Every English speaker and writer may have something for you to learn. But that might not be skills in speaking correct English. Most native English speakers are exposed to more-or-less standard English in school, but spend their lives speaking casually or in accord with their community at home or in accord with those at their place of work or worship.

English classes tend to present the rules for standard English, but not all demand strictly correct English.

The posts, and many of the comments on Daily Writing Tips, are mostly good and proper standard English. Keep your dictionary handy, look up each word to understand why each is used – what it’s meaning is, why that form of the word is used, and what the meaning of the sentence is. It is practice taking the sentence and the paragraph apart, to examine how it goes together, that teaches how to write in that manner and style.

You can also take grammar and phonics classes, to better understand how words are used, and how they sound. That and a good dictionary – not the best available, but good enough for the community and work you are involved with.

There are many tips for building vocabulary – the list of words that you know and use correctly. One is to keep note cards with you, and write down every new word you here (it does get less hectic, later!), then when you can, you look up and add the definition, and a couple of examples of how to use the word correctly. The writing down of the information is an important part, for some people, in learning the information. Writing it down is important for me, even if I never return to that note or message again.

Luck!

Compound sentences and commas DO EXIST, and there is no reason to ignore the use of commas and not create compound sentences just so your writing can sound like a nervous four-year-old child trying to recount his or her day.

I never ignore the “rules,” but I do question whether they are correct in light of other knowledge. I also have to consider the source. I’ll give you another example of a faulty rule, this time from higher education.

A physics professor declared that scientific articles should not use the first person. I’m not sure what journals he was reading, but the copy of “Nuclear Science and Engineering” (published by the American Nuclear Society) sitting next to my desk certainly has articles using the first person. Articles using the first person pass their editorial review. My conclusion is that the rule is wrong. A better “rule” might be “Don’t state opinions as if they are facts.”

Now, back to the example I noted in a previous comment. The teacher said that sentences should not start with “because.” If she had said that a dependent clause cannot be used as a complete sentence, such as clauses starting with “because,” she would have been correct. Although we sometimes do it for emphasis in much the same way we start sentences with conjunctions for emphasis. Because she wanted her students to write complete sentences, she espoused a rule that is not correct.

Because this dependent clause is linked to an independent clause, this sentence is grammatically correct.

I do not recall a similar admonition against starting sentences with the words “although” or “while,” two more words that start dependent clauses.

What’s the point of this? It ain’t true just because someone said so.

Times have changed.

Where 40 years ago there were a paper or three in most cities, a bunch of magazines, etc., book publishers, and three TV networks and radio – who’s work was seldom seen written, by and large almost all public writing was *edited*. Editors were skilled and respected, at times immensely powerful authority figures in some organizations. What professional editing and skilled proofreading accomplished was to establish, for a time, a nearly uniform standard of adherence to grammar and word usage.

If you had surveyed personal writing such as diaries and journals, and private correspondence, you would have seen a hodgepodge of styles, varying understanding of grammar and word usage, and quirks of regional and family usages.

Before the advent of compulsory education, the assortment of usage kept schools of scholars entertained and employed; teaching everyone in America similar grammar rules and sentence structure was a good start in achieving “proper” language usage as the norm. But students still went home where the local and family idiosyncrasies of language culture were preserved and passed on.

Today we still teach our children the essential rules, mostly. Recall the mess that whole-language and ebonics makes of whether rules matter (”if it sounds sensible it is close enough; marking it wrong would damage self esteem”).

But very little that appears on the Internet is edited. Of those that compose their priceless messages in MS Word or similar applications with tools available to notice spelling and grammar mistakes, these tools are often ignored or misunderstood – and they are limited in how well they allow for context.

You now see a wide diversity of adherence to polite standards because today’s union teachers, some of them, are less effective at teaching grammar rules, but most especially because there is so little effective, professional editing applied to much of today’s writing, both private and public.