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 Marketing freelancers make an average of 17.7 mistakes per 100 words, while Writing and Translation freelancers, as you might expect, do a bit better with an average 10.1 – which in fact still seems very high to me. (Whereas 19.3 5 errors for IT and Programming actually seems fair enough , 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:
