Sometimes being an English major is hard, especially when no one really understands what the heck you do at all!

1. We are always putting you into a story.

Whether you’re dating an English major, friends with one, or even just know an English major we will constantly be analyzing you. We will try to figure out if you’re our antagonist or protagonist and whether the symbolism of you sneezing in math class the other day was positive or negative to the storyline.

2. We will correct your grammar.

Some of us are more vocal about this than others, aka the Grammar Nazis, but regardless we’re all doing it one way or another. It may be as simple as muttering under our breathes that you used ‘less’ instead of ‘fewer’ or counting the amount of times in our heads you used the plural instead of the singular. Whatever it may be, just know that we’re doing it.

3. Our workload is heavier than you think.

People often ask me what I do as an English major and seem to think that I must have all this free time on my hands, but that’s not really the case at all. Imagine having to read four novels, write five essays, and edit all of your friends’ papers in one week? Yeah, that’s pretty much all we do with our “free time”.

4. We don’t all want to be teachers.

I would be an awful English teacher. I don’t like children and teenagers annoy me, so no, just because I’m an English major doesn’t mean I want to eventually teach. There is actually a broad spectrum as to what one can do with a degree in English.

5. We make mistakes.

Whenever an English major makes the slightest grammatical mistake or pronounces a word incorrectly in front of her friends, all hell seems to break loose. Hey, we’re human too and we’re going to make mistakes. Sorry, we didn’t catch that comma splice that you wrote in your history paper last week, we have lives!

6. We don’t know definitions off the top of our heads.

I mean, some of us do, but that is like a mere 1%. Most of us know how to use “big” words in a sentence, without knowing the actual word-for-word definitions, so please stop addressing us as if we’re walking dictionaries.

7. Sometimes we get bad grades.

Just because we’re English majors doesn’t mean that our writing is perfect. Sometimes, we royally fuck up on an essay, and that’s okay, because if we knew it all we wouldn’t need to be in school to begin with.

8. No, we don’t know what that author meant.

Sometimes the curtains are just blue, okay?

9. Some of us are good at other things, too.

I mean, this doesn’t really apply to me too much because English is my whole life, but some English majors are awesome at other things like math, science, history, etc.

10. We just love English a lot.