I confess: I’m a grammar nerd. I always have been. Even when I walked through the hospital corridors in my occupational therapist, pre-writing life, I always loved snarling at the door marked KITCHEN’S, ‘What exactly does the kitchen own?’
Yes, I know, it’s a pathetic sort of pleasure.
Ironically, now that I’ve been earning my living as an author for over twenty years, I’m more tolerant of the fact that English is a changing, living language. I’ve had to accept that when people say decimate to mean devastate or annihilate, they are actually following common usage, and it’s probably not polite to ask them if they mean that one in ten was wiped out.
And sometimes, in fiction – or in blog posts – I break grammar rules. (Yes, it’s true: I’ve just started a sentence with And. I’ve had elderly readers tell me in shocked tones that their English teachers would have never allowed that.) Usually I do it deliberately, but sometimes it’s a mistake, and that really is upsetting.
Because some things are still wrong – and it matters. I frequently get emails from people who are keen to teach me how to ‘author best seller books.’ (I don’t write back and point out that I’ve had a book on the NY Times bestseller list. I told you I was getting more tolerant.) I’m quite sure these people know a lot more about marketing than I do, but I cannot imagine that I would ever pay money to learn how to write from someone whose email is full of grammatical mistakes. (‘A book who has a nice cover’ was another recent one. Really?!)
So I was interested to read a survey by Grammarly, an online grammar checker, that Sales and andTranslation freelancers (and 19.3 for IT and Programming – which actually seems fair enough to me, since they’re using language I can’t understand anyway.)
However, the part of the survey to make a grammar nerd’s heart rejoice is that in each category, the freelancers who made the fewest writing errors earned better reviews – and more money. Grammar nerds of the world unite: it turns out that grammar does matter!
Grammarly, whom I’d only known previously as a source of hilarious-for-grammar-nerds e-cards and memes on facebook, has kindly allowed me to reuse their infographic:
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