![\"You](\"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/bad-grammar.png\" "\\"bad")
<\/p>\nNotice anything strange about the following ESPN.com headline from last night?<\/p>\n
I’ll give you a hint: “it’s” grammar sucks.<\/p>\n
Now, I’m not a good grammar theorist; frankly, I couldn’t define its more esoteric concepts and have to repeatedly remind myself what a gerund is.<\/p>\n
But when I was growing up, I internalized the basic rules of grammar by inference — by reading lots of books. Books have editors and even the most basic adhere to a cohesive set of grammatical rules. Sure, descriptivists love arguing about “he\/she” vs. “their”, the proper use of semicolons, and whatnot, but in my experience, when it comes to published media there’s a staggering level of agreement about what constitutes good grammar.<\/p>\n
Of course, I have my quirks. The New Yorker <\/em>is as good as modern writing gets, but I still grimace when its editors throw in gratuitous umlauts<\/a>, as in “co\u00c3\u00b6operate”, <\/em>and “ands”, as in “three hundred and twenty”. On the other hand, I’m cool with split infinitives (find the one in paragraph 3!) and sentence-ending prepositions. But on the whole I can read an entire issue of the magazine and only set the internal grammar klaxons firing once or twice.*<\/p>\n Anyway, the web is ruining all that. The average Facebook user is a grammar-ignorant heathen who probably thinks that “Strunk and White” is a web comic. Worse, popular bloggers — people who actually make a living as writers — are just as bad, and more shameless. TechCrunch routinely has elementary-school level grammatical gaffes on its front page, and it’s by no means an exception.<\/p>\n I wonder: is this because (a) bloggers just don’t know grammar, or because (b) most<\/em> writers don’t know grammar, but only bloggers that don’t have copy editors fixing their mistakes?<\/p>\n Fine, I understand that no one wants to hear complaints about bad grammar. It’s overdone. But I’m not out to change other people; this is my personal forum for narcissism, after all.<\/p>\n The problem is that the Internet’s poor grammar is killing me<\/em>. It’s making me dumber, and I know it, like I’m Charlie Gordon in the second half of Flowers for Algernon<\/a><\/em>. I read these blogs every day. I learn by inference. And my internal inference generator, which long ago induced the basic rules of grammar from reading texts, is going haywire.\u00c2\u00a0I sometimes double-take when I see a grammatically correct phrase because I expect to see something incorrect. <\/em>It’s really bad.<\/p>\n (For instance, I might read that last paragraph, and hesitate on the last sentence for just a second… is that “It’s” actually correct? Is there any truth in a morally relative universe?)<\/p>\n And now… the front page of ESPN. Ouch.<\/p>\n P.S. My computer science friends tend to be exceptionally good at grammar. Is this because the same skills that enable you to understand the syntax and semantics of a programming language also enable you to grok English grammar? Or maybe the maddening attention to detail that’s required to write good bug-free(-ish) code also applies when writing prose.<\/p>\n * A strict nerd will realize that if you have no<\/em> internal grammar rules, your klaxons will never fire. In other words, your internal grammar checker is sound but not complete. But rest assured that I have plenty of rules, and strictly hew to them to irritating effect. I mean affect. Just kidding!<\/p>\n from “you’re” favorite paper, the\u00c2\u00a0WSJ<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yeah, so these are still bloggy, but the writers are real journalists, and anyway the posts have been up for hours and the errors are still there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Notice anything strange about the following ESPN.com headline from last night? I’ll give you a hint: “it’s” grammar sucks. Now, I’m not a good grammar theorist; frankly, I couldn’t define its more esoteric concepts and have to repeatedly remind myself … Continue reading
Addendum: I posted this last night. By 8am this morning, an old high school friend, Allison, sent me two more mainstream errors:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/your.png\" "\\"your\\"")
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/roll.png\" "\\"roll\\"")
<\/a>from the Chicago Tribune<\/a>. We’re on a “role” now!<\/p>\n