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by nonamechicken 1616 days ago
> Reluctance in gaining even a basic level of mastery in language skills goes to show you don't respect / value other people's time.

I am not sure how using 'comprises' instead of 'is comprised of' can be considered as reluctance in gaining a basic level of English.

> You want your readers to put in the extra effort required to make sense out of your half-baked messages.

How is the message half-baked just because one word in that whole paragraph was wrong?

> Asking people to use coherent English on an English language forum is a reasonable expectation. I wasn't making a value judgement on the thread OP. I hope this is clear (this is why reading comprehension is important too).

I perfectly understood what 'blocked_again' said despite English not being my first language. I am pretty sure normal humans can process these sentences without any problems. Now if we are talking about 'reading comprehension' for machines, it may be a different issue.

I ran your comment in Word's grammar checker. It suggested a couple of changes.

1. Change 'required' to 'needed' in "required to make sense".

Reason: Clarity. A simpler word would be clearer for your reader.

2. Change 'master' to 'proficiency' in "mastery in language skills".

Reason: Inclusiveness. A gender-neutral term here would be more inclusive.

3. Change 'wasn't' to 'was not' in "I wasn't making a".

Reason: Formality. In formal writing, try spelling out the word.

3 comments

1. Disagree, required and needed are equally clear. 2. Mastery is gender neutral. Perhaps your grammar checker is confusing this with master? 3. Rules of what is and isn't formal have changed. Contractions such as wasn't, isn't are perfectly fine.

These are just nits. Not at the same level as using compromised instead of comprised. Edit: Actually this is a non-issue, I responded to the assertion "...As long as you understand what the person is saying it's good enough...".

Your reading comprehension skills need serious work.

Master(y) in acquisition of skills context is gender neutral. The reason is to avoid master/mistress - slave connotation.
Comprises is actually correct, if you read my edit you would see that I admitted that and learned something in the bargain myself.