> there’s a lot more latitude for improvisation in English Lately I've been hanging out on the English Language Learners Stack Exchange. It can be a discouragi

> there’s a lot more latitude for improvisation in English Lately I've been hanging out on the English Language Learners Stack Exchange. It can be a discouraging place. Too many people answer simple questions with complicated explanations of English grammar, when the real question they should answer is "How can I say this the way a native speaker would?" An example: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/152764/is-this-sentence-correct-make-vs-made/152787 https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/152764/is-this-sente... OP wanted to know if this sentence was correct: "Your kindness has (and will continue to) made a difference." The top-voted answer explains that "This sentence is an attempt at parallelling, where a sentence branches into two or more parts. In this case, it also rejoins at the end. The parallelled part must join on to the common part in the same way." And that's just the beginning. The answer goes on to explain about "eliminating the duplicated word sequences" and finally arrives at this sentence: "Your kindness has made, and will continue to make, a difference." That's grammatically correct, but hardly any native English speaker would ever say or write it. In fact, someone commented that the sentence "sounds more German than English to me." My zero-rated answer was "I like to find the simplest way to say things. You can thank a person for their past, present, and future kindness all at once: 'Your kindness always makes a difference!'" I don't care much about the votes, I'm just a bit sad that so many of the high-rated answers on ELL seem to answer the technical questions of grammar instead of helping people sound like native English speakers.