I’ve Become a Grammar Snob – Rant Warning

I love the art of writing immensely and respect all the great leaders of literature from comics to classics.  Thus, it is more than understandable that one of my biggest pet peeves is poor grammar and spelling, especially from someone who claims they are a “professional writer”.  Of course, I will excuse someone if they are writing in a foreign language they have not yet mastered, or if they suffer from dyslexia or any other learning disability related to literacy, but if you are the kind of person that is just too lazy to use the oh so handy spellchecker, well, I’m sorry, but that’s just inexcusable as far as I’m concerned.  Now I’m not talking about the occasional typo, nobody is perfect, but some errors are just downright ghastly to me.

I read a lot – books, magazines, blogs, whatever happens to catch my fancy, but as soon as I begin to spot simple errors, I not only lose interest, I lose respect for the author, and the editor for that matter too.  If I had a nickel for every time I saw the incorrect use of “they’re” and “their”, “your” and “you’re”, “its” and “it’s”, etc., I would probably be a millionaire.  And apparently, the plural of writer is actually writer’s as far as some “professionals” are concerned.  Seriously?

What has happened to our education system?  Are people no longer being taught simple grammar in school anymore?  Or perhaps it’s because our teachers can’t spell either nowadays.  As a former teacher myself, I can attest to the fact that yes, there are indeed teachers out there who cannot spell, and this boggles the mind.  How can people employed to help shape the minds of future generations be so uneducated themselves?  Are our children destined to be doomed?

And for the love of Shakespeare, writers!  Do you have so much going on in your head that you have lost the ability to string your thoughts together in a coherent fashion?  I’ve often found myself reading something that had originally enthralled and captivated me, but then realized I was reading a sentence that went on and on without end, and then it became a fragment of ideas, a jumble of words, a puddle of verbal diarrhoea, and then it strayed from the original prose that caught my interest in the first place, but it was obvious that the writer was unaware of this, and so just kept writing and writing, and then suddenly I no longer had any idea what the person was actually talking about, and completely lost track of what I had just read,  so I had to revert back to the beginning of the sentence only to find myself once again lost in this maze of unintelligible rambling without any form or shape or end in sight.  Are you still with me?  Believe me, I’ve seen this more than once.

Now, if you are one of these offenders who drives me crazy, the sad part is, you probably don’t even realize the error of your ways.  Ignorance truly is bliss.  Or have I really just become a grammar snob?  I can’t possibly be alone on this one.  Writer’s, lettuce unite against these literary atrocities!  Oops!  I mean, writers, let us unite! ;)