If you pick up a selection of this week's newspapers, it won't take long before you come across an article decrying the standard of young people's written communication skills. Here's a startling, and yet typical, example from the Guardian: according to the UK Recruitment and Employment Commission, ‘graduates are twice as likely to make mistakes as those who did not go to university’ in their CVs and letters of application (Jones and Ashton). What kind of mistakes are they making? Mainly spelling errors or grammatical ones, apparently. What does that mean? The OED defines grammar as:

If only there was a Department, a physical place, where we could go to discover these rules and ‘established usage’ of English. Because the biggest difficulty of being requested to be precise in your use of language is that there is no universal or standardised guidebook to English grammar, with rules that everyone in English-speaking communities adheres to. Firstly, spoken and written grammars are different: what is acceptable in speech may not be in writing.