No, really - enough is enough! No matter how careful we are when writing something, we all make mistakes. For instance, this page will probably end up containing at least two errors, no matter how many times I check it. But there are limits.
I’ve recently taken to reading and posting comments on various newspaper blogs (yes, I know, but it amuses me). One question keeps nagging away at me: if you want your opinions to be taken seriously, why can’t you bloody well be arsed to check what you’ve wriTTUn too sea tha y’uo avent mad ENNY stupud mistokes;!.? After all, when you’re having a discussion with someone face to face, do you deliberately go out of your way to make it difficult for them to understand what you’re saying? Do you use the wrong word on purpose? Do you suddenly EMPHASIZE CERTAIN PHRASES for no reason? (Mind you, that was a favourite device of that “Great Orator”, Michael Foot, I seem to recall.) Do you insist on leaving no pause between the end of one remark and the start of the next, so that the person you’re talking to has no idea what you’re on about? If you’ve answered “No” to all the above, we’ve at least established that you’re not John Prescott.
It’s hardly news that people in this country are growing more illiterate with each passing day. Almost every missive from a bank, building society, media company, government department or local council is littered with elementary mistakes. The problem is not so much bad spelling (thanks, one presumes, to the ubiquity of spell-checkers) as an ignorance of basic grammar and an inability to get right the name of the person being addressed. (Yes, I’ve got a weird foreign name, but you’d have thought British organisations were used to funny foreign names by now.)
But okay, fine. I can easily understand what they’re trying to say, and I can live with the odd misplaced apostrophe and occasionally being called Mr. Grandmack - but when, say, a Daily Telegraph reader decides to comment on something he or she has just read, can they honestly not be bothered to spend ten seconds making sure they’ve started each sentence with a capital letter, haven’t inadvertently hit CAPS LOCK half-way through, and have actually managed to spell the name of the Prime Minister correctly?
If you’re reading a newspaper blog and commenting on it, how busy can you be? (Especially if you’re a civil servant at “work”.)
Let’s be honest - my grasp of grammar isn’t that strong. I’ve even been known to stick an apostrophe in “yours” when bashing out an email. And years of reliance on Microsoft’s Yankee spell-checking programme (program? - Bill Gates definitely thinks so) means I’ve lost the plot over whether the “s” in “realisation” is actually illegal or just Un-American. (I had written “un-American, but Bill insists the “u” needs to be capitalised. Oh, hang on - he thinks that should be “capitalized” with a “z”.) And I always have to think twice about whether the full stop at the end of a sentence within parentheses comes before or after the last bracket (before, if the whole sentence is enclosed: after, if only partially enclosed - I looked it up).
But using “s” or “z” in a word which works perfectly well with either, or sticking full stops before or after a bracket don’t really matter much. They don’t look horribly wrong on the page, and therefore don’t snag the mind in passing.
Unlike...
When you use a single-digit number in a sentence, it needs to be spelled out - in other words, “three”, not “3”. And “fulsome” is not a synonym for “full”, just as “simplistic” is not a synonym for “simple”. And a comma does not
perform the same function as a full stop, you can’t just start another sentence after it, right? These sound like minor errors, but they annoy me because the rules are so simple - just like the fact that “definitely” doesn’t have an “a” in it (it definately doesn’t). And that the plural of “MPs” is not - ever - “MP’s”. And that when half of your sentence is all capitals YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING WRONG. And that contractions such as “he’s” always require an apostrophe.
These are the little buggers that drive me mad, because getting them right is so easy that not bothering to observe them, as Lynne Truss pointed out, amounts to discourtesy.
What about a blog where participants who can’t be bothered to check what they’ve written will be given one more chance - and then barred? Just as a zero-tolerance policy towards petty crime seemingly lowers the frequency of more serious offences, so an insistence on getting the small technical things right when writing might actually improve the quality of the views being expressed. (Yes, I know - pigs might fly.)
Now I’ll just sit back and wait for the police to turn up to arrest me for being non-inclusive, judgmental and elitist.
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