Forgive Me: I Make Grammatical Errors But I Am Still a Good Person
If you have been reading Embrace the Chaos for a while, then you know some things about me: I have three kids, I like food, my husband is a neat-freak and I make typos. I have to assume that if you are returning to this blog then you are a fan of run-on sentences, parentheses, the word ‘and’, and the occasional snarky comment.
Some people, however are not fans of my grammatical errors. I am sure that they have not chosen to single me out. They simply hover around cyberspace as copyediting vigilantes searching out forgotten apostrophes and incorrectly applied adverbs. They obviously believe that their services are making the world a better place. In fact, they have even told me that:
“Whether or not brownies are important to education, good English is. Please note that you can not be anaphylactic "to" anything. It is not a synonym for allergic, even though the result of an allergy may indeed be that someone exhibits anaphylaxis. This fuzzy thinking, lazy syntax and pseudo-scientific (pseudo means false, by the way) is what is causing a whole culture to speak nonsense or allow nonsense to be spoken. No wonder we can't think clearly about the relative importance of home baking versus school rules, much less the survival issues of most of the humans on the planet and almost all the animals and plants.”
Thanks, buddy.
The truth is that I do not mind being corrected. One of my most egregious errors was when I titled an ode to my mother-in-law “In Praise of Mother-in laws”, that should have been “In Praise of Mothers-in-law”. The comments were absolutely correct in pointing out my error, but I fail to see why as ML said “It was difficult to see past the error and read the whole article.” She obviously made it to the bottom of the post just to comment.
It’s not the correction that I mind, it is the vitriol that often comes with it. This is a blog – a weblog, an email to the world as my friend says. It goes straight from my keyboard into cyberspace. Sadly, there is no editor to refine my scribbling and catch my grammatical errors. I wish there was.
I understand that there is no excuse for lazy grammar or typos. The title of my blog is Embrace the Chaos – that is a hint to my inner-self, as well as my surroundings. Sometimes I do my best work surrounded by three yelling children, a dog and an oven full of burning cookies. But sometimes I do not.
My journalism professors (yes, I do have a Masters in Journalism) would not be pleased with some of my errors. I hope that they would not ignore my message just because an apostrophe got in the way. So if you catch an error in my post, feel free to let me know here or on Twitter. I would be more than happy to correct it if it makes the post better, or I will leave it for the world to see if it’s too late.
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