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Back in 1990, Leonard and Gilsdorf presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage
elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation
problems, pronoun–antecedent (dis)agreement, and various
examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the “botheration level” of each usage “error”; their conclusions were that 1) academics are (nearly) always
bothered by usage “errors” more than executives and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least
were evolving over time into acceptable English usage.
Just over ten years later, these same researchers have followed up on their original study and have drawn similar conclusions from the more recent data.
View both works by Manning, Alan D.
View all 34 works published by IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication |
The Grammar Instinct
http://www.ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/47/21669/01003698.pdf
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 peer-reviewed
Manning, Alan D.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
2002
Abstract: Back in 1990, Leonard and Gilsdorf presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage
elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation
problems, pronoun–antecedent (dis)agreement, and various
examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the “botheration level” of each usage “error”; their conclusions were that 1) academics are (nearly) always
bothered by usage “errors” more than executives and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least
were evolving over time into acceptable English usage.
Just over ten years later, these same researchers have followed up on their original study and have drawn similar conclusions from the more recent data.
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