User:JRYon/The Importance of Being Correct

While English is a living language, and there is definitely room in the world for dialectal variations in both spelling and grammar, consistency and intelligibility are key. For those of us who are not neurotypical, what seems like a simple typo or a stylistic choice to the majority can make a sentence extremely difficult to decode. Therefore policing language use isn't elitism as some claim; rather, it's necessary for accessibility.

Given a clean slate, I generally prefer older, British English spellings, except where they are hard to read (e.g. I am more likely to write ‘coördinate’ than ‘homœopathy’). I won't go through an article in American and “correct” it to British; that is snobbery. If an article is predominantly written in American English, new contributions should recognise that. (NB. Scots isn't English, despite what many people think).

Likewise I don't recognise so-called swearwords as such in the vernacular, except when directed at a person. However, for reasons of tradition and clarity, I am unlikely to tolerate them in formal writing. Formality and correctness dictate many other things: commas, semicolons, parentheses and proper quotation marks are my friends; abused apostrophe's are not. The accusative of ‘who’ is ‘whom’. The word ‘less’ is not synonymous with ‘fewer’. English has a subjunctive mood. The passive voice is often heard. The pronoun ‘they’ is plural.

Dumbing down helps nobody; precise (“long”) words can be looked up, or augmented with a definition, but imprecise (“short”) ones lead to ambiguity. The Simple English Wikipedia exists for a reason. I would prefer to see effort put into translating content from here to there, creating a truly accessible Wikipedia for those who need it, rather than reducing the technical accuracy of the English Wikipedia.

I expect my own errors to be ruthlessly corrected.