Week 6: Grammar

Alright loyal readers, we need to talk about something: your grammar sucks. Never has a generation had more trouble with simple English than ours. I don't know if that's actually true, but I can't imagine that our society would have made it this far if our ancestors spoke and wrote the way most everybody does today. I don't know if it's an education issue or just that people don't care, but I often feel as if I'm one of the few people in college who graduated from third grade. It's nearly impossible to peer review papers based on content because I have to sift through pages upon pages of grammatical bullshit. Buckle in for a lesson.

Here's a simple chart I made to help you out

They're, Their, There: It's really pretty simple. The items found in the chart above are some of the most common mistakes even though they're probably the simplest to fix. I'm so tired of people saying things like "your a asshole, stop corectin my grammer." While I may be "a asshole," I'm really just trying to help you pull that D+ average up so you can graduate from your 7th year of college with some dignity. No matter how many times I explain the simple rules found above, I will undoubtedly receive a text soon afterwards that reads: "my teacher is such a dik! He is makin me go 2 his office but i dont wanna go over their." If you don't know why either of those sentences are incorrect, educate yourself until you figure it out. I can guarantee that if you memorize these 5 rules, all of which you should've memorized before you left the womb elementary school, you'll see at least a letter grade higher on every paper.

Me and my friends: If you never write a single thing, you could maybe squeak through life without learning those 5 rules and avoid sounding like you fall on your head every morning. There are lots of grammatical rules, however, that are easily identifiable in every day speech. One of them is "me and my friends" or, correctly, "my friends and I." If you say "me and John went to the movies," or something equivalent, I assume that you drink a lot of Mountain Dew and enjoy listening to Nickelback. Of course, everybody makes mistakes and I'm only talking about the people who say this regularly. Here's how this rule works, Mountain Dew-drinking imbeciles: if you're saying, "I am going to learn how to use proper grammar," then for you and a friend it would be "John and I are going to learn how to use proper grammar." On the other hand, if you're saying, "Cole taught me some valuable lessons today," then for you and a friend it would be "Cole taught Stacy and me some valuable lessons today." Get it? Got it? Good. Moving right along.

Incorrect spelling: You can't fix stupid. There is pretty much nothing you can do about this one except learn how to spell. There's even a magical computer program that exists today called spellcheck. This wizardry will look at what you've typed and will put an idiot-proof red line underneath the word if you spelled it wrong. Seems simple, right? Evidently not. I had a group project last year on discrimination in the workplace, and one of my group members was writing about sexism. Throughout the entire paper she spelled it sexisum. Not, once, not twice, but every damn time she used the word. Is "sexisum" a recognized word in the dictionary of computer magic? You bet your sweet ass it's not. And when was the last time you saw a Facebook post from that high school friend who always posts selfies that didn't have a spelling mistake in it? Oh, never? That's what I thought. That's the same person who thinks Alaska is part of Canada and spells Native Americans "Nate of Americans." Frequent spelling mistakes (learning disabilities aside, and trust me, Greg who works at Chili's doesn't have a learning disability) are a great mark of idiocy.

I hope you all enjoyed this week's installment, and maybe some of you even learned a thing or two.