This is an easy gallery posting for me to write about. I have not joined the gallery before, so this is a new one for me. I am writing this, and keeping it as short as I can.
It has the ability to end up as a rant, but I really want it to act as an education.
On twitter today, I had a discussion with a few people who had differing views on spelling and grammatical errors. It was a pleasant chat and we discussed some opinions on this. I hope this post is taken in the same vein.
I have come across the spelling / grammer issues many times, and without being dictatorial about it, The Gallery gives this the perfect platform. I waded in with both feet on twitter as it is a theme that I have been aware of a lot more recently.
More and more tweets flash past in my timeline, and they are complaining about spelling and grammar. I am doing my little bit to stop that going any further than it already has as social media houses a very large proportion of fanatical readers and writers (myself included). It took me a long time to learn what I am going to say, and I wish I had realised it earlier in my life. It really did take having special needs children for this to sink in.
Lets just stop and think for a moment.
- What if your opinion today is that people with bad spelling and grammatical errors are lazy, or just can’t be bothered?
- What if you are offended by those people who get their words mixed up and use them in the wrong context?
- How do you react when people whose commas, full stops, and question marks are in the wrong place?
Lets look at this from a different angle.
- What if you came from an abusive background and you had little schooling. You struggled to read and write, and you couldn’t attend classes as you have three young children to look after. There is no-one to help you with childcare, and social media is your sole way of communicating and talking to other adults?
- What if you have grown up with a learning difficulty, but you have fought to be able to learn to communicate, and your brain won’t always let you remember the correct order, work formation and structure to sentences.
- What if you had an aptitude so fantastic that you could receive a Nobel Peace Prize for the value of your work in Mathematics, but you just couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind why some words mean completely different things in different sentences.
- What if you have a brilliant business brain, and people better than you at english do your promotional literature, but you want to meet your public through social media. Would you prefer they saw you, or someone pretending to be you because their spelling is better.
- Imagine you are a small business start up who can’t afford to employ someone to do your social media for you. How are you going to connect with people if you can’t enter the modern age because people will judge your business by how well you can write?
If a company has promotional material to make themselves look professional, then they pay for that to be error free. Large companies can afford to have eloquent people run their social media for them.
Perhaps the person at the other end of the spelling mistakes is ill. Perhaps they could be the best friend that you ever made. Perhaps you need some help and they are the one that steps up to the plate for you.
All I have to say to those who struggle to accept people who do not manage to meet your own standards of writing in the English language is:
Tomorrow – “Step away from the dictionary.”
ps I have not spell checked this post.