rustypolymath wrote:
The best advice I can give you is this: get as comfortable as you can with formal grammar. Train your ear to "hear" good sentences so that, rather than trying to memorize a checklist of acceptable syntaxes or idioms, you can start to "feel out" the consequences of NOT using the appropriate syntax. For example, in the original question on this thread, the consequence of using "instead of" was to entrain literary confusion by juxtaposing the metaphorical "in the place of" with the literal "place." (By the way, the Fowler brothers have an excellent discussion on metaphors and the consequences of inappropriately mixing metaphor with literal meaning. The book, however, is very, very dense.)
I'm hoping to go a long way playing by the ear... Just cant get around to the technical side of things.. Well my first cat should separate the wheat from the chaff