A few days ago, we received the school's newspaper, and our entire school learned that our editor didn't edit anything at all. There were grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization errors abound, and a frightening amount of usage issues. This is a high school newsprint. I could understand if it were, say, an elementary school paper or something like that. I might even be able to forgive a middle school making mistakes of that degree, but this was ridiculous.
The thing that screws with me the most? They're/Their/There.
They're taking their kids there.
I don't know how many times I've had to explain this particular fallacy.
They're: A contraction of the words "they are" meaning that a group of people or objects are in a state of being. If you can't use this particular one properly, just say "They are..."
Their: A possessive showing that a group of people or objects own or have something. If all else fails, say that something belongs to them, if you can't use this one the right way.
There: A place, this usually acts a pronoun so instead of saying something was at a specific location, (e.g. The party was held at Rei's house.") If you cannot use this one properly, (e.g. The party was held there.") just say where the party was actually held.
That irks me more than you could ever know.
Another thing that kills me is when someone misspells something they've typed. For goodness sake, the computer has spell-check. If you use Google Chrome, it automatically checks your spelling as you type. There isn't an excuse for poor spelling in written print, and there's definitely not one for mistakes in type. I can understand screwing up a ridiculously long word, or even words that completely ignore phonetics, but things like "shrewd", "friend", "maybe" or "definitely" just make you seem dumb.
The worst possible crime, in my humble opinion, is when people use chat speak in everyday writing or speaking. This means the people, like many of my classmates, who say "L-O-L" instead of just laughing, or "R-O-T-F-L" when it's obvious they're not even laughing to begin with, or "G-2-G" when they're leaving. "Got to go" has the SAME amount of syllables as saying "G(ee)-two-G(ee)", for those of you who say it. It doesn't make you sound cool and it definitely doesn't make you sound smart; however, if you're aiming for sounding like a preppy bimbo, you've hit the mark on the nose.
I'll forgive the punctuation issues (those can get rather tricky), and even some of the grammar issues, such as "good" instead of "well" or "bad" instead of "poor" and situations with odd comparative and superlative adjectives (do I say "more green" or "greener?") but there isn't an excuse for some of the most common mistakes in the English language.
In the case of the editor, I just don't think she read over it, maybe she was in some sort of rush, because she would have phrases with odd spacing between words (e.g. "al lthe" instead of "all the") or she would only capitalize part of a name (e.g. "john Henderson" instead of "John Henderson"), so I'd like to think she knew better, just didn't pay attention. I'm not entirely unreasonable, I understand being swamped, but she should have slowed down some because it made the school paper a huge joke.
The moral of this story? Slow down and think: you have tools, use them.
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