It’s not National Grammar Day (that’s March 4), but I can’t wait. When did people stop being able to write properly?
My inbox is awash with writing containing misplaced commas, apostrophes and hyphens where they shouldn’t be, and missing where they should appear. Comma splices abound and if I have to explain the subjunctive tense (If I were…) or the difference between ‘that’ and ‘who’ (and ‘whom’ for that matter) one more time, I think I might scream.
Don’t get me wrong – I know that language evolves, and situational usage means different rules. There are places where it’s absolutely right to start a sentence with ‘and’ – and places where it absolutely isn’t. I remember being horrified when ‘hey’ replaced ‘hi’, and yet I now use it all the time.
I work with words for a living. I expect to wield the red pen, making edits in the words that accountants, engineers and other technical people give me. But more and more I’m also having to correct grammar and insist on stylistic consistency in writing that I’m seeing from people in Communications roles.
Mignon Fogherty is one of my grammar heroes (heroines?!). She’s otherwise known as Grammar Girl and has been dishing out grammar advice for almost two decades in podcast form and in books. She’s been on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and for fellow CBC geeks, you may have heard her on Spark several years ago. These days, you can check her out on Instagram (@thegrammargirl) or listen to her podcasts wherever you find your favourites. She has a way of making the dry subject of grammar interesting, and often delves into the “language evolves” debate. A few days ago, she taught me that although ‘irregardless’ started to appear in dictionaries as far back as the 1930s, it was – and still is – marked as non-standard or slang. I’m not going to start using it any time soon, but I guess like ‘hey’ and ‘hi’, it may one day become part of language.
Back in the office, I feel like the old curmudgeon, when I insist on ‘well-made clothes’ but ‘clothes that are well made’ or when I write in the comments for the umpteenth time that a word is plural not possessive and therefore needs no apostrophe.
Of course, I’m not without fault. There is probably a mistake in this blog post, and I’m sure you can find them in others. It’s been humbling to learn, through writing two books that I’m terrible at putting closing quotation marks in the right place. I’m getting better, but I (and my editors) still find them at the end of the dialogue tag, instead of where they belong.
Tell me what broken grammar rule drives you crazy?
