Do you know Hrithik Roshan lent his voice for a song in Kites, and that the music album releases tomorrow ?

Yeah well, I too don’t care. But look at this sentence :

The 36-year-old actor’s debut song, Kites in the Sky, composed music by Rajesh Roshan would be released tomorrow along with other songs of the film.

There are many things wrong with it. First, ‘composed music by Rajesh Roshan’ — plain wrong. And then, my pet peeve : ‘Would be released’. The article is attributed to PTI, which makes it worse. I would expect a respected news organization to know the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’.

From my limited understanding, ‘would’ is used to denote a possible event. The possibility is usually implied or stated explicitly. Will, on the other hand, is for a certainty. So I ‘will’ go to work tomorrow but I ‘would’ not go to work tomorrow. I might be missing corner cases, but you get the gist.

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Since we are at this topic, there is another pair — shall and will. If you don’t know the exact difference between the two, I’d strongly recommend sticking to will. The world doesn’t come crashing down if ‘shall’ isn’t used at all, but it might if ‘shall’ is overused instead of ‘will’.

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Now I don’t think of myself as a suicide bomber for the Grammar Taliban, and I clearly know when I care about semantics and language. Language, for me, remains a mode of communication. Further, not everyone was fortunate to have English as their first language or even study English. It’s not funny just to hear someone speak in broken English. I find it morally incorrect to take note of errors in such cases. But when a person is writing a book, an article, a news piece for the PTI, I don’t think it is incorrect to expect them to know the basics — because they are asking for their writing to be judged.

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All that being said, I am sure I make mistakes too. In case you see errors at this blog, you must write back with comments.

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