Bad spelling and grammar depress me

[cherydactyl]

Apparently this is a product available on the McCain web site:


Also, a teacher mooched a book from me recently. Her bio has an appeal for her donorschoose.org project, and she segues with "And now a word from our sponcers..."

Actually, I see a lot of bad spelling on the teacher communities I follow. It worries me.

This is not to say that I am not sometimes guilty of errors and typos. I don't like when I do it either, and can be an obsessive reviser of my own posts and comments both before and after posting them.

Comments

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Says something about the educational level of McCain's supporters...

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

I recently had to teach a co-worker about it's versus its. She knew the contraction part, but thought that the possessive also used the apostrophe. (sigh)

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's depressing.

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I think people remember the apostrophe rule for possessive *nouns*, and they forget that "its" is not a noun.

Anyway, this encounter has changed how I explain it to people. I use to focus on the contraction part, but now I point out that possessive pronouns don't use apostrophes. His, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs. These are all possessive pronouns ending in 's', and they don't take apostrophes. My hope is that makes it easier to remember which one to use.

[gizelnort.livejournal.com]

You know...what I really envision is someone goofed up and now they have all these pens. Someone in the campaign says: "Hell, move them anyway, who is going to know?" Hehehehe...we know.

[pattimst3k.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. I remember reading another teacher's syllabus last year and it said to SIGH and return the bottom of the page. Nice.

I am sure that I make typos all the time at school, but I do try to watch myself!

[jixel.livejournal.com]

from the party that gave us potatoe

[presterjon.livejournal.com]

My personal pet peeve is when someone substitutes 'your' for 'you're'. It bothers me all out of proportion to the issue. Typos and accidental mispellings by people tend to bother me not at all. That pen picture bugs me though.
Oh another one is when someone says, "It's a mute point." Its not a "mute point" the phrase is "moot point". Its from the old Anglo-Saxon political body the 'moot' and it means endlessly debated. I guess that's not really grammar, but word origins and correct speech are important too.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that using the wrong word or wrong form of a word...like your mute/moot issue bug me lots too. There are so many examples. Homophones (their, there, and they're/your and you're) and near-homophones (which I would classify the 'moot' issue as) have different spellings for sometimes "merely" historical reasons, but they also make writing and reading clearer than it would be without the different spellings.

And don't get me started about how people are losing the distinction of count vs. mass nouns...FEWER items, LESS mass, but not LESS items, people! I wrote an essay about that for my semantics class; thus the big chip on my shoulder. People who shrug and say "whatever" and call me a nerd for pointing out the distinction are missing a useful grammatical cue.