The only fact about grammar, is that grammar is subjective. Get 10 English teachers in a room with some commas and you'll get 100 different variations on the same sentence, each justifiably correct. There are many different style guides that give different answers for different aspects of grammar. Instead of trying to shoehorn Bethesda's writing into one style or another, I've tried to keep a very vanilla feel.

I made this patch for my personal use, to preserve Bethesda's style and adjust lines to match where they did not already, when a line has been changed by another mod in my load order. If you're having the same issues, you may find this useful, too. My aim is eventually to expand this into more of the vanilla dialog to make it fully consistent.

For a bit of a preview, here are the rules I'm following so far:

• Capitalization is at its heart, cultural. For this reason, I'm preserving/making consistent any nouns which Bethesda overwhelmingly capitalizes. Examples include: Jarl, Aedra, Daedra, and Dremora. Also included are titles important to specific groups. High King, and Shield-Brother are examples of this.
• Other nouns will be capitalized when they clearly refer to a specific thing or group. Examples include: Apprentices (at the College of Winterhold), College (of Winterhold), and Mages (of Winterhold). (Winterhold had a lot of these, ok?) This also includes familial names like the line "Yes, Mother." and "I told my mother, that I would."
• "The" or "the" before a place name. My personal style is to keep the lowercase as much as possible. If there's more than one Bethesda example of uppercase that isn't clearly something like the title of a place on the map, I'll change it to uppercase.
• Commas should be used before a name or title at the end of a sentence. A classical example of this would be "Let's eat, Grandma!" (eating with your grandmother), and "Let's eat Grandma!" ( if you're a cultist of Namira you should probably use this one).
• ", too" at the end of a sentence. This is extremely subjective. But, as Bethesda has extremely consistently used the comma, I opted to preserve it and add it in when it was missing.
• Oxford commas are non-negotiable. Luckily there aren't too many instances of this that I was able to find so far.
• "?" or "." at the end of a sentence when it starts with something like "Why don't you...". This one is also pretty subjective. It can be taken literally, as a question, or more figuratively, as a declaration. In these cases, I've been listening to the voice line and reading the context around the line in question in order to make a determination that makes sense to me.
• .... at the end of a sentence. Today I learned that having four periods at the end of a sentence, when an ellipsis would end the sentence, can be considered correct. For now, I'm not forwarding these as I think they look weird. If there's overwhelming demand I will forward them as well. Thanks to my wife for pointing this out. ^_^
• Dates, like 4E 201 are written with a capital E and a space after the "e".
• Alternate spellings, where both are correct, will be kept vanilla.
• Hyphenated compound words are being dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
  

I would by no means call myself a linguist, or an expert in the English language - that's the wife - and my aim here is not to make a patch that adheres to exacting standards. The overall goal of this patch is to ensure that Bethesda's style comes across as clean, consistent, and easy to read, as much as possible. To that end, I welcome any suggestions or opinions you may have. I've opened the bug tracker on this mod for your suggestions, and all I ask is that you include the form ID of the line in question in the title, so I can easily find it for comparison and editing. And I definitely could have made a mistake, so if you find something that's inconsistent within the patch itself, please, do let me know!

Installation:

Use MO2, place this plugin after any mods that edit the dialog in a way you dislike. It would probably be fine, but install after hitting the "new" button at your own risk. 

Uninstallation:

Don't. Or do, but then start a new game.

FAQ

What about other fixes that aren't to the dialog/writing itself?
I have made a concerted effort to carry over any fixes that I am aware of, without having to require any other plugins as a master. This may mean that you will need to do a bit of conflict resolution yourself, however the vast majority of fixes have been carried over.

I tried to clean the plugin, and this mod just contains a bunch of iTMs?! Why?
Because it's meant to put things back to the way I think Bethesda intended them in most cases. For this reason, you should not clean this plugin. But you also shouldn't use it if you don't have issues with other mods overriding vanilla dialog.

I'd like to help, where can I find you?
You're quite welcome to join myself and other like minded players over at my Discord server. 

Credit and Thanks

• Thanks to all of the lovelies on my Discord server, who encouraged me to finish at least this phase, and contributed their opinions.
• Thanks to Icecreamassassin for major help with scripts.
• Thanks to Pickysaurus for being awesome and putting up with my crap.
• Thanks to Stonehands and Jelidity for proofreading, and also putting up with my crap.
• Thanks to Jelidity again for fixing a mesh, you're the bestest!
• Thanks to Captain Blob-eye, who made a first pass at some of these for me.
• Image by Janet Gooch from Pixabay