What's Standard English? Part 1: Overview

It's getting harder to decide what is Standard English today. The global view of this topic is that Standard English is British English, taught throughout Europe, Africa, Australia, and most of the Asia and the English-speaking Caribbean, while American English is taught in the United States, some of Asia, South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm considering what we practice around the world as opposed to what we learned was proper English. In the business world, writers are pushing back against what constitutes a correct sentence, acceptable diction, and customary punctuation. I see comma splices especially becoming commonplace, writers assigning new meanings to everyday words, and new words not only flooding emails but pouring into dictionaries as acceptable usage. I'm beginning to see more violations of the norm than the norm. If that's true, then aren't the violations the norm? 

In this series, I will explore writing "standards" that most people ignore, whether they are driven by factors such as stylistic preferences, time constraints, or globalization and technology.