I will confess, I’m not that great at grammar. Mainly, I’m the sort of person that write/type stuff as I am thinking it and barely look back at what I have wrote. I see it as that it’s online and it’s as informal as it gets. As long as it is readable, it shouldn’t matter if it not 100% perfect.
With that said: majority of the time, I swear that they can just make out roughly what I am trying to saying. I will understand it more if my grammar for a message was so bad that they can’t make out what I’m trying to say. Otherwise, I just felt kinda bullied and mocked for having bad grammar skills.
As ridiculous as it sounds, it makes me so self-conscious and paranoid to post anything and it can even be as simple as making a reply on a post. Internet is a brutal place but so is real-life. The only difference is that I would just block them which I know is little petty but I think that it would be better than me snapping at strangers online. My patience is thin and I just get sick of having people in my life just getting angry at me as well as I feel like a punchline to a joke.
Eh. I used to care about spelling and grammar. Since I learned that the purpose of language is to communicate and if you’ve communicated your intent, you’ve done your part. If I understood you, then I’m the asshole if I correct you. You’ve done nothing wrong.
That being said, if what you wrote could have gone two different ways and your mistake made it go the other way, I and others absolutely will call you on it — you see this online all the time, and it’s always in good fun. Or if it’s obvious it was an iPhone autocorrection. But we’re not saying you’re an idiot, we’re just saying it’s funny because you didn’t convey what you mean. We still got it, but it’s funny and we’re all gonna laugh together. Or at least that’s my read on the situation.
Being a “grammar cop” isn’t the best, because then you’re an expert and people wanna keep coming to you with how to spell this or that and it’s like… bro it’s not that big a deal. I had a guy come to me and ask me if he spelled a word correctly, and he spelled it the American way. I said technically that is valid English but it’s American English. And this is how you spell it in proper (i.e. the King’s) English… he didn’t understand why it wasn’t right or one way was more correct. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Now if it’s something like maneouvre vs maneuver, the Yanks will give you some shit for that one. If you wrote colour, I mean everyone knows you drop the U in American English. But an -ise vs -ize (like utilise/utilize) — most people won’t even see it. But I’m the weirdo for knowing English and American English. I prefer English. My phone prefers American English. I know how to change it. I can’t be arsed. Because anyone who knows English understands both well enough, for the reasons above.
Now when I start mixing in other languages… I admit, that’s a bit extra…
…but getting back to the topic at hand, when you’ve acted in good faith and people call you out, remember that’s their problem and not yours, and you can safely ignore them (and others should, too). You see someone getting picked on over something petty? Don’t give it any air. Don’t react. Ignore it, treat it like it didn’t happen — because it never should have happened.
Oh… and now guys like me get shit because AI uses em dashes — like that. Guys like me have been using them all along. It’s possible AI trained itself on the people with the best grammar, so now we sound like AI. Fucking great, right? So now we’re getting it from the other side. I guess what goes around, comes around…