In class, my student said: "Nobody cares if I spell "part-time job" with a hyphen or not. They can still read the words."
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And in an email this morning: "I understand why using “which” to refer to an idea instead of a single noun is syntactically wrong. It’s just that I have heard native speakers use “which” like that in spoken language so many times that I just assumed it was a correct use (I even heard it just an hour ago in a movie, which immediately made me think... so easy to do, I just did it.).
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I wrote back this:
Regarding “which” – you are right. Speakers use "which" every which way. Speaking is different from writing though. Speaking is usually done spontaneously. In speaking, there is enough other information (context, tone of voice) to understand. If I don’t understand and you are in front of me, I can say, “What do you mean?”
In writing, the reader is often remote. In formal writing, the writing represents a final recorded thought. The writing introduces the author to the reader and often there is no other information except the written text. It is important to be as unambiguous as possible so as not to interrupt the reader’s flow or wear the reader out and thus break the bond of trust between reader and writer.
Regarding the student complaining about hyphens. I agreed with him as well. Most likely, 90% of readers won't care if a compound word is together, separate, or hyphenated. These are graduate students, though. They might be writing academic papers that will be rejected by publishers if their spelling is inconsistent. They will be writing research proposals and internship reports.
I told them that they could do what they like with their writing, unless it is writing they do for me in this class. I want them to know what correct, concise, unambiguous writing looks like so that they can at least have choices.
My Spanish-speaking student told me that in her country, they like to write long sentences with little punctuation. She said that they were taught to almost never use commas. She also said the writing is tedious and hard to understand.
I'm sure there are many opinions. We do what we do.
mivasairski see below re minutiae.
This is an important idea, that might be hard for this generation to understand. I'm old enough to remember before the internet, when information came from books, newspapers, magazines, and the like.
These were carefully architected pieces of writing, consisting of a central thesis pitched to an editor, the editor tweaking the idea and making suggestions for key points to cover, the writer doing the research and writing the first draft, the editor responding with notes, and then a final version penned, which was copyedited by a professional, proof read, laid out, type set, and printed, then reviewed again.
But that kind of writing rarely - if ever - still happens. Even my friends who write for The Economist only get one pass by an Editor nowadays.
So - and here's my central musing - in the era of words-on-the-internet, is it a proper assumption that "formal writing represents a final recorded thought?"
Tweets get deleted constantly. Blog posts and news stories get edited after being published, without any notification that the content has been changed. Scientific papers are routinely proven to be complete fabrications, heavily slanted, or undergo heavy revisions after publication. Books on the non-fiction shelves today have proven to be total fabrications (Mutant Message Down Under, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World), and every mass-market book (ignoring all the self-published dreck out there) you pick up today is riddled with so many copyediting errors they can actually be hard to read, or the author's point can be completely muddied. Etc...
So... in this day and age, what is "formal writing"? Your dissertation that one, possibly two people, will ever crack the cover of, scan through briefly, and then never open again? Papers written for schoolwork that add nothing to world's knowledge or canon?
(Just to be clear, I'm musing off the top of my head, asking the questions that I find there... not commenting on your teaching style or intention. I, for one, am someone who greatly treasures the written word, and beautifully crafted sentences and ideas. I mourn the loss of editors and the amazing writers they honed and polished to a shining finish.)