In writing, the reader is often remote. In formal writing, the writing represents a final recorded thought.

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.)

Yeah well I just got an immediate 0 on a paper for one incorrect citation of a quote so I'd like to cash in on one cynicism please

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.

You can lead a horse to water...

The distinction everyone seems to be talking about here, without using the right terminology, is between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar. Basically, descriptive grammar aims to take utterances of speakers of the language and uncover the rules underlying those utterances, while prescriptive grammar aims to provide rules and guidelines for producing those utterances.

So, your student was completely right in observing how native speakers will use 'which'. From a descriptive grammar standpoint, it's not syntactically wrong. In fact, it's pretty much impossible for a speaker of a language to come up with a sentence that's syntactically wrong as long as it's understood by other speakers. From a prescriptive grammar standpoint, whether or not that's syntactically correct depends on which grammar rules you're subscribing to.

As for your hyphen issue, English is very resistant to word pairs becoming compound words. First the word pair needs to enter common usage, then the hyphen is introduced, and eventually, the hyphen is removed. This is in contrast to other languages which add compound words very easily. If English was more like those languages, the whole thing would probably be a single word by now ('parttimejob'). 'part time' is currently in a period of transition between being a common word pair and being hyphenated, so there's a little bit of ambiguity right now. From a descriptive grammar standpoint, the writer should just use whatever comes naturally, and that will reflect how far that word pair is in becoming a compound word. From a prescriptive grammar standpoint, the writer should use whatever the grammar they're following dictates.

It seems you're teaching a prescriptive grammar for the purposes of helping them succeed in academia. Perhaps it might help if you explain the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar and explain why you're teaching the prescriptive grammar and why academic writing is the way it is. Not everything can be explained by written vs spoken language and by the explanation that written language needs to be more unambiguous. I mean, a written letter to your mom doesn't have nearly as many of the requirements of writing for an academic journal. While plenty of it is to reduce ambiguity, a lot of it really just is by convention. Some of that convention seems to be kind of pointless, and in terms of producing understandable writing today, it's totally unnecessary. But convention, itself, can be useful. It prevents written texts within a community from going through the constant changes fluctuations everyday speech goes through, and only lets in the major changes the language. In other words, it's more stable. When reading a paper from decades ago, you don't need to be familiar with all of the language trends from that time. No need to know what 'groovy' means or whatever other terms and phrases they were using back then that never caught on in the long run. Additionally, by having a standard, it makes your writing more accessible to speakers of a variety of dialects of English. It means everybody will need to learn how to conform to the standard, but the benefit is that they don't need to struggle to understand the writer's strange writing style every time they read a new paper - they only need to learn ONE variation of English. Speech patterns and spelling rules that are wide-spread enough and used consistently enough will eventually make it into the standard. These properties are really important in academia, so that's why they use their writing conventions.

I don't know if I should write what I'm about to write, but here it goes.

Punctuation and grammar are important. The way we write tells a lot about us. Even if we don't think it is important to follow some of the rules, it will at best show that you are not concerned about following something that is an established standard. At worst you can be easily interpreted as someone who is if not uneducated than at the very least lacking in many respects. On one end, it is very superficial and can lead to some presumptuous judgements or making a poor first impression. On the other hand, it is the writer's fault for assuming that others have just as loose opinion on certain standards and disregard 'arbitrary' (but then again you are guilty for saying that something is arbitrary… arbitrarily ;P) rules.

More so, as goobster pointed out, there are quite a lot of differences between the way we write and speak. Something that simply sounds right is oftentimes a wrong way to write it and vice versa where something that looks right can make you cringe after saying it out loud.

That said, it's important to recognise if perhaps the rules and standards of the language keep up with the way we communicate. I don't know how this will hold for English, but here is my pet-peeve in Polish that is pretty much vestigial but enforced strictly and for a reason that almost no-one alive remembers. And even then, it was mostly the people with higher education. Back then, you could quite literally tell if someone is of higher education by the way they pronounced even the everyday names and objects.

We have many repeated letters. There's u and ó, h and ch, ż and rz. They have their own pronunciation rules, grammar, ways of spelling etc. However, most people who cared about different pronunciation were pre-WWII academics. But after events like Katyń Massacre and lesser known Intelligenzaktion have pretty much purged people who knew the difference. Today we still have to obey these complex rules, but even modern academics speak like majority of pre-WWII people. Paradoxically and for a reason that I can't explain, most of the people who still use different pronunciation live in rural areas of Poland, which while much closer to proper pre-WWII Polish sound just wrong to many people from cities. Anyway, some examples:

-Chemia (chemistry), Herbata (tea).

- Chrom (chromium), Hrabia (count, the title of high nobility not as in "I'm counting things").

Exchanging h to ch in any of them would look weird, but most people would say them without any real difference. And as I have mentioned, most of them are from rural Poland and unlikely to even bother with academia. Same with other letters that have dual notation.

It's important to follow standards, but said standards must be:

- Clear.

- Reflect a way the language is used.

- Allow for providing the strictest meaning that you want to convey with minimal amount of exceptions.

If that's not met, it's going to be only a growing problem.

I've heard this argument before, but I don't agree to the degree you're using it.

There is definitely a distinction between "formal" language and informal, and people will judge the quality of writing by the degree that it conforms to accepted practice in that field. When I went to law school, our first semester writing class was focused in large part in learning the arcane and quite frankly stupid citations rules that our profession uses.

But the problem is, these aren't really what our profession uses. They're kind of the basis, but really they're the rules used by law schools and journals. Courts use similar rules, but have their own local flavor. The Supreme Court, for example, has different rules for italicizing certain things than the Blue Book (the standard legal citation manual). But so what? It's not like the issue of whether the word "see" is in italics suddenly changes its meaning or makes it harder to understand. This also ignores other things like the fact that the editors of each successive edition of the Blue Book like to change things just to make their mark, rather than because there's a reason to.

Language is only valuable to the extent that it's understood, and that relies in large part on standardization. We all have to be on the same page. However, this often gets taken too far. I'm having an incredibly difficult time imaging a scenario where either of the two examples you used would create any ambiguity. I get that a term of art for a given field would look weird if spelled differently, but that just goes back to the standardization thing.

Too often, I think, this kind of thing becomes a way to separate people, and can overtake the underlying ideas. So we need to be wary of creating arbitrary rules for rules' sake. The "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule is a perfect example: this was made up by teachers in the 19th century to mimic Latin grammar, simply because they wanted English to be more in keeping with Latin, and therefore better somehow. It serves no purpose, and can often actively inhibit clarity, requiring the writer to go through all of those "with which" or "of which" contortions to match.

I'll admit this is kind of a bugaboo with me, because I think far too often it's a form of intellectual snobbery. I also think it cheapens communication; some of the richest literature deliberately ignores convention. I mean, can you read Cormac McCarthy and say his books would be better if he used basic punctuation? I also think it's quite arrogant. I wouldn't try to mimic the English of the inner cities in a courtroom, but that doesn't mean that version of English is "incorrect" overall.

So again, your writing/speaking distinction is not enough in and of itself to justify such arbitrary rules. The question is whether the thought is clear, full stop (which can include conforming to standard terminology, to be sure).

I want them to know what correct, concise, unambiguous writing looks like so that they can at least have choices.

I'm sorry, but this mindset drives me absolutely crazy. You're not the Emperor of English! No one person gets to impose their ideas of what a language "should" be by fiat. You can say what the conventions are, but I think it goes too far to say that this is "correct," as if there is some objectively True English out there. Language by its nature is not objective, and saying that it's "correct" just comes across, to me, as condescending. Just as you're trying to get your students to communicate clearly, it's important, frankly, what words you use.

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.

That's strange. I mean, I agree that Spanish writing definitely favors run-on sentences to a greater degree than English, but plenty of languages do this...Ancient Greek writers would go a full paragraph with only one active verb. It's different, sure, but it's ridiculous to say that it's per se hard to understand.

academic bubbles work great for academic professions.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

"I understand why using “which” to refer to an idea instead of a single noun is syntactically wrong....

I don't understand it entirely. What constitutes an idea? These are some of my recent usages of the word which. Did I get it wrong somewhere?

the gist you mention, which is the main topic of the video

But I also really enjoyed The Ballad of Mr. Steak, which is a stylistic precursor to

that is the part that resonated the most with me. Which might explain the urge that I always have

Tesla isn't prevented from driving by transportation authorities, which is the point I was trying to make

I do recall that one shouldn't use relative pronouns to start a sentence. Other than that, these seem like good uses to me. For me, concise and unambiguous writing is more important than getting the minutiae of writing correct.