[This is Part 2 of the post title. If you haven’t read the first part, please read it here, though this post can be read in isolation too]
An important distinction that people often miss out on is the difference between _grammar_ and _style_—the difference between writing _correctly_ and writing well. And this distinction is very important because it’s more or less easy for most native speakers with some amount of training in the standard dialect (and knowledge of things like right spellings) to write correctly. Writing _well, _and in a manner that makes the output pleasurable to read, is not easy, and needs years of practice, not to mention exposure to good works.
People often get confused between grammar and style, which is not surprising, since school teaching of both is usually intertwined, and kids are usually just told that sentences which don’t look nice are just plain wrong. Probably style is what most people refer to when they say that grammar helps maintain _clarity. _But why does this issue arise in the first place? I’ll tell you why—students go to a _writing_ course, expecting to not only learn how to write well, but to hopefully be exposed to good works of literature and learn . However, they are told that sentences that they considered perfectly grammatical and _fine_ in their language aren’t actually so, because someone says they aren’t. For instance, the previous sentence begins with however, which many prescriptivists will insist is _wrong. _They will offer no real reason for this, and won’t be convinced even if you show them works of good writers who use sentence initial however, nor will they be ready to disabuse themselves of this madness if you told that this construction has been prevalent in English from as long ago as you care to look , and is used by everyone and their grandmother. The sentence before that contained a _split infinitive, _which is another thing that is supposed to be _wrong_ in the opinion of prescriptivists, and it also contained the word _hopefully_ used in the _It is hoped that… _sense instead of _full of hope_ sense, which is another of their peeves. When they find no other reason to support these shibboleths, they play the clarity card, or the redundancy card, or the beauty card, or the authority card.
Punctuation is also a matter of style. There are some established norms, and they aren’t necessarily there to make communication efficient or logical. LOGIC would say that a period that actually belongs to the parent sentence should not be placed inside the ending quotation marks of the nested quotation, but style manuals say otherwise. You could find sentences in favour of the Oxford comma, and you could find sentences against it, so don’t go doling out drivel about how it helps resolve ambiguity.
Of course, I am not suggesting that we teach children that writing sentences that are clearly difficult to parse or understand is OK. Children must learn the difference between good writing and bad writing, and be able to improve the way they write, and it is fine to suggest alternate phrasings of sentences where some tweaking might produce better sentences, but imposing blanket rules on kids which aren’t even attested in good literature is neither good for the short-term development of their writing skills nor in their long-term training. In the short run, this makes them memorize mindless rules (note that they need to memorize these rules precisely because they are mindless—a _real_ grammatical rule of their language would mostly get acquired before they turn 5) instead of trying to develop a sense of good writing, and in the long run, it is producing individuals who have their understanding of language and grammar inside out and who will then turn into mothers and fathers who will then train another generation of kids caught in this state of nervous cluelessness. This is surely not one of the objectives of the VanDamme academy, or of any pedagogic process or curriculum for that matter (though our Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibbal’s efforts come dangerously close).
It’s one big quagmire, and I don’t know if there ever will be an end to it. People who try to enforce grammatical rules and _good writing_ in general are looked down upon, which can be good or bad depending on what exactly these people try to enforce. But the argument which is given to them is that anything is OK as long as it conveys the necessary information, which is silly, because _They is walking on street _is unconditionally ungrammatical in Standard English irrespective of the fact that anyone who hears or reads it will get the information that there’s a group of people and that the group is walking on the street.
It’s time people saw, understood and analyzed human language for what it is instead of romanticizing and armchair theorizing about what it should be. I don’t know when that will happen, but Linguistrix will keep trying.