Grammar Police

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this is my pet peeve. as a professional writer, you MUST write correctly. if i am writing a book or a poem or an essay, of course i have to spell correctly and have proper grammar and i want people to tell me if i have a mistake.

on the other hand, i HATE it when people do that about e-mails or posts. if i wanted to, i could probably go through and slaughter everyone's posting in regards to spelling/grammar/syntax/etc. but what's the point????

the english language is very complex. when i am editing my work, i have numerous books that i have to pour over to make sure everything is correct. then i have to have several other people that are well educated in grammar to scrutinize it after i'm done. but this is for work i plan to have published, where it's of the utmost importance to show perfection.

in e-mails and posts, the importance is on what we write--how we convey our emotions and feelings and frustrations and all those other things. proper spelling and grammar mean nothing in regards to that. so long as the meaning gets across--screw the rest!! !!

sorry, there's my rant. can you tell it's a pet peeve for me?
april

Who's English are we going to adhere to, though? Standard English, or Webster's English?

just realized my first sentence was unclear--my pet peeve is when people complain about spelling/grammar in e-mails and posts.

april

You know, every forum I belong to, there is alway someone that complains to the grammar nazis about grammar or spelling. I have long learned, that a lot of posters don't speak American and read around that. Another words I've learned to decipher and not whine!!

I don't see what's wrong with the idea, maybe only if the meaning is very unclear, because there's been plenty of times where the point someone is trying to make is lost in the terrible grammar.

My Grammar was very Cockneyfied, when I've first started posting here. It seems to have gradually polished itself off, over the past year and a half. Seeing a lot of samples of Good Grammar has really helped.

When I see Grammar that isn't perfect, I look back to the way that my Grammar was, and I don't freak out.

Should it really matter on how someone uses grammar in the end. If it makes sense it really should not matter at all.

I tend to be a stickler for correct grammar and spelling--I am a technical writer. However, I have problems with a grammar police. Sometimes, a word would get misspelled in a post because of a typo--this has happened to me on a number of posts. There are also people on this list whose mother tongue is not English, and have problems with English grammar and especially English spelling. I think English has the most irrational spelling of any language that I know.

MY pet peeve is grammar police. Screw anyone who can't cope with imperfection. Try being the poor guy/girl who struggles with these things and, just to add insult to injury, has to put up with the whining of the spelling and grammar police.

I'm a writer, but I don't obsess over posts, e-mails, etc. Half the time, I make mistakes too, but it's usually, because I'm typing so fast. The only time I pull the grammar police card is when I'm with my niece and nephew, who are still in school and learning. On the internet, you can't be a stickler about it. The people involved in discussions are from all over the place and have different ways of spelling things. I'm also sensitive to the subject, because my bf is dyslexic and can't help himself.

With the overuse of the texting language, perfect grammar is going to be dead in about 10-20 years. Sit back and enjoy what decent grammar we have while it's still around.

Grammar Police
Arrest this man
He writes in fragments
And buzzes like a fridge

I was good at spelling and grammar, but I stopped caring once I discovered that it doesn't really matter. As long as I can read the posts without struggling it doesn't bother me.

Were such an office filled, I would, simply for personal amusement, be compelled to continuously emit copious amounts of tortuously constructed syntactical mayhem, liberally interspersed with the most egregious spelling errors imaginable, all in the hope of inducing a brain implosion in the one deputized with enforcement responsibilities.


werd ...

I used to HATE grammar police.

My own spelling and grammar are improving a lot, so now I'm starting to understand why incorrect spelling and grammar bothers some people so much. Being slow in learning English I'll willingly admit to being terrible at times and far from perfect now, but when you do get glaringly obvious errors it's like nails on a chalkboard.

I improved my English because I spent so much time on forums having the grammar police on my back that I started using Microsoft Word to check my posts before posting to avoid people using this as an excuse to undermine me, this helped a LOT by showing me my mistakes as I typed. Seriously, grammar has always been a blind spot for me, using Word in this way helped me more than anything else ever did.

Why don't others do this? Or if you know your English is poor use the spell check function on Google Chrome (so useful!), then you can post without bothering others, having the grammar police bother you, or having the pettiness in forums of having people ignore your arguments based on a typo or a mistake in your grammar.