First and foremost, allow me to clarify that when I say "grammar is important," I don't mean to the standards of the crazy high school grammar teacher. I’m saying that, regardless of the medium, if you have the ability not to, why choose to sound uneducated?
*Note: "Grammar" here also includes spelling, punctuation, and usage.
1. Poor grammar could be considered a display of ignorance.
Every time there’s an argument online, there is always that one person who says the ironic, “your an idiot,” after which everything that person has said becomes invalid. They then tend to defend their misuse of the word by saying, “It’s just Facebook,” or claiming that they only care about their grammar for important things like school or work. That is absolute nonsense. Regardless of the medium, your grammar is a representation of you. When people on Facebook are incapable of using proper grammar for simple things like "your" and "you're," it reflects poorly on them. That’s why the person who said “your an idiot” would no longer have a valid argument. By demonstrating their lack of grammatical knowledge, they have potentially deterred their readers from accepting what they said to be factually accurate.
2. Employers check social media before hiring now.
Employers are using social media more and more as part of the interview process before filling a position. Having poor grammar on your social media accounts will certainly not help you appear to be a desirable employee.
3. Grammar is the foundation of the English language.
When grammar deteriorates, sentences could be left meaningless or difficult to understand. Since words like "then" and "than" have completely different meanings, when swapped they change the entire meaning of the sentence. Another great example of this is when people say, “I could care less,” but really intend to say, “I couldn't care less.” The latter is the desired meaning, but some people don’t seem to realize they're actually saying the exact opposite. In the first phrase, while the person means that they do not care at all, they are saying the opposite. If you "could care less," it means that you do, in fact, care. By allowing phrases like this to become common, we are slowly devolving our own language.
That being said, if you caught any grammatical errors in this article, good for you. I am absolutely not claiming to have perfect grammar. My main qualm is with the people who make simple mistakes or refuse to use the correct version of words like "there," "your," "to," and "then" or say "could of" instead of "could have." The point of this article is to simply bring attention to the fact that our society is starting to accept poor grammar as a social norm while classifying proper grammar as a stuck-up characteristic. Proper grammar should not be considered an attractive quality that a person either has or doesn’t have; it should be a common occurrence in everyday use of the English language.
