It's hard to figure out who to blame.
I mean, any English (or rhetoric) teacher in the world even the least bit of knowledge would grade a paragraph like this with a D- at best. I taught English to ESL kids for a year and even they wouldn't have written this poorly (for rhetorical and grammatical purposes):
Once again, I'll point out that I have already been educated, and my educators, paid professionals for the most part, had determined my skills in English to be quite proficent. A sentence like that would have raised eyebrows only for its length, once again a stylistic error if unintentional. Once again, I am forced to weigh in on the issue: on one hand, I have my complete literary knowledge and education telling me the sentence is far from a crime against the English language. On the other hand, I have a collection of motley vagabonds whom I do not know telling me I am incorrect. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to discern which I am more inclined to believe. - Vermillion Hawk
Oh boy, where to start with this debauchery. I guess at the beggining.
Red Highlights: Red in this paragraph is what I've used to highlight one of the first signs of rhetorical weakness in someone's writing: ill-used repetition. Rhetorical repetition is actually a tool that can be used to drive home emphasis, but where inexperienced or poor writers/rhetoricians often fail is in choosing a phrase to repeat.
In this case, Vermillion carelessly picked the phrase "once again" to repeat at the start of most of his sentences despite the fact that he wasn't using it to reinforce the SAME action. The problem? The first use of "Once again" does not refer to the same action (reiterating his education) as his second "once again" (reitierating that a run on sentence is a stylistic error, which it only is if it is still grammatically sound). Then, as the final nail in the coffin his third "Once again" refers to a completely different action (being forced to attempt a rebuttal). The point of using a phrase like "Once again" as a rhetorical tool is to emphasize how the same action is necessitated by each successive point. What Vermillion should have done, if he wanted to use "once again", is set the initial action as having to repeat himself. Instead he set the initial action tied to "once again" as a specific thing (reiterating his education) and therefore all subsequent "once agains", in order to be rhetorically accurate, have to follow suit. You can't just use them like a drunk man with no understanding of where he has woken up and expect to make it fly.
In short, Vermillion knows that repetition can be a rhetorical tool but he hasn't figured out why or how to use it properly. He knew the melody but not the notes. It is a classic sign of someone who has taken maybe one or two classes in rhetoric, but knows essentially only enough to embarrass themself when actual students of the it are around... or just people with common sense.
Green Highlight:This is an error Vermillion has been repeating for a few posts now, presumably after misreading the Wikipedia entry on run-on sentences.
He has equated these two facts, when they are in fact very different:
1. Your sentence is an example of a bad run-on sentence with basic punctuation errors that prevent it from being an example of a grammatically acceptable run-on sentence.
2. Your sentence is just a run-on sentence.
The key takeaway here is that not all run-on sentences are bad. In fact, as was explained in the other thread, a clever writer with a keen eye for punctuation can keep a sentence going almost infinitely.
The problem with Vermillion is that at some point he read that run-on sentences can be acceptable, and thus leapt to the horrifically misguided assumption that all run-on sentences are acceptable. This is a big problem, because it has for some reason given his strange mind license to horribly abuse commas under the pretence that the only fault he's committing with his abomination run-on's is a "stylistic one".
This is very far from the truth and it's enabled him to do a great deal of damage to the written word while under the pretence that he's upholding it.
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