“It's hard to take someone seriously when they leave you a note saying, 'Your ugly.' My ugly what? The idiot didn't even know the difference between your and you're.”
― Cara Lynn Shultz, Spellcaster
In today's world of increasing emojis, lack of punctuation, and all the other writing offenses often taking place on text messages and WhatsApp, it’s easy to wonder where all the good grammar has gone.
Surely it must exist in professional settings, right? The answer to that is yes and no. While good grammar is vital in professional communication, there are offenders in the workplace. A survey by LLC.org found that 83% of employees have a coworker who annoys them. 52% said they're bothered by excessive exclamation points in business communications, and 76% are annoyed by bad grammar.
Another study found that good grammar is also essential in our love lives. According to ProWritingAid, an AI-powered writing assistant, grammar is important for online dating profiles. The survey comes at a time of rapid growth for online dating. The number of online daters is expected to reach 277 million by 2024.
The research, commissioned by ProWritingAid, surveyed 7,500 US consumers and 5,000 UK consumers. Alongside this, live profiles were run to compare the success of profiles with and without grammatical mistakes using the same images.
According to the survey of 12K people, 63% of women reported that they consider grammar important when assessing a dating profile, compared to 53% of men. Women aged 18-34 are 311% more likely to choose well-written dating profiles than those with grammatical errors.
Grammar is vital in our personal and professional lives, so how do we make it fashionable again? Embracing editing apps, like ProWritingAid or others, is a good start.
Here are other reasons to embrace good grammar.
- In a world dominated by social media, good grammar can help show your authority.
- Good grammar means you pay attention to details.
- Good grammar shows respect to the person you are communicating with.
Finally, grammar is the foundation for effective communication.