This is Violence

“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between.”

“The point of grammar is to facilitate clear and precise communication, to make language reflect thought and intention as closely as possible. On that front, a lot of colloquial bad grammar is actually GOOD grammar. I think focusing on grammar for grammar’s sake is a mistake.”

—John Green (via runalovegood)

This guy gets it.

(via sylviawrath)

Someone needs to tell all the AP kids….

(via zeenie)

I think this is mostly true, but not entirely true.

As someone who’s grasp of even basic grammatical rules is fleeting at best, and who is a fairly firm believer in power of slang and colloquialisms, and who only recently acquiesced to using apostrophes in possessives (I’m a child of the IM era), I recently had my eyes opened to an additional factor in this discussion by way of David Wallace’s essay “Tense Present” which is: the baseline effectiveness of relaying a concept is only part of the equation. Your choice of words and the way you structure them are also a critical aspect how you convey what you’re thinking in the context of the reader.

In this way, I think using slang and colloquialisms are 100% acceptable as long as their meaning as signifiers of larger concepts is something you want your reader to infer - like in Infinite Jest, for example (to stay with the DWF thing). If on the other hand, you’re writing for an audience that doesn’t use that sort of language you should make the choice to use it conscious of what you’re signifying by doing so.

(via zeenie)

“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

“Anyone who thinks that artists create great pieces of work because of, rather than despite, their crushing mental illnesses, has never experienced the kind of depression that leads someone to suicide.”