5 ms·

<pedantry> Your pedantry tag has no opening </pendantry>

• buckminster 6y ago
  <pedantry> It wasn't a pedantry tag. And yours is differently misspelled! </pedantry>
  • Hydraulix989 6y ago
    Don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
    • steve_g 6y ago
      But sometimes it's OK to break the rules.
      • kmonsen 6y ago
        Not with -pedantic enabled, that’s kind of the purpose.
      • Hydraulix989 6y ago
        Unless you're already calling someone else out for a spelling mistake.
    • ryankemper 6y ago
      I'll terminate this by being so pedantic that we cross over into non-pedanticism. Per descriptive linguistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description), the assertion that it's wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction is incorrect. Ditto for splitting infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition, etc. (Descriptive linguists basically define the rules of language to be how humans actually use the damn language. It turns out such a philosophy saves you from falling into a lot of traps)
      • hnal943 6y ago
        How many pedants are descriptivists?
        • thomasfedb 6y ago
          Few
      • ooobit2 6y ago
        It depends on the use. That last sentence is fine, as the complete thought is apparent. But I just split this sentence from the one prior to it. Do any of these last two make sense? Likely as much as this sentence does. The best approach is to think about the way we read aloud, as I have with this sentence, the words and punctuation we see on a page. This paragraph makes better use of sentence structures that frame a complete thought. That said, the prior paragraph did the same but separated too many closely-related thoughts that would have been better understood in fewer, more additive sentences. Key takeaways: News anchors vary the pitch and phrasing of their speech because a typical monotonous speaking voice is too predictable to our hearing sense, so we naturally pay less attention to droning speech. Writing works similarly for the brain. Failing to work with subordinate and additive structures, vary sentence and paragraph length, and start and end thoughts with unexpected phrases, makes any writing more difficult to sustain interest. So, start your sentences with hieroglyphs, smoke signals, or whatever works to engage and re-engage a reader after every period. Just make sure you frame complete thoughts and limit the number of breaks mid-thought.
      • giantDinosaur 6y ago
        Unfortunately merely noting 'descriptivism' as if it solves the issue of linguistic prescription doesn't help that much. We prescribe all the time, like it or not, language isn't a free for all at the individual level. It's also _descriptively_ true that many people regard certain rules as inviolable, which certainly means that prescription is, in some sense, completely reasonable: comply, or we'll refuse to accept you. How does 'I'll do whatever I damn want' really handle that? It can be true that it's 'valid' on one level, while being wrong on another.