[grot]

A liberal arts education teaches you many useful things: grammar, for example.

Read his opening paragraph again.

"As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial, and one of the more painful ones was the fact that the Dropping out is probably not for you post gave people the impression that I'm against studying the arts, literature or any other non hard science."

Awkward, no? That's because it's a run on sentence.

The things that a liberal arts education teaches you are not always obvious. Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

How many times have you picked up a book, skimmed through it, and never opened it up again? How many times have you actually read a book, and then for some weird reason, forgotten all of its contents very soon after? Formal schooling forces you to reengage with texts again and again. Formal schooling forces you to be critical of yourself and your own work before someone else has a crack at it. All of these things can be accomplished by a very motivated and disciplined individual. But how many of us are actually that motivated and that disciplined?

[bermanoid]

Awkward, no? That's because it's a run on sentence.

Awkward, perhaps, especially when cut-and-paste de-highlights the link around "Dropping out is probably not for you".

But it wasn't a run-on sentence, jacquesm properly connected the independent clauses with a conjunction instead of just smooshing them together.

As opposed to the sentence that I just wrote, which did not, and actually constitutes a run-on sentence (though some purists might object to lumping comma-splices together with run-on sentences).

If you're going to insinuate that someone's education is lacking based on their grammar, please make sure to actually point out a grammatical mistake.

Or better yet, let's leave the grammar policing aside, it doesn't add much to the discussion given that jacquesm writes plenty good English for blog-format prose...

[georgefox]

In fairness, it was awkward, and there are quite a few comma splices and other grammatical errors in Jacques's post (e.g., the second paragraph). I actually found this a little distracting myself. That said, I agree that grammar policing is kind of a low blow.

[jacquesm]

I'm happy to accept the low blows, being a non-native English speaker/writer anything that will help me to improve is more than welcome.

Of course it would be nice if such comments were accompanied by suggested fixes and/or constructive criticism of the content. But you can't have everything ;)

[georgefox]

If English is not your first language, then you're obviously doing quite well. As a fairly typical American, I can only speak English, and I have much respect for anyone that's bilingual. (Incidentally, most of the bilingual Americans I know have liberal arts degrees.)

Here's my feedback, though: I thought your post read as if it had been written hastily. There were some mistakes that seemed careless, like not capitalizing Wikipedia or omitting hypens and dashes in constructs like non-hard science and pro-education. Additionally, there were some issues with sentence structure, especially comma splices, which bermanoid referred to above. For example, the second paragraph:

I guess it was to be expected the way I phrased things there so let me take a moment to correct this perception, the offending lines are right at the start in:

The comma there isn't valid, as it splits two independent clauses without a conjunction. I'd use a period instead, but I'd also rephrase slightly:

I guess it was to be expected with the way I phrased things, so let me take a moment to correct this perception. The offending lines are right at the start:

I'll take one last example:

You can study those subjects to your hearts content and there are lots of places online where you can discuss them until the cows come home.

First, hearts vs. heart's seems like another hasty oversight. This sentence, though, is a different type of run-on. Technically, if you put a comma before and, you're safe, but without it, us grammar nerds call it a fused sentence. This is a pretty serious nitpick, and this is very common among native speakers as well, but two of these in a row caught my eye.

[jacquesm]

> I thought your post read as if it had been written hastily.

It was written while being disturbed about 30 times by a very active toddler :)

I'll take your points to heart and fix the post tomorrow morning, it's getting late here.

I'd have missed the 'heart's'.

What bugs me about all this is that many years ago I came to terms with working with people from many different backgrounds. Immigrants from all over the globe, in a single company that I ran in Toronto. We learned to look past the mistakes in grammar or pronunciation to the essence of what someone was trying to pass on.

Of course it helps if all written communication is perfect and if everybody would speak perfect English. The fact of the matter however is that language is a vehicle for expressing ideas and thoughts, and to pass those thoughts from one head to another, mostly intact.

Here on HN there is a tendency to ignore the message but to focus on the delivery. This is just a subtle way of attacking the person rather than the subject matter and I always wonder how we would have fared in that office if every mis-spelled word or wrongly pronounced word would have been pounced upon like that.

I think I'm doing ok in English, not perfect but it will do for most everyday conversation. A while ago there was a vocabulary test that floated around here and it tested the most uncommon words to get an idea of how big your vocabulary is.

Such tests miss the point entirely, as does the nitpicking about grammar and spelling. What matters is the idea behind the message and those that manage to look past the errors will sometimes find that that dyslexic or first generation immigrant over in the third cubicle has a very valid point, poorly expressed.

We'd do well to remember that and to always try to digest the message rather than the wrapper that it came in.

So, I really will take your advice , and I hope that it will stick (it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks). Over the last couple of years I think my writing has gotten a little bit better but it is very hard for me to measure my progress due to a serious lack of objectivity.

Thank you once again.

[georgefox]

My apologies if I came across as making some sort of ad hominem attack here based on the grammar in your post. Let me re-iterate: for a non-native speaker, your English is very impressive. Sure, there were a few awkward phrasings and some grammatical errors in your post, but I think I'm much more sensitive to these things than most people are, and it in no way affected my ability to understand the message you were trying to convey. I just so happened to respond to the grammatical tangent in the comments here. :)

Honestly, the intent of my original comment was specifically to legitimize the non-grammar-related part of grot's comment. Looking back, I failed miserably at that, and the conversation centered even more on grammar. I distinctly remember having written something else that I apparently deleted before commenting. Let me go back and make a comment that's actually valuable.

> Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

Personally, I can strongly relate to this. I'm very interested in literature, for example, but I'm not very well read. There are plenty of libraries around me and plenty of resources available on the internet to help me self-study, but I just don't do it. I can self-study node.js just fine, but I need some coercion to get into Shakespeare. This is something a formal education in liberal arts can provide. Whether or not it's affordable depends on a variety of factors, so it's hard to make a sweeping statement in support of or in opposition to such a degree. But I think people are very prone to looking at educational choices as business decisions, where a negative ROI is obviously bad. I think this is a limited perspective, but unfortunately, it's a reality a lot of people have to deal with.

[MKT]

Let's not forget that you could major in STEM and take plenty of liberal arts courses. For example, I was an engineering major and still took English I and English II, as well as Japan Before 1600, History of the Labor Movement, African History and some others. Let's not turn this discussion into comparing multiple false choices to each other.

[caseysoftware]

Agreed. The options are not mutually exclusive. I also was an engineering major and picked up two minors outside my field specifically in the social sciences.

I wonder how common the reverse is? As in [choose: English, Art, History, etc] majors taking Calculus or Physics..

[DanBC]

I've read stuff from liberal arts graduates that was just as bad as the example, if not worse.

See the trend in the late 70s, 80s and early 90s for "freedom" and "creativity" without "stiffling" grammar and spelling rules.