Social media: A grammarian's personal circle of hell
If you are a writer, a reader, or someone who cares at all about the English language, social media probably annoys the shit out of you on a daily basis. The internet is rife with it's/its, they're/their/there, and other grammatical errors that people really should know better than to make.
While my personal pet peeve revolves around the proper use of "less" and "fewer", today we're going to talk about punctuation (and the importance of it.)
Enter our champion: the Badger Football twitter feed.
If you've got some time to kill #Badgers fans, check out our updated Football video playlist on YouTube http://go.wisc.edu/1xvx8m
Now, kudos to Badger Football for turning their social media horror into a nice viral story. Instead of deleting the tweet, apologizing, or doing something else reactionary they soldiered on proudly (albeit without a very important comma.)
There is an important lesson in this story, however, and within this lesson is a personal plea from what remains of my sanity: being restricted to 140 characters does not absolve you from your grammar sins. Using a tiny phone or tablet keyboard is not a valid excuse for improper punctuation. You are not forgiven for using "u": that is not a legitimate word. I'll allow auto correction blunders, mostly because they are usually hilarious (like when I told my husband "Radition is in my future" because my phone didn't understand "Radisson") but this is my only exception to the social media conundrum that is hastening the demise of our written language and, most importantly, grammar.
No matter how informal your tweets, posts, and Facebook updates might be, treat them with the proper respect. Only you can prevent badger fan murders, one comma at a time.
While my personal pet peeve revolves around the proper use of "less" and "fewer", today we're going to talk about punctuation (and the importance of it.)
Enter our champion: the Badger Football twitter feed.
If you've got some time to kill #Badgers fans, check out our updated Football video playlist on YouTube http://go.wisc.edu/1xvx8m
Now, kudos to Badger Football for turning their social media horror into a nice viral story. Instead of deleting the tweet, apologizing, or doing something else reactionary they soldiered on proudly (albeit without a very important comma.)
There is an important lesson in this story, however, and within this lesson is a personal plea from what remains of my sanity: being restricted to 140 characters does not absolve you from your grammar sins. Using a tiny phone or tablet keyboard is not a valid excuse for improper punctuation. You are not forgiven for using "u": that is not a legitimate word. I'll allow auto correction blunders, mostly because they are usually hilarious (like when I told my husband "Radition is in my future" because my phone didn't understand "Radisson") but this is my only exception to the social media conundrum that is hastening the demise of our written language and, most importantly, grammar.
No matter how informal your tweets, posts, and Facebook updates might be, treat them with the proper respect. Only you can prevent badger fan murders, one comma at a time.
6 Comments on "Social media: A grammarian's personal circle of hell "
One thing that has become increasingly disturbing to me lately is the amount of people who have terrible writing. Now I may not have the most glorious writing in the world, but I do make it a point to make it as neat as possible and, at the very least, legible. I was appalled recently at the writing on a parking ticket I had received. These things seem to have lost their importance in our education system.