A student doing a college exercise should, in my opinion, stick to the basic rules (however defined, MLA, etc). Gotta learn the rules before you can break them.

I'll be honest - this whole discussion has made me re-examine what, exactly, I think they're teaching "the kids" these days.

I've always had a dismissive relationship with grammar. It's been natural and assumed and you put the words in the order you do because duh. That's how they go. But I'm awakening to the fact that the rigor with which people are being instructed in the manipulation of written English has atrophied greatly since I was forced to diagram sentences.

I had presumed that most people, by college, bloody well knew "the rules" and, more so, that "the rules" of any engagement would be fundamentally clear to any practitioner prior to putting pencil to paper. At the same time I'm realizing that nobody puts pencil to paper anymore and that the idea of actually having (and knowing!) a style book is novel and unknown.

It's interesting. I like pointing out that Thai has five registers (common, formal, rhetorical, religious, and royal) and that the register used depends on the context. English also has five registers (frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate) but the more I look at it, the more apparent it's becoming that the first two are becoming opaque to all but the learned.

Interesting times.