an apostrophe.
If I had subjected this article to a newspaper or magazine then then it would have been returned.

Good article -yes, I read it all, but I speed read.
I do wince when I see poor spelling or grammar, but I would not dream of correcting what anyone wrote on a forum. I was fortunate to attend school in the days when we had lessons on grammar and I have a natural 'eye' for spelling (if you see a wrong spelling in my posts, it is probably a typo) but many contestants on the quizzes I watch appear to be unclear about the difference between nouns, verbs and the other parts of speech. Some of them are teachers, so it is hardly surprising that their pupils have problems.

What, you read all of it?!

Deliberate and tongue-in-cheek.

Were the mistakes in the article tongue-in-cheek/deliberate/unintentional?

It's OK in its place , as long as people don't start being picky on Gransnet, outside this very special corner, that is.
I am cross eyed with pendantising my own work. aaaargh. tea/supper/dinner time!

Good article butternut. Sums up how I feel about pedantry or should that be pedantitude.

Thoroughly enjoyed the article, butty .

I can't stand pedantry!!!

I certainly enjoy a bit of pedantry, too, carol and annobel, but I really felt for the greengrocer

Unrepentant pedant - that's me!

Point taken, but I do enjoy a bit of pedantry

Really enjoyed the article - thanks for pointing it out.

I don't know whether its because I'm a bit of a pedant but.....the way the word "insurgent" is used always makes me cross!

Like it

Oh, this is lovely Butternut. I love the word pedantitudinousness.
As a teacher of English as a second language I love the way that new words come into being or change their meaning etc., but I must admit that I am a bit of a pedant too; simply on the basis that the job of punctuation is to make things more easily readable.

Oh yes. I really like that.