Tommy Collison

I tend to be more forgiving to the average person screwing up a loose/lose proposition. Writers, however, do not get a free pass on this one. It’s like an accountant not knowing the difference between subtraction and division. It’s like a pilot not knowing the landing gear should be down for landing. And while the consequences of poor grammar cannot be equated to a pile of aluminum on the runway, in terms of professionalism and advancing a writing career the implications are the same.

I agree with Angus on this one — I’m a ferocious grammar Nazi while I’m writing stuff like essays and articles, but I’ll slip into shorthand (“thx” , “wilco”, tho”, etc.) for SMS, AOL or Twitter DMs. (An observation that a grammar-obsessed friend of mine once shared with me went something like: “I’m there writing a tweet and I’m just over the 140 character limit, and I’m like: ‘shit, which grammar rule do I have to break in order to send this?’”)

Writers and English teachers have no excuse for poor grammar, though. To me, the severity of the consequences of an English teacher having poor grammar are somewhere in between those for writers and those for airline pilots, in that students could pick up bad grammar habits and (mis)use them in exams, costing them marks and potentially a grade.