Grammar pet peeves
Maybe it’s more of spelling problems that peeve me. I am not claiming to be perfect at spelling, nor do I have perfect grammar, but it makes me very irate when I see educated individuals making very simple mistakes. This goes for fellow bloggers, those who comment to them and the general population. I spend a fair amount of my time outside of work online and see many cases of people who would sound incredibly intelligent, if only they would use proper English. It’s very difficult to take someone’s arguments or debates seriously when their spelling or grammar is so horrible, you doubt that English is their primary language.
There are a few reasons I will excuse poor language skills.
- Having grown up speaking another language and having English as a secondary (or tertiary) language is a good excuse. I know of one gentleman whose native language is not English who can type far more fluently than a majority of teenagers out there, so this really isn’t a valid reason after all. The eduction system in North America really needs to work on enforcing basic spelling and grammar in elementary school.
- Having poor typing skills is another valid reason. Some people just can’t type to save their souls. These people would benefit from a good spell checker. Some are even built right into the blog sites, or into their web browsers (I love my Firefox!!!). Other times people just type too fast and don’t catch errors. Another example of this is what I like to call “fat finger syndrome”. I sometimes suffer from this when I am very tired, and my fingers hit keys I don’t want them to hit. I wonder why the lettering is worn off my backspace key?
- Sheer stupidity. This is not an excuse.
There are a few things I find inexcusable when it comes to publishing anything that anyone should be taking somewhat seriously, be it a blog, posting in a forum, or simply writing an email to your friends.
- Misusing homonyms:- There, they’re, and their; your and you’re; to, too, and two; it’s and its; whose and who’s; you get the idea. This is stuff you should have learned in Grade 3. There is a place, they’re, you’re it’s and who’s are contractions, their, your, its and whose are possessives.
- Using chat or text lingo in something you want others to take seriously. I don’t care if you have PhD, MD or a million other letters behind your name, if you want me to read it, type out the words. Things like “how r u?” are only acceptable if you are texting me from a cell phone that charges you a buck a letter. To read something like the following excerpt from a blog taken from a medical professional is actually kind of embarrassing.
“if u hav nvr taken it b4 in ur entire lifetime. You, however, would have the answer tho.. or at least in the near future. Its not really my fault when I wun be able to tell you if this medicine will close up ur airways and potentially shut u up forever.”
It’s very hard to take this person’s writing very seriously (even knowing the author is from a non English speaking background)
3. Streetspeak:- by this I mean “gangsta talk”. If you’re not a gangster.. I shouldn’t be hearing you say things like “word up homeboy” and similar phrases. At least in the forum community I frequent, most of the people are white, upper middle class teenagers. None of them are gangsters, gangstas or wiggers, so don’t talk/type like one.
If anyone actually reads this on an ongoing basis, I am sure you could probably find some sort of errors in my logic or in my grammar itself. I am not perfect when it comes to syntax and punctuation and I tend to overuse ellipses… but I like to think that I show that I am an intelligent person by my attention to detail. It’s what makes me a good tech.
we have feelings, too.