Luckily, The Grammar Police Are Always Watching

The Grammar Police Are Always WatchingI love the Grammar Police

The Grammar Police are ever vigilant and frightfully quick on the draw whenever the tiniest of grammatical error, or erroneous spelling mistake hits the ether of the Internet.

So fast are they, that I have to say that I may forget about doing the tedious proofreading of my blog posts from now on, and simply wait for the Grammar Police to do it for me. And it’s free!

So how does this devious plan work?

I stumbled upon the idea a couple of days ago when I made a clumsy error. I wrote a new blog post, and as it was well after midnight by the time I had finished, I left it in draft and planned to do my proofreading and format checking the next morning. Better to be fresh to do all that stuff.

However, being as tired as I was, I inadvertently clicked the wrong button on my WordPress editor. Instead of ‘Save to Draft‘, I clicked ‘Publish‘.

I didn’t notice of course, and I went off to get ready for bed. I grabbed my phone, and as I was about to set my alarm, I noticed three new notifications on my Twitter feed. Yes, they were from the wonderfully alert Grammar Police! One was even kind enough to post a little image of the errors they found in my text. When I checked the link, I realised what had happened.

I of course immediately ran back to my laptop and corrected the errors, in a flash. Phew! Saved.

But what I realised, was that the Grammar Police are far more efficient than I could ever have imagined. Clearly, that must have hundreds, if not thousands of RSS feeds, Google Alerts or any number of other clever techie tools to track new blog posts, which they instantly peruse for the smallest sign or hint of grammar and spelling offences. In my case, one ‘your‘ instead of ‘you’re‘. I did double my offence though, by doing a copy and paste of part of this offending phrase, for emphasis. So, yes, I got into double trouble!

So anyway, the upshot of this little episode is that now it is clear that I can save myself a lot of time and energy. I don’t need to slave over my blog posts, proofreading and correcting before publishing. All I need to do is publish, wait for the Grammar Police to jump into action, and within thirty minutes, I can look at their suggested corrections, make a couple of edits if need be, and immediately republish my perfect text – before anyone other than the Grammar Police has had a chance to read it.

What a cunning plan!

10 thoughts on “Luckily, The Grammar Police Are Always Watching”

  1. Ah, you clever, conniving devil you. As GP bait in this very article, you have planted several egregious grammatical goofs that would normally have set me into “gotcha!” mode. I won’t say what they are but will merely cut and past them into my own “dontcha” file to be sure I never similarly err.

  2. Good to see some humour about something all professional writers value, Derek. We are all prone to error in our expression; when tiredness or passion overtakes our own internal grammar police officer. It’s good when someone points out an error, since it means we have the chance to put it right. Of course, there are those irritating pedants who are incapable of seeing well-learned rules bent for the sake of effect, and we all know what we think of such anal fixation. But those who point out the genuine errors are welcomed by those of us who want to give the best we can to our readers.

    1. I agree with you, Stuart. I never mind an eagle eye, however I get a little annoyed with the Grammar Police, who fail to state the crime. Ones that only say, ‘there are mistakes in this post.’, send me immediately to the comment spam button. lol I much prefer the police who use a nice contrast such as ‘Nice post, but you don’t spell restaurant with 3 As!’

    2. And then there are those who are wrong, but seem sure they are right. They write insulting things about your “mistake,” rather than taking the time to find out that THEY are the mistaken one.
      Or I could be wrong. LOL!
      Peace, love & great grammar for all,
      Sherrie

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