Legally Blind Observations

early-onset-of-night:

dagseoul:

Any one who criticizes your written work because you didn’t proofread well, or you routinely misspell, or you don’t always correctly use apostrophes, or you implement the wrong “there”, or you use a sloppy or non-traditional style: any one who criticizes you for these things, is an asshole.

Writing is not an easy task. For most people, it takes courage to publicly share ideas. I have almost ten years of experience teaching young writers at university, and I tutored writers for several years in and out of writing centers. I’ve worked with lazy and rich white kids who and hard-working ESL and EFL students. I don’t care what kind of writer I’ve taught: writing well is a scary thing for the majority of writers. It’s a rare student who was naturally confident.

Stop being petty & privileged fucks about blogging. If you regularly circulate stupid photos about how to properly use there, their, they’re and you, your, you’re and it, its, it’s, you are a fucking douche bag. You aren’t smart. You aren’t cute. You aren’t correct.

Fuck prescriptivism.

Let the revolution against Grammar Nazism begin! :)

So basically OP’s argument against expecting grown men and women to be able to write properly is “writing is hard, so cut them some slack”? Let’s not put effort into doing something properly because it’s difficult? That is the lamest bullshit I’ve ever heard. Can you imagine a world where that was an okay stance to take?

“Making this light bulb thing is hard, so I’m gonna half-ass it. Who needs light anyway?”

“Wow, figuring out how to get this plane off the ground is really giving me trouble. Guess I’ll stop trying to figure it out. Who needs heavier-than-air flight?”

“Now that I think about it, an amphibious ground strike on the beaches of Normandy is gonna be REALLY difficult to pull off, and even if we do pull it off, we’re gonna lose a LOT of men. Who needs France and a world that isn’t ruled by Hitler?”

Gimme a break man. Proper grammar and spelling is something that projects intelligence, regardless of actual intelligence, and past a certain age, is just something you have to know. I’m not saying you need to have memorized Strunk and White, but if I meet you and in your speech or writing you use poor grammar, I’m sorry, but I’m going to assume you’re at least a little ignorant.

And if that makes me an asshole, so be it. At least I know to use “you’re” when I’m telling you you’re illiterate.