Grammar does not matter

Please stop being a grammar pedant.

Me from twenty years ago would never have imagined that me from today is taking this position. And yet now I feel like I see this with such clarity that I need to bring more people on board, because I feel it’s genuinely important: Stop nitpicking grammar and spelling. It’s elitist, it’s rude, it’s pointless, and it’s unkind.

If you’re one of those people who goes around telling people that their its should have an apostrophe, or your it’s should lack an apostrophe, well, please don’t be that person anymore.

Why?

Because the dictionary is not a rulebook. It’s merely a lagging indicator of word usage compiled by people trying to track how people use words.

Grammatical rules are not rules, they are merely conventions that have been codified for a particular time and a particular set of people.

There are people who use words differently than they are found in the dictionary, and there are people who follow different grammatical conventions than you find in grammar school textbooks. This includes me, to a certain extent. I make up words once in a while, but you know what I mean when I do that. And I break grammatical “rules” once in a while and this is perfectly fine.

Moreover, the notion of a singular correct spelling of a word is purely a social construct that has emerged in relatively recent times. For example, if you read the correspondences between folks like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, they use different spellings and it worked just fine for them. It’s not just that each person had their own spellings, but they individuals didn’t even consistently use the same spelling. It was find then, and it was fine now. Just because some folks decided to build a dictionary means that we are compelled to use the spelling that they used for the dictionary.

Some words are really hard to spell. Like plagiarism for example. If someone spells it plaigarism, so what?

When you see a person who uses “bad” grammar, what does that say about them and their background? While it’s not helpful to make unfounded assumptions, here is a list of what I imagine to be one or more of the reasons we see this:

-They weren’t raised in a home environment that emphasized a need to use “proper” grammar and spelling.

-They didn’t go to a school that prioritized the following of grammatical rules, or they attended schools that thought “proper” grammar was important but they were underresourced.

-The person is part of a culture or upbringing with different grammatical norms (e.g, AAVE).

-The person didn’t learn English from infancy as a “native” speaker, and having trouble picking up the completely bizarre and idiosyncratic grammatical and spelling rules of our makeshift language. (While I learned lots of grammar in Spanish in high school and college, I’m aware that I get this stuff wrong a lot while speaking or writing. Since English is even a more bizarre language, then why should we have a problem if somone uses “their” when they meant there?)

-The person simply hasn’t bothered to learn or use grammatical and spelling conventions because it’s not a priority for them.

-Perhaps the person thinks that good grammar and spelling is important, but they just aren’t good at it even though they try. That’s fine, too.

When it comes to myself and the people around me, there are two ways that I see “proper” writing to be important:

• I want to be able to understand something. If the point isn’t clear, then it’s a problem. For example, the folks who advocate strongly for or against the serial comma (if you’ve paid attention, I generally employ it) say it’s about clarity. I suppose it is, sometimes.

• I realize that other people mistakenly confuse “good” grammar and “correct” spelling to be indicators of smarts, attention to detail, so I do get concerned for my students when they can’t fluently code switch in and out of SAE (Standard American English), because it will detract from their professional prospects. While I don’t think our society should need or require or expect everybody to be masters of SAE, that’s not a common perspective, and well, we do live in a society. I can work to change it but also we also want folks to succeed. We need to play the game even as we work to change the rules.

In the course of running our research labs, then I think it’s our duty to make sure that manuscripts and grant proposals are written in SAE, because if they aren’t, then they’re going to get dinged.

When it comes to our role as science educators, though, this might be a different matter. We should ask ourselves, how much of our insistence in SAE might be getting in the way of the learning objectives of our courses? Let’s say you have a student use the “wrong” conjunction or spell a word “incorrectly.” How does this matter? Is it possible that if we can be focused on “proper” writing that we aren’t spending time working on the information being conveyed, or that we are distracting students from improving the information by emphasizing the “rules?” I am not answering this question in any single way, because I think the answer to that question is highly context dependent. Are you teaching an intro course to a classroom full of international students and other students coming from backgrounds where SAE isn’t emphasized? Or is it a capstone course for majors to prepare them for careers? Should we be having different standards for international students who barely passed the TOEFL than we have for our other students? Under what circumstances should we be grammar cops?

Once you’re outside the classroom, though, then I don’t see any room for grammar pedantry. It accomplishes nothing other than creating unnecessary communication barriers. If you have someone you know well enough who has said they want you to “correct” them, that’s a different matter. But if you don’t have that kind of relationship, then just let it go.

This might be harder for some of y’all when you have ignoramuses being wrong on the internet when it comes things like fascist governance, anti-science garbage. Their bad takes may well have “bad” grammar. But if you’re one of those people who writes comments to point this out, then this just makes you look bad. Or at the very least, by a tiny smidgen, folks like me will find it a little harder to respect you.

I’ve had lots of people close to me who were big time grammar pedants. Some of them are no longer with us, so that makes writing this all the easier. But for those of grammar pedants still with us, it’s not too late to change your course.