other audiences in your daily, personal,
educational, and other lives. In each instance you need to consider with care who your audience is and what set of grammatical
rules they will expect you to observe in your communications with them. If you don’t know your audience personally—because it is too big, hidden from you behind business
or bureaucratic titles, or simply because you have not yet had a chance to meet with it or gure out who its members are—then your best choice is to follow the rules of
standard English as closely as possible.
If you don’t know your audience, you run the risk that those who hear or read you will see grammatical mistakes or attempts to play with the rules of grammar as evidence of your inability to speak or write clearly or correctly.
Perhaps as important, those who detect grammatical errors in your statements will have to waste time guring out just what you meant to say or how you meant to say it.
Grammatical errors thus certainly fail to meet one of the goals of ordinary communication—e cient transmission of information—and they probably undermine
clarity and brevity as well. We sometimes recognize that our writing or speaking doesn’t meet audience expectations when those we address don’t respond as we want.
It is true that many rules of
grammar are less than absolute, open to interpretation,
and exible, depending on circumstances and your stylistic and personal preferences. But all such invitations to bending or breaking the rules of standard grammar have to be weighed against how such departures from common practices will betaken by your audience. If you are completely con dent that a substandard construction like “ain’t” will amuse or be tolerated by those who listen to or read you, then use the word. If you are at all uncertain how such a word—or any other mistake or deviation from standards—will
be received, then stick to the rules.
Brie y put, audience is the single greatest determining factor in your choice of rules to observe, twist, or abandon. Be very sure of your ground—of your skill as a writer or speaker, which amounts to your ability to judge and properly address your
audience in an appropriate style—if you choose anything but the strictest observation of grammatical rules.
Auxiliary. Verbs are often made up of more than one word. The verb words in such clusters breakdown into main verbs and helping verbs, which are also known as
“auxiliary verbs The
most common auxiliaries are “be,” can could “have,”“may,” might must shall should “will,” and
“would.” Be
“do,” and “have”
and their various forms can also be main verbs.
Auxiliaries combine with many verb forms to produce
tenses, the
passive voice,
moods, and other verb phrases and effects. See also
voice, main form.
