Pet Peeves and Grammar Nazism
I was making my daily rounds through the blogosphere this morning, and I kept running head-first into one of my biggest pet peeves. As someone who tries to take pride in his writing, I try very hard to use correct grammar and spelling. Yes, I misspell things, but I’m almost obsessive/compulsive about correcting my spelling; if I see something I misspelled six months ago, I have to go back and correct it.
This leads me to what is becoming the most common contractional error on the web – “would of”. What the hell is this? Naturally, what people are trying to say is “would’ve”, the contraction of “would have”. When I see “would of” in a sentence, the writer part of me cringes in pain.
I believe this leads to a much larger issue. Yeah, you all knew there was a larger issue here, or I wouldn’t be wasting bandwidth on this little rant. The issue is that of education. I have difficulty believing that such a preponderance of gross grammatical errors to be a real coincidence, and I’m left wondering if people are being taught even the most basic rules of grammar – rules that used to be taught in the second grade.
Yeah, I know such a simple grammatical error is of little significance, but when I see reports that people know more about the Simpsons than they do the U.S. Constitution, or the lack of a basic third-grade level science education, then I wonder what exactly is being taught in schools today.
I recently proofread a paper that was being written by a college student. The spelling and grammatical errors on this paper were – for lack of a better word – painful. If I had ever turned in a paper of that quality in high school, I would have been deserving of the big red “F” that would most assuredly have been my grade.
Yes, “would of” is fairly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but oftentimes the small stuff we ignore are the signs of much larger problems.
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