If you show an interest in writing, you can’t scroll peacefully on TikTok without coming across dozens of different videos on the most hated grammar mistakes. Now, the thing is that I don’t go to TikTok for grammar correction. I should be on there to build a BookTok community. In reality, I am spending the best part of my time watching K-drama edits and figuring out what BTS are up to — which, luckily, right now, is still easy to follow given that 5 of them are still in the military.
So, do I want to be force-fed videos on grammar mistakes?
Hell, no! Stop stealing my attention away from my beloved K-dramas. I’ve got better things to do than watch some stranger tell me how much they feel the need to correct other people’s grammar mistakes. How dare you interrupt my enjoyable scrolling with your silly little grammar mistakes video?
What Is The Typical Grammar Mistakes Video?
They lack creativity, for a start.
If you were to believe those videos — by which I mean if you had zero knowledge of English grammar and decided to shape your entire knowledge from those videos (it’s a silly idea, but who am I to criticise? You’re free to do what you want) — you would come up with a very short list of possible grammar mistakes in English:
- Getting confused between you’re/your and there/they’re/their
- Misusing the holier-than-Thou Oxford comma
Other frequent grammar mistakes appear more frequently among non-native English speakers, such as:
- Missing an S while conjugating
- Accidentally adding -ed to an irregular verb (e.g. I sleeped tight on my pillow while the Internet was having a meltdown about my grammar mistakes)
- Getting particles wrong (i.e. BTOB Eunkwang breaking the language barrier to tell a depressed fan to “give up” instead of “cheer up” … Oops)
- Using an odd word order
- Getting confused between to + verb infinitive and verb ending in -ing (e.g. I want eating pizza before to go to bed)
For the sake of fairness, I’m going to ignore the grammatical imperfections committed by those for whom English is a second, third, fourth, fifth or even more language. Yes, that lovely grandma in rural China isn’t speaking perfect English. She does, however, speak perfect Mandarin, Cantonese and some proficient Mongolian. She’s also fluent in Korean and Japanese. So, give her a break. She’s mastered international communication more than most of us.
Instead, I’ll be focusing more on the preferred grammar pet peeves, the grammar mistakes the falsely elitist corner of the Internet is ready to judge and sentence you for.
Are Those Really Grammar Mistakes?
Well… yes and no.
You’re and Your, along with the tholy There/They’re/Their Trinity, are everyone’s favourites. If you’ve received a message you don’t want to engage with, the absolute best thing to do to appear like a total prick online is to post of video of yourself correcting their grammar rather than engaging with the actual content of their message.
It works a charm to show off your massive intelligence — assuming that by intelligence, you mean the absolute inability to apply contextual understanding to a text. They’ve mispelled you’re, so now you can happily pretend that you didn’t understand what they were trying to say while correcting their grammar — which would somehow prove the point that you did, indeed, understand precisely what they were saying.
Granted, that one is a grammatical mistake. Bear in mind that a large proportion of the English-speaking public has never had any proper grammar lessons. So, they’re obviously doing their best with the knowledge that was directly available to them.
Fuck That Oxford Comma
I hear you, screaming vandalism and heresy. The comma, as it happens, whether from Oxford or from anywhere else, is not a grammatical rule in English.
Punctuation in the middle of the sentence is only designed to make it more understandable and easily readable. Some people need them to clarify things while others are perfectly happy raw-dogging long sentences with not a single comma in sight and without automatically getting intimidated by the absence of separation in the phrase. Just like you’ve done right now. And guess what, you’ve survived that long, comma-free sentence just fine.
By the way, I am using the term raw-dogging intentionally here. I used it a few weeks ago in a social media post, talking about raw-dogging ND, which, given the context, the hashtags, and the rest of my social media profile, meant raw-dogging neurodivergency. To any child of the modern Internet, the meaning is 100% clear. This is about going through hardships without any support or preparation, whether medicated or else. Now, you wouldn’t believe the sheer amount of male Internet users who have failed to:
- Notice that the 90s and early 2000s Internet slang has evolved
- Pick a suitable educational platform outside of On£yF*ns (and this isn’t a dig at the people posting on On£yF*ns; many of them are intelligent people who perfectly understand that the language used on the platform doesn’t apply to the rest of the Internet)
- Read the whole post (or even the whole set phrase) before commenting
(I’m not usually one to fall into gender bias, but just out of scientific curiosity, those comments were all written by men. Take what you wish from this finding; I haven’t pursued the research any further)
Anyway, back to the Oxford comma. It has become a must-have in academic essays and other forms of professional writing. But, truth be told. It’s no more than a choice. Your text will be just as grammatically correct without. However, it could be more difficult to read and understand, depending on the length and subject.
That being said, being petty to the point of correcting emails and text messages that don’t have a comma is unnecessary. Besides, the correction is defeating the point: you would have needed to understand the content to correct those pesky “grammar mistakes”. Here again, contextual understanding should be your saviour. If you have none, I’m not too sure how you manage in oral communication, where commas are clearly absent.
How I Feel About The Hunt For Grammar Mistakes
I hate it. I hate it so much, I would rather write and rant about it than publish an article about The Dead Shadow today.
It’s petty. It’s unnecessary. It’s also destroying communication as a whole. Grammar is there to help convey the meaning of what you want to say clearly. The absence of it doesn’t impact the overall contextual understanding.
If you were to hear the content spoken rather than read it, you would be none the wiser about how they’ve spelled “your” and where they’ve put a comma. Yet, you would still understand the key information that’s being passed on to you.
So, what’s the point in highlighting someone else’s grammar mistakes?
Even I, as autistic as I am, can easily still see past some grammatical rules for the benefit of communication. Are we now saying that neurotypicals are the ones who need all the rules? This might well be the next BBC scoop.