Why It Matters That You Write Right

In this day and age, we read and write more than ever.  The sheer variety and ubiquity of the internet has led to the written word dominating our lives.  Our personal life, with texts and e-mail.  Our social lives, with Facebook and all similar social media, and our cultural lives, with sites just like this one – thousands of them – forming the backbone of our cultural consciousness: the zeitgeist.

It’s great; everyone has a voice.  It’s a nightmare; everyone has a voice.  One of the unavoidable downsides of this is that we’re exposed to a much larger percentage of things that are badly written.  And since most people learn the rules of the written language the same way they learn to speak it – by seeing and doing – there are way, way more opportunities to take in bad information.

This may seem like a minor point.  So you wrote “then” when you should have written “than.”  Big deal.  One little error.  And I’d agree with you.  But this post isn’t about errors.  It’s about mistakes.  And like the saying goes, an error isn’t a mistake until you refuse to correct it.  This is a post for the people who write on the internet, the people who don’t have the time or money to have their work professionally edited.  This is a post about the little things.  About taking the time to do something the right way.  Because when our attention spans are short enough that we can barely get through a few paragraphs before we start skimming, every word counts.

First, let me tell you what this post is not about.  It’s not a rant about people who conflate ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ (but, uh, don’t do that). It’s not a post about nitpicking.  “Grammar Nazi” is a pretty loaded term.  I mean, anytime you equate something or someone with a Nazi, you’re not exactly being calm and thoughtful.  The mental picture of some elderly librarian-type gleefully cutting into someone’s writing with a red pen, pointing out all their typos, is not what I’m talking about.

catherine-zeta-jones-zorro-798595999

 

Stick with me, guys.  Look, it’s a really incredibly pretty girl!

Everyone makes errors.  Everyone has typos.  Even the very best writers make about one mistake per 1000 words (a number that I absolutely made up, but is still probably true).  Professional writers get their work professionally edited.  There are people called line editors whose entire jobs consist of meticulously reading a manuscript and finding mistakes.  Not content editors (that’s a whole different thing) but someone who goes line by line, trimming stray apostrophes and eviscerating dangling modifiers.

So, there’s nothing wrong with making an error.  They happen, and if you’re the only one editing your work, they’re going to slip through.  I’m sure there are several errors in this very piece.  Errors are analogous to a slip of the tongue, like saying “I’ll take the ten-pound dog of bag food.”  Easily forgivable.

Still with me?  No, wait, stick around!  Look, it’s a really hot guy!

No, what I’m talking about are mistakes.  If errors are a slip of the tongue, mistakes are when you pronounce “library” without the “r,” or pronouncing “nuclear” like it has an extra “u.”  I’m talking about things you don’t even think to question because you’ve seen them used a certain way.  Insidious little nuggets of disinformation that spread, like a virus, until no one knows what the hell the word “ironic” actually means anymore.  Or even worse, the wrong but somehow prevalent meaning of a word will slowly, bizarrely, creep around to the exact opposite of what it actually is, like in the case of poor, poor “nonplussed”.

So, why does all this matter?  Why should you devote one iota of thought into using words correctly?  Why should you care at all about the nuance of grammar?  Here’s why:

1.  If you don’t, you’ll look stupid

Not the most tactful way to say it.  I suppose I could have gone with “your presentation will be sloppy,” or “people might regard your ideas with less merit if they aren’t presented in a professional manner.”  But the fact of it is, you get the easy, simple stuff wrong and you come off like an idiot.  When there’s no voice, no body language, when it’s just text, just these words that you’ve written?  You conflate “it’s” with “its” and you might as well be writing in crayon.  I worked at a real estate office that was hosting a get-together that included families.  My co-worker typed up the flier, and at the top, it read:

“Parent’s are asked to supervise there children.”  To me, the flier looked like this:

child-s-crayon-drawing-5374722

 

I once saw a breakfast menu that said, “Try our selection of fine tea’s.”  I thought, OK, did they not have anyone edit their menu before they printed 50 of them?  Are they this sloppy with their food, too?  The place went out of business a couple months later.  Was there a connection?  I like to think so.

Point of the point: When you’re writing on the internet, when it’s impersonal and our attention spans are so short that most people are looking for a reason to stop reading, getting the easy stuff wrong can be a deal-breaker.

2.  It wrecks the flow of your writing

Did your teachers talk about “tone” in your English classes?  Mine did.  Every great writer you love has tone coming out of his or her ears.  Tone is a tricky thing to pin down.  It’s made up of all the tricks in the writer’s toolbox like diction and pace and alliteration.  It’s the way you can recognize a Douglas Adams quote even if he’s not named – because no one else writes like Douglas Adams.

Bad grammar muddies your tone.  It’s the literary equivalent of mumbling.  You might have style and panache, but if you use apostrophes like scatter-shot over random words with “s” in them, it’s going to take me out of the moment every time.  It’s going to stop my eyes on the page, a hiccup, a break.  Try to read the following paragraph smoothly – you can’t.  Your eyes won’t let you.  (Credit to Rob Kyff, San Jose Mercury News)

“The amount of grammer and usage error’s today is astounding. Not to mention spelling. If I was a teacher, I’d feel badly that less and less students seem to understand the basic principals of good writing. Neither the oldest high school students nor the youngest kindergartner know proper usage. A student often thinks they can depend on word processing programs to correct they’re errors. Know way!

Watching TV all the time, its easy to see why their having trouble. TV interferes with them studying and it’s strong affect on children has alot to due with their grades. There’s other factors, too, including the indifference of parents like you and I. A Mom or Dad often doesn’t know grammer themselves. We should tell are children to study hard like we did at they’re age and to watch less TV then their classmates.”

Does your brain hurt yet?  Eyes twitching a little?  Do you even remember individual sentences or their content?

It’s not nitpicking, it’s not something only intellectual snobs care about, it’s not something to take lightly.  It’s the difference between being understood and being dismissed.

3. Nuance is important on its own

Remember, something as simple as a comma can be the difference between “I’m starving!  Let’s eat, Grandpa!” and “I’m starving!  Let’s eat Grandpa!”

4. Because this is the only way it’ll ever happen

 

words-cant-describe

It’s impossible to do in person.  Correcting someone’s grammar or word usage is, for lack of a better term, a dick move.  There’s no way that you don’t come off like a giant douchebag.  The absolute best-case is that the conversation grinds awkwardly to a halt before starting back up again.  “Man, look at that sky.  The storm clouds are literally at the doorstep.”  “We’re outside, there’s no door out here.  You’re using ‘literally’ wrong.”  (awkward pause) “Oh, yeah.  Thanks.” (awkward pause) “So, you think it’s gonna rain?”

Can’t be done.  You’ll come off as smug, or condescending, or a prick.  Or a smug, condescending prick.  The only forum where you can have an honest discussion and perhaps learn something is one like this.  You don’t know me, I don’t know you.  I’m not picking on anyone in particular, and there’s no back-and-forth argument where someone can get defensive.  Just this.

So, what can you do?

Start with the basics.  There are two (well, two-and-a-half) basic categories when it comes to common mistakes.  And guess what?  They’re all easy – so, so easy – to avoid.  I’m not going to talk about split infinitives or whose/who/whom, or that/which.  I’m talking about stuff like:

Homophones and Apostrophes

These overlap.  The basic problem:  Most people have much more experience speaking and listening than they do reading and writing.  So words that sound the same get mixed up, all the time.  The Golden Oldies: your/you’re, it’s/its, to/too/two, there/their/their.  The heavy hitters:  accept/except, affect/effect, then/than.

Some of them you just need to know, but some of them there’s no reason to ever get wrong.  I mean, “it’s” always, always means “it is” or “it has.”  But because of the apostrophe, and the fact that “apostrophe = belongs to” is a thing that people think, you see sentences all the damn time like “put the book back on it’s shelf.”  Look, every time you write “it’s,” just expand it out to “it is” and see if your sentence still makes sense.  Boom!  Now you should never, ever, ever get that wrong again.  Right?  Right???

Apostrophes, by the way, are the weeds of the literary world.  They’re constantly popping up where they have no business.

Apostrophe-man.col1_

 

Stupid, stupid English.  To use the same punctuation to denote both missing letters (contractions, such as “couldn’t”) and to indicate possession (“take the rat poison out of the kid’s lunchbox, please.”) is just stupid on a monumental level.  If you want to get all technical about it, it’s really only doing one thing – replacing letters – but the letters it’s replacing in the case of it indicating possession have been phased out of the English language.  Thanks a lot, English.

Go here to find out the whole story.  No, seriously, go there.  You might learn something.

http://www.dreaded-apostrophe.com/

Come on, you’re really not clicking on a site called “Dreaded Apostrophe?”  Anyway.  Problem number two:

Language Drift

For whatever reason, words do this.  Someone gets the notion in his head that “bemused” kind of sounds like “amused,” so it must mean “kind of amused.”  Sorry, wrong.  (It means puzzled, confused, or bewildered)  But then that someone used it in a newspaper article, and, like herpes, it just couldn’t be stopped.  The only way to combat this is to use these words correctly, as often as you can.  You should go out of your way to use these words because they need your help.  And if anyone gives you any flak, just pull a Will McAvoy:

 

Some other words that could use your help:

Literally – this one’s easy.  It means “without exaggeration or hyperbole.”  It means you’re not speaking figuratively.  If someone tells you, “I could literally eat a horse,” bring them a horse.

Peruse – “to study intently.”  Flipping through a magazine isn’t perusing it.  Intently pouring over your research notes, on the other hand, would be perusing.  I hope you perused this article.

Pristine – “in its original state.”  Most people use it as a synonym for “clean.”  Close, but not quite.  It may seem like a trivial difference, but we already have more than a few words that mean “clean” and nothing that captures the exact meaning of “pristine.”

Nonplussed – For whatever reason, it seems like it means “cool and collected.”  It means almost the opposite, though – “startled to the point of speechlessness.”

Travesty – like the word bemused, I’m guessing this is one people get wrong because it just sounds like “tragedy”?  That’s kind of depressing.  It actually means a mockery, or a parody.

Tip of the iceberg, folks.  For more on this, I recommend the following links:

8 Words the Internet Loves to Confuse With Other Words

9 Words You Didn’t Know You Were Screwing Up

9 Words You’re Confusing With Other Words

So, debate time.  Did I convince you that this is important?  Are you ready to join the Mission to Civilize?  Or do you not see what the big deal is?  Next time you type out something to post on your blog, are you going to peruse (hah!) it and craft it until it has the clean lines of a racing yacht, or will you join the hordes of barbarians who do unspeakable things to apostrophes?

Sound off below.

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14 Comments

  1. I agree… to an extent. Unfortunately, being married to a linguist has forced me to be sympathetic to the problem that our “Standard Written English” may as well be called “Standard White English.” Part of the (supposed) beauty of online discourse is that everybody has a voice, even those who use a different voice than SWE.

    That said, a lot of people don’t bother to learn the mechanics of their dialects, either. That you speak one doesn’t necessitate aptitude in writing it. And I’ve found the best dialect writers tend to also have SWE down cold. Furthermore, many people who commit these sorts of errors/mistakes/crimes ARE attempting to write in SWE. So… it’s complex, I suppose, but in the end I think the biggest takeaway for me is that writing ought not be a casual enterprise.

    Personally, I used to be a lot better at wielding the grammar sword than I am now. I need to dig out my Chicago Manual of Style again. I was a journalism major in college, so I’m sensitive to good writing but more sensitive to deadlines. Curious; do you have a background in this at all, or are you just a “concerned citizen?”

  2. While this isn’t the sort of article I normally see on Unreality, it’s nice to see someone attempting drop some knowledge about writing. I hope that others, especially those who commit these apostrophe atrocities, read the full article and click on links that you provided. It never hurts to learn a thing or two.

  3. Definition of nonplussed (adj)
    Bing Dictionary
    non·plussed [ nòn plúst ]
    1.confused: surprised, confused, and uncertain what to do or say
    2.cool and collected: calm and unperturbed.

    Um, what?

  4. your jusst maad becuz’ u thnk ur smart lol! u onle “talk” about speling and stuf iff you dont no “anything” about wat yur’e talkig about! fight Me irl’ n00b! lol! [snicker]

    Oh, you forgot to mention random use of quotation marks. That one kills me. I appreciate your use of boobs to make your point, though. It kept me reading because I thought there might be more down the line. Classic!

  5. @David R: Mostly a concerned citizen. I’ve had a few short pieces published but nothing big yet. My degree is in Philosophy, not English, but you need to be a decent writer to excel at either.

    @alex: I know, doesn’t it make you crazy? I have no problem with willful appropriation of words, like using cool to mean good/fashionable/awesome. Because it’s so far from the original meaning, you can always tell from context which meaning was intended. But when it’s “language drift” as in the case of nonplussed, what happens is that it’s used incorrectly in a context where you’d use the correct meaning.

    For example, “nonplussed” is all about someone’s reaction to something.

    “Brian pulled a gun and stuck it between Alex’s ears. Alex looked at him, completely nonplussed.”

    So you can tell from context that “nonplussed” has to do with a reaction to something unexpected, but that’s as far as it goes. Everyone agrees that you use “nonplussed” in a certain kind of situation, but once a certain percentage of people are using it wrong, it’s a self-perpetuating problem because who looks up what words mean anymore?

    It’s a damn shame, because it ruins good words.

  6. @David R – I’d like to hear more about your insights into language and race. This is something I didn’t consider at all when I wrote this. I mean, I don’t have a problem with regional dialect. I’m not one of those people who get snippy and say that ain’t isn’t a word. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “real” word or not, the fact is it’s out there. It isn’t a word that gets used incorrectly or has a meaning that’s gradually gotten confused or muddled, though, which is what I’m talking about.

    It’s hard to see how something like apostrophe usage could have a racial component. Isn’t the whole idea to promote clarity and precision of meaning? I mean writing, “the Parker’s are coming over for dinner” is wrong no matter your background or race. I’d be very curious for you to expand on the subject as it’s one I really didn’t consider.

    @Nick Verboon – Yeah, quotation marks get their share of abuse. I still contend that apostrophes are the most mistreated of the punctuation marks, though. Hah, and I did consider adding more boobs. I figured if I did that it would cross the line from “joke” to “desperate plea for attention”.

  7. I’d be curious to see if you have any recommendations for words to “police,” err, “civilize,” before they drift too far. As alex mentioned, nonplussed has already gone past the point of saving (since it’s been canonized by the dictionaries as an acceptable usage).

    But if we were to triage: which words that haven’t gone ’round the bend are the most in need of protection? What do we put on the “Vocabulary Endangered Species List?”

    (On another note, I learned in grade school that punctuation *always* goes on the inside of quotation marks… is that actually correct? I could see an argument for putting that last question mark on the outside of the quotation mark since the question being punctuated is the whole sentence rather than the title. Grammar correction requested–although I reserve the right to think of you as a smug, condescending prick… just for other reasons.)

  8. I was surprised and slightly curious as to why an article like this would be on Unreality, as it seems slightly out of place. but you really hit the nail on the head (figuratively) for the most part. Being on the internet so often, it’s rare that a day goes by that I don’t see a post about a grammar Nazi or someone correcting someone’s misspelled comment. The part about looking stupid is absolutely true, there is nothing worse than reading and seeing the mix-up of its/it’s, then/then, there/their etc.

    Being able to write and edit is very important in this day and age. If you don’t know the basics, people will most certainly let you know.

    And yes, I proofread that hell out of this before I posted, I’m not a strong writer myself but I like to think I have a grasp on the basics.

  9. I have no intent of trolling, and I’m writing this with good intent. There are quite a few sentence fragments in this article, and there is also a handful of questionable commas among some other minor mistakes. You still made some excellent points and certainly understand bad writing when you see it. However, I would like to encourage you to avoid using editorial-style, informal writing when the topic is grammar. Your message will have much more gravitas if a reader can’t turn it back around on you as easily.

    This is just a tip! 🙂 I enjoyed the article.

  10. irregardless instead of twisting the structure to fit the word, irregard. still not a word, but its a better non word than irregardless. I am sickened that chrome autocorrect refuses to add the squiggly red line under it.

    regard, regardless. irregardless means the former, but everyone uses it to mean the latter. or ladder, as I SEEN wrote before.

    god I feel awful about that last bit.

    another one that gets me; “I could care less!”
    GREAT, so that means you care though right? because the write way to say it would be “I COULDN’T care less!”

    this article really hits the hammer on the nail. I witness numerous mistakes in syndicated blogs all over the ‘net, and it really pisses me off. some things, are minor, but some things, are just so bad it makes you wonder how someone has ever gone through schooling without being beaten by the meter stick, or the yardstick if you are south of my BOARDER.

    http://en.webfail.net/ffdt/im-board-facebook-fail-of-the-day-.html

    one instance, a blogger was discussing a recent even with a captain of a police force.

    lets say it was nowheresville, and he started out with this

    Yesterday a nowheresville capt. joe asshole did something about something and is in deep something.

    capt. is an abbreviation of someones title, not used to abbreviate the actual thing- captain. sorry, I am not as familiar as i used to be with my descriptive words.

    it should read, capt. joe asshole did something………..

    or, a nowheresville captain, joe asshole. the two CANNOT be combined. and it just snowballed from there on. the writer had all kinds of errors that I would forgive for something like a youtube comment, or twitter status, but for a blogger for a major news outlet, it is somewhat inexcusable.

    people just don’t understand that being able to understand what you are saying is one thing. but the easier it is to understand you the better, and that is done through proper grammar and writing techniques. missed the apostrophe in dont wont couldnt etc. thats fine, i know what the word dont means, wont has two meanings, won’t and wont, but seeing as next to no one uses it, you might as well forget about it.

  11. THIS COMMENT IS REALLY LATE so sorry.

    “I’m not one of those people who get snippy and say that ain’t isn’t a word. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “real” word or not, the fact is it’s out there.”

    Well, “ain’t” has an honest history, though its meaning has gotten somewhat muddled over the years, so there’s no reason for people to get snippy about it. I like that word.

    But anyway…

    “It’s hard to see how something like apostrophe usage could have a racial component. Isn’t the whole idea to promote clarity and precision of meaning? I mean writing, “the Parker’s are coming over for dinner” is wrong no matter your background or race.”

    Well, in this specific example I’d say you’re probably right. But more broadly, if we were to look at (say) African American English, then we’d have to get into the different ways AAE conjugates verbs, uses double negatives, etc etc. There are pretty clear features that the dialect has; it’s possible to study it in much the same way you would study American Standard English. If someone wanted to come online and write in AAE, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. It is, after all, the internet. Everybody has a voice, and they deserve to have their own.

    I hope that people writing professionally (or semi-professionally) in a dialect would make an effort to understand HOW to write in that dialect. Unfortunately, this is not always how it works.

    It’s certainly possible to be misunderstood when writing in a dialect like AAE, but it’s shockingly easy to be misunderstood when writing in Standard English, too. You’ll find me messing with all kinds of rules in my articles — I use sentence fragments, start sentences with conjunctions, and probably do a whole host of other things I’m not thinking of or flat-out don’t realize — but couldn’t some of that be considered a personal stylistic flourish? At the very least, some of the rules I break are broken in order to more closely represent the way I actually talk.

    I WOULD say that anybody writing seriously should be a) knowledgeable regarding ASE and b) knowledgeable regarding their own specific dialect and voice. I also think they should strive for clarity, but there’s a lot of modern writers who would disagree with that.

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