Punctuation

[GrandDesespoir]

AIBU to wonder why people make up their own personal rules for punctuation when this usually only has the effect of obfuscating what they're trying to say? (NB I'm not talking about established writers who have done this like James Joyce and e e cummings.)

I'm thinking of things like random spaces before exclamation or question marks, unnecessary capital letters, words in quotation marks when they have no need to be, and (my pet peeve) completely eshewing punctuation in favour of an ersatz stream-of-consciousness style with loosely-connected (or completely incoherent) thoughts separated by an indiscriminate number of dots.

Nobody suddenly decides they're going to start writing 1.2 when they actually mean 12, or 3 x 3 = 6 when they mean 3 + 3, so why do some people apparently think they should use punctuation differently to everybody else?

Why is it 'showing off' to use more than basic vocabulary? That is just codswallop. Or, for those of you offended by those three syllables, tosh. The poster who took it upon herself to translate the OP stated she/he is a teacher...

There was no need to translate the OP. How patronising they anyone should do that.

...that anyone...

I wish I'd come to this thread early on. From previous similar threads I could have warned the OP about the reaction she would provoke.

I didn't go to a prestigious secondary school, but from the outset I had a good grounding in grammar and punctuation and I am so grateful for it. I ended up in a profession where those things are essential so that early education stood me in good stead. The sort of comments on this thread made me realise long ago that misuse of grammar and punctuation is something that should not be remarked upon, but it still grates even so!

For me, it's a case of time and place.

If I'm talking with people who are educated to a similar level to me or I know have broad vocabularies then I'm going to use langauge that fits that. I find it irritating when people deliberately try to show off their vocabulary because it comes across to me like they're trying to prove a point.

The reason I feel that way is because the most intelligent people I know don't act in a way that says 'I'm so smart look at how much I know/I know big words', whereas the people I know who feel the need to draw attention to how much they think they know/show they know big words have never been quite as intelligent as the image they like to present.

The thing is on MN is that there is quite a few claims of inverse snobbery (some rightly) but other times it's calling inverse snobbery on the grounds of "but I want to show off and you lot are so anti intellectual"