I grew up with a grandmother who always used shall and will correctly, and expected me to do the same. I never quite lived up to her expectations, however, and I now live in a time when very few people could live up to them either. The easy explanation for the shall and will problem is that when talking about the future shall is used with I and we, while will is used with the rest of the pronouns. Thus, ‘I shall go to school today,’ but ‘he will go to school today.’ However, the distinctions do not end there as there are always grammatical complications, for if there is a sense of duty or emphasis about something shall may be used by all pronouns as in ‘I shall defend this fort to the bitter end.’
I think about these fine grammatical distinctions as I read emails and texts in today’s world. What would my grandmother, born before the automobile, think about ‘ r u going?’ or ‘lol,’ or more impossible to imagine, ‘WTF?’ And I do understand the addition of acronyms to our language and that times change. I remember vividly as a young bride saying in my father-in-law’s presence, a man who was a WWII Marine veteran, that something was a snafu. His face turned red, and he said with great emphasis that I should not say that. I saw nothing wrong with the word as it meant simply a great confusion. It might have meant that to me, but to the battle-hardened Marine it was not a word but an acronym for something no young lady should know about ------to him it stood for situation normal all f…… up. I even got out a dictionary, and showed him where it appeared as a word, but he was not mollified. To him that word rang with his time on the beaches of the Pacific.
Before you relax too much, I am sorry to say that I am not through with the shall and will grammatical nightmare. When used as a contraction both I will and I shall end up being I’ll which is a relief but not for long. When both are used as a negative it ends up being I won’t and, oh dear, I shan’t. That word sounds straight out of a Jane Austin novel, and something my grandchildren would smile over condescendingly if I used it.
All of this is an example of the changing aspects of language: my grandmother used all aspects of shall and will easily as part of her daily speech, the next generation, me, could use some aspects of the tangle while leaving others behind, and the current generation does not even know there is something to sort out. Where will this lead us? Who knows, but IMHO u r not required to deal with this issue as it may be TLTR and in any case NRN. I’m just sayin……..