What to know to write well?

it should be a piece of cake for US government truthers/conspiracy theorists to show the official fable is accurate.

...which is [likely] also you using the innate grammar for a dialect of English.

"To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Well, at least you inserted (only parenthetically, but still...) the word "likely" for once, in place of your usual blustery cocksure pronouncements, eh?

'likely' was/is appropriate because I don't know of the grammar of all dialects of English and given your record of dishonesty, it might all be an act.


I never knew that dialects had "innate" grammar. If the dialect is born with it's [sic]own grammar, then maybe I don't hafta be, ever think of that?

'likely' was/is appropriate because I don't know of the grammar of all dialects of English

You, by your own admission and by your involvement know little to nothing about the grammar of English. That holds true for the vast vast majority of Americans [and other countries] who also know virtually nothing about grammar yet they are able to function in this incredibly complicated venture.

There ya go, contradictin your own damn self, again, eh? You're saying they don't know it, but they know it. Which is it?

You can read the Pinker article, "Grammar Puss", which explains it well.

“The MIT linguist Noam Chomsky represents everything that's bad about academics. I don't like his intolerant attitude or what I consider tactics that are nothing less than intellectual dirty tricks.”

The main obstacle that we have today to clearly understanding the nature and origin of language is the overly formalistic, anti-empirical, anti-historical influence of Chomsky's paradigm for doing linguistics.”

“It has become very clear in recent years that Chomsky's generative calculus model of linguistics has no relevance at all to anything about actual language. It has also become clear that the main generative notion of the innateness of language is based on flimsy, non-existent evidence.”

“Despite this, it still remains true, that to the world at large, Chomsky's theories are somehow considered an important "scientific breakthrough."

“The Chomskyan approach to language really is irrelevant to language; its claims empty, not explaining anything at all important about language, just some tricks of notation about its own made-up examples. It’s as empty theoretically as it is in its practical usefulness to language studies,which is nil.”

It can’t and doesn’t help at all in language translation, either practical or computer using, in computer speech recognition or language production, in language teaching – it is useless in teaching grammar in school -- and is totally irrelevant to understanding texts, discourses, conversations, language change, language history.”

Chomsky thinks you can understand the whole of language entirely through introspection – asking yourself questions about made-up examples without having to bother with the incredibly hard work of actually studying real language. Of course, his followers among linguists love this approach, because it’s so much easier to study made-up sentences, where you can find exactly what you expect to find, since you put it there, than to go to the trouble to actually immerse yourself in and study the real language that surrounds you.

“ROGER SCHANK is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist; director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences, at Northwestern University; John Evans Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and professor of psychology and of education and social policy. He is the author of fourteen books on creativity, learning, and artificial intelligence, including The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions, with Peter Childers (1988), Dynamic Memory (1982), Tell Me A Story (1990), and The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind (1991).

“Marvin Minsky: Roger Schank has pioneered many important ideas about how knowledge might be represented in the human mind. In the early 1970s, he developed a concept of semantics that he called "conceptual dependency," which plays an important role in my book The Society of Mind.”

“Murray Gell-Mann; I know Roger Schank slightly, and I find that his work has many appealing characteristics. Working with the concept of scripts, he was led into a huge project in education, using computers. As I listened to his description of some of the ideas behind the project, I found myself in sympathy with many of them.”

it is useless in teaching grammar in school --

That sounds like you without the eloquence, layman..