Grammar Rant: The Catch 22 of Correcting Others

This week I've been in Austin visiting a good friend and former coworker. The first thing we did when I arrived was drop by her friend's house for a quick visit. While at her friend's house, the three of us were reading an e-mail the friend had sent to her newest interest on Match.com. It was a long and witty e-mail, and it was well thought out; however, I noticed one mistake: she used an apostrophe with the possessive form of its. (Cue horror music.)

Now while I'm pretty sure that wasn't a deal-killer for the guy - heck he probably didn't even notice - I had the burning desire (as I always do) to interrupt as we were reading to point out the unnecessary apostrophe. Fortunately, I've embraced the fact that most people don't like to be corrected, so lately I try to keep my trap shut.

Yes, I'm one of those grammar freaks who constantly likes to go around correcting others' grammar and spelling. I swear it's not because I have nothing better to do or I need to boost my ego; it's because a) I have the urge to voice everything going through my head (thank you ADD) and b) I just feel it's everyone's duty to help improve each others' grammar and spelling. Otherwise, we'll all make the same mistakes again, and again, and again - myself included.

Case in point: Who didn't notice someone misspelled whisk on the Scrabble board, and who tried spelling reckless with a W this week? Both me. Thanks to corrections from my friend and handy, dandy spell check, I won't forget either any time soon.

So back to the Match.com e-mail. Ironically enough, my friend's friend noticed her mistake on "it's' and pointed it out to us as we read it. I exclaimed how excited I was that she noticed the error and admitted I had held back from pointing it out to her. Her response? She told me to correct her any time. (Cue Hallelujah chorus.)

Imagine if we all made ourselves more open, as she is, to being corrected (at appropriate times of course). I realize this idea is probably in direct opposition with Dale Carnegie's teachings in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (i.e. you will probably not win people over by correcting them) so it might be safer to simply read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (a must-read for any grammar freak; it even comes with punctuation stickers so you can correct signs around you. (Wish I had those on me when I penned in a correction on a sign at Ikea! Oh well.)

My obsession with grammar may stem from the Spelling bee in the second grade. I was one of two people left standing, and the words they gave us at the end were only there/their/they're. But neither of us knew the appropriate use of each word, and since they kept switching up the forms of "there" and we needed two correctly spelled words in a row, it felt like an eternity until one of us finally lucked out and won. Unfortunately, it wasn't me, but from that day on, I always remembered which form of "there" to use.

I'll leave you with the wonderfully geeky grammatical joke on the back of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" that explains the title.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Share:
How do you feel about correcting others or others correcting you?