What does the ability to differentiate between correct and incorrect grammars say about a person? Is it indicative of his or her intelligence? His or her observation skills? It’s quite shocking to see how many people enter college lacking basic knowledge of sentence structure, grammar and academic writing skills. Having knowledge of these things is essential in an academic setting (read: everyday life).
What kinds of perceptions do people get from you when you send out tacky, ungrammatical tweets or Facebook statuses? Are we judging you for it? The answer to this is absolutely! I believe that college students should be quite familiar with the most basic forms of English grammar.
I can completely understand people who are not intimately familiar with English grammar (you really start to become aware of things in your own language when you begin studying a foreign one), but being that many Americans only speak one language, why not do it well?
I have been disappointed by countless English majors who cannot differentiate between “your” and “you’re” and ones who believe that apostrophes can actually be used to form the plural (i.e., 90’s, A’s, ex’s, etc.). It is absolutely astounding to me that these people can read countless literature pieces and write hundreds of pages but basic grammar eludes them. Does this have anything to do with their intellectual capacities or their observational skills? I, personally, have not the slightest clue how things like this happen. It’s almost oxymoronic.
Many people will argue that on social media, a person can be as informal as they like. I don’t necessarily think that means making yourself appear less intelligent. Please don’t think that I’m referring to the way in which people structure their sentences. Most of us at this university speak Southern English, so I have no problem with “ain’t” and deletion of verbs. You know this to be true if you’ve seen any of my tweets. I, however, cannot get behind the incorrect comma placements, the disrespect many people show to apostrophes and the atrocious nature in which “you’re” and “your” along with “there,” “they’re” and “their” are ignorantly used. English should not be this hard for native speakers, especially those seeking B.A.s and B.S.s.
Being the open-minded person that I am, I realize that people don’t really speak the same way that they write. I am not one of those pretentious people who believe that formal, standard English is appropriate in every context — we know that isn’t always the case. I am just advocating that people, college-educated adults, be familiar and conscientious of simple things in their language that many children in eighth grade or lower tend to get right most of the time.
Everyone makes mistakes on papers, makes typos or confuses more complicated grammatical structures, but for a person to not know things that many people take for granted is preposterous. A little proofreading hasn’t hurt anyone, not to my knowledge. Next time you decide to hit send on that tweet or Facebook status, make sure that you cover your basic grammar.
Carl Case is a senior English and Spanish double major from Brookhaven.
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