Jessica Lahey, a middle-school teacher, wrings her hands over the fact that, in our oppressive world, spelling matters.
“Ideas should be judged on substance rather than appearances,” she writes, “but this simply is not how our world works. We live in a society where appearances matter, where in order to be heard and taken seriously we are judged quickly and superficially.” And, she goes on, she teaches her students “to dream about a world in which they can be respected for the content of their thoughts rather than for…the placement of their commas.”
I’m not sure where to begin, other than to suggest that if you can’t grasp a few simple rules about your native language, then I really don’t care about the content of your thoughts—nor should anyone else.
Back when I was studying music in college, there always seemed to be those who wanted to skip jazz theory and jump right into free improvisation, imagining that all those archaic rules about scales and chords and harmonic progression unfairly prevented them from the true expression of their musical ideas. The results were unambiguously disastrous.
It’s the same thing with spelling and grammar. If you can’t tell the difference between your and you’re, how to spot a comma splice, and whether a particular verb requires a direct object, you might want to see if you can sit in on a couple of eighth-grade English classes before blessing us with your profound insights.
