Don’t Throw It Away — ‘Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools (on my side of the Atlantic, at least) for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.

Those few young people who do learn it, seem to pick it up, against the odds, by instinct. Even then they’ve no template of understanding with which to correct their own writing when something goes wrong.’ The Vocabula Review