Grammar And Spelling Scolds

I see your doing fine.  Is that sew you can tale everyone about the affects of you’re new job?

Who amongst us just went into a silent – or maybe not so silent – conniption fit regarding the small paragraph above?  Did you have an overwhelming urge to fix all the mistakes?

I ask this because we writers are prone to be spelling and grammar snobs.  If we see something spelled improperly, be it online or in print, it is just our nature to rush to correct it.  Part of this is because we want people to properly spell words and use correct sentence structure, but a larger part for so many of us is how much it irritates us.

A few of the problems above are obvious.  Sew is different from so, and that’s not a mistake many make.  Such a poorly written few sentences tend to lend us to thinking that the writer in question is pretty stupid.  And if it stopped there, folks might accept us as simply being educated.  However, it doesn’t, because of the worst offender of the lot – your versus you’re.

I freely admit to snarkily correcting folks who use the incorrect version of the word.  I sit on my high horse and judge their educational prowess as subpar because they obviously don’t understand the proper form.  Why, if they were as smart as I, then they’d know that your is possessive and you’re means you are.  Yet that attitude is part of the problem, is it not?

Most folks not completely gripped in the throes of OCD would look at the first paragraph outside of your versus you’re and rightly judge the intellect of the person who wrote it.  Language is a basic guide to intelligence, and most judge those who don’t use it properly, especially when the mistakes are so outlandish.  However, there are a few, such as the aforementioned your, that set us off and get us to unfairly judge others because we’re nitpicky.

Don’t get me wrong – we should be nitpicky to an extent.  After all, we write for others to consume, and if they stumble over our words, then we suck at our job.  But most folks don’t write for a living, and they’ll make mistakes.  Rather than look to the meaning of what they wrote, we tend to focus on that one glaring/annoying error and judge them solely off of that.  And that lends itself to people believing, quite rightly in many cases, that we’re effete snobs who can’t get past a word.

Your isn’t the only one(others being their versus there and would of versus would’ve), but it is undoubtedly the most common.  We’re scolds over this because, dammit, shouldn’t people known how to use the right word?  But we miss so much and grate on so many when we do this.  Our scolding isn’t winning us any friends, and I suspect many continue to do this precisely because they know it gets under our skin.

We’ve got to let go.  If you want to judge someone silently, go right ahead, but ask yourself just how much openly calling them stupid has gained you?  You win many friends that way?

(PS – I called this grammar and spelling scolds, but this is mostly about spelling, despite so many saying that spelling correction is being a grammar nazi.  I mean, grammar and spelling are two very different things, aren’t they?  But hey, you knew that.)