What the grammar gurus don’t get about how we learn

By Ben Ambridge. Sticklers beware. The British Library is hosting it’s English Grammar Day, a day to finely split hairs over split infinitives, apostrophe’s (sic, sic, sic), and Oxford commas (sick!). Yes, in the case of written language, the ability to follow a set of arbitrary, complex and often-contradictory rules is probably as good a marker as any of intelligence and educational attainment. (And, yes, those were deliberate mistakes to annoy the sticklers!).
But what some grammar gurus forget is that the vast majority of language is not written, but spoken. More...