Jules Jones

I said you'd get into polls... I think their appeal to the reader is that of expressing opinion in a single click rather than having to work out how to formulate it.

I'm becoming a little alarmed about what people are learning about grammar. legionseagle belonged to some online writing group whose younger members (British, as far as I know) were always telling her she should remove all auxiliary verbs such as "was" and "had" on the grounds that they weakened the sentence, or put off the reader, or some such nonsense. They appeared to have no idea of anything but the most basic tense and mood. Presumably this starts from the idea of a simple past tense being active and direct, but they seem to be applying that idea as an inflexible rule which eliminates all shades of meaning. And they seem so certain of themselves that I suspect the fallacy has somehow got into parts of the teaching profession.