The Times has an amusing story about how self-appointed grammar police are patrolling the Twitterverse for blatant violations of proper spelling and usage. It probably wouldn’t surprise most of my readers if I told you that a screeching, knuckle-rapping grammarian lurks just beneath my calm and affable exterior. My teeth involuntarily grind together when I encounter a sentence that uses “your” when the author really means “you’re.” A little vein in forehead pulses whenever I encounter the word “irregardless.” In another era, I might have been a much-despised bachelor English teacher at a grim English boarding school.
This is all to say that I have some sympathy for the cause of these grammar cops, even though I think their efforts might be needlessly confrontational. Our national literacy levels won’t plummet if someone posts a badly written tweet. There are enough really talented writers on Twitter to keep the general readability of the format pretty high.
A complex, well-written sentence is pure beauty, it is art , and as such it can move the human heart.
I feel I’m lucky to have the opportunity to read a blog written in correct English.