For many years now, the Grammar Police have been trolling social networking sites in search of their next rescue mission. Yes, you read that correctly: rescue mission. While you may feel as though the Grammar Police are out to publically humiliate you and rip your self-confidence to shreds, we really are only trying to create a world in which people communicate using language as it was intended to be used; properly.
Others are so quick to judge us that they often overlook our perspective. Here are a few things we’d like you to understand.
1. Our goal is to educate you, not embarrass you.
The sooner you stop getting offended by your own mistakes, the sooner you’ll learn to pay attention and stop making them.
2. We could come up with a better argument, but it’s just easier to invalidate yours.
Honestly, know your audience. If you’re arguing with a known Officer, spell check and the basic principles of sentence structure are your friends. If you still fall short, you have no one to blame but yourself for making our job painfully easy.
3. Pointing out that we can’t think of anything besides correcting your grammar is you, not thinking of anything better than pointing out that we corrected your grammar.
It’s a vicious cycle… we bring to light the faults in your logic to avoid having to come up with a counterargument, only for you to be equally lazy and slightly less original by repeating that we chose not to produce a counterargument because we “couldn’t.” It’s fine, really; whatever helps you sleep at night.
4. You’re lucky we don’t take it so far as to point out comma splices and the difference between phrases and clauses.
Frankly, we’re just trying to enforce the basics, and even that has become an all-consuming task. Once we feel as though you've mastered level one, we'll up the ante.
5. We make mistakes too, though rarely, and we expect you to make a sarcastic comment challenging the level of our intelligence. If you notice it, you’ve earned it.
No Officer is without fault at some point or another… though most of our errors can be accredited to typos or autocorrect, we still commit the crimes we punish you for. We expect nothing less than your brutally savage attack. All’s fair in grammar and war. (There is probably one hidden in this article for dramatic effect)
6. If you want us to stop correcting you, stop making errors.
It’s kind of like parking tickets; if you want to stop getting them, stop parking there. I don’t know what else to tell you.
So, the next time your Aunt Susan politely reminds you of the difference between “your” family and “you’re” family, or the kid you ignored in History decides to chime in about the party over “there,” thank them for taking the time out of "their" day to do you a grammatical favor. You just might learn something along the way.
