Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write

I've been keeping up with the blogosphere, and there have been a couple of posts that have irked me enough to write a post about linguistics. And that's saying something. A good example is from itsme, who wrote a blog post asking people to please learn how to write. And it received over a hundred uptoots. I'm afraid I have to pull rank here and say I studied English at university, and although the majority of my classes were about reading books, I did also take classes on the meta-disciplinary understanding of how the pedagogy of English is taught, and that gets into what English actually is. To ask someone to write properly is to assume there is a way to write proper. There isn't. There is no universal, static version of English. Or any other language, for that matter. Every dialect of English, including regional accents and non-standard forms, follows complex, systematic grammatical rules. For example, should a writer avoid splitting infinitives, or avoid double negatives? These,…