3 Bad Accidence

I had no idea how widespread this problem really was until I casually posted on Facebook about my frustration with a day of receiving particularly bad grammar. This innocuous action touched off a firestorm of commiserating comments from friends with dozens of examples that were much more egregious than the ones I had cited. In this era of real-time spell checking and centuries of grammar expertise literally at our fingertips, writing like a poorly educated first grader seems more inexcusable than ever. I'm the first to espouse the virtues of forgiveness, but at some point, enough is enough.

Like it or not, you will be judged on the things that you write. And more and more, our communications, both business and personal are occurring in written form (albeit 144 characters at a time). There's never been a time when it's been more important to learn how to write in a way that doesn't make you look like a moron - and as it turns out, there's also never been a time when it's been easier. But to get you started on your road to grammatical recovery, here are the three most egregious grammar errors (believe me, there was a longer list to choose from):

1. Homonym Confusion. Now that you've come back from dictionary.com to look up "homonym", I think we can all agree that if you don't know that there are a large number of words in the English language that sound identical, but are completely different words in both spelling and meaning, you've got no business writing anything at all. Seriously, your inability to tell the difference between these words makes everyone think you're an idiot. What's more if you think there are only two versions of the word "to", you might be too stupid to bother counting any higher.

2. Two Words, or Not Two Words... that is the question. Let me be perfectly clear about one thing, just because your beloved spell check didn't catch a mistake, doesn't mean you didn't make one. The spell-check algorithm only makes one check with hyphenated words, and that is to make certain that the words on either side are spelled correctly. It therefore can't tell you that "week-end" is supposed to be one word, or that "thank-you" or "a-lot" should be two. As a general rule of thumb, hyphen are like guns: if you don't know how they should be used, you probably shouldn't be using them.

3. A Case Against Phonetics. There comes a time in every person's life when trying to spell something phonetically (when they haven't a clue how to spell it) goes from being an innocent mistake to being a reliable indicator of a single-digit IQ. That time was the fourth grade. With the world wide web being broadcast to every corner of the globe via satellite, and spell check being included on everything with a keyboard, the excuses for spelling like you did when you were writing primarily in crayon and punctuating your afternoons with "nap time" have all but vanished. Nothing invalidates the use of a fancy word like misspelling it, so just go with the words you know, or look the damned thing up. If you got it so wrong that even the spell checker can't help you, you probably shouldn't be using it anyway.

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I'm confident there are more inexcusable and inexplicable grammar crimes out there than those I've listed here. All of them being committed every day, much to chagrin of you and I. For the record, if English isn't your first language, you get a pass on all of this. In my experience, however, those are the people least likely to commit these violations. No, these affronts to a decent secondary education are committed by people who look and sound just like you and me. And if you've just finished reading and still have no idea what I'm talking about, do us all a favor, turn off your computer and back slowly away from the keyboard. Nobody has to get hurt today.