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To: software salesperson who wrote (1379)	2/19/2005 8:43:15 AM
From: DewDiligence_on_SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1834

Your style is not the one used by many leading publications, e.g. WSJ, NYT, The Economist, and Forbes. I have not seen an instance in these publications of the construction: “If he was president [of the U.S.] then…” merely because the referenced individual was 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the U.S. Such a construction would probably sound uneducated and jarring to most readers. (An exception to the above is a verbatim quotation, where most publications have adopted a policy of not correcting errors of usage.) The main determinant for using the subjunctive vs indicative is not the theoretical possibility of the conditional being true but rather the degree to which the speaker intends the conditional to be interpreted as a hypothetical. Example of bad usage: “If I was Warren Buffet I would not be posting on SI.” Because SI is anonymous, for all you know I might actually be Warren Buffet. However, that does not make it correct to use the indicative construction. That’s enough time on off-topic stuff for one day. You can have the last word if you want it. Over and out.