Why my grammar sucks and you do too

I have never had great grammar. I could not tell you what a gerund is, or how to use a semi colon, or why you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. I was taught this vaguely in high school, but my teen angst and hatred of English teachers who picked favorites always hindered my development in writing. If it were not for autocorrect and apps like grammarly, I would be screwed when writing 10 page papers on racism in Brazil.

When I was in community college, I started getting really incredible grades that made me rethink what I was taught in high school. Maybe I was finally showing my skills as a writer, and all it took was a professor at a community college who cared enough to teach the material. He tried his best to instill in me this passion for grammar, but his class ended after the semester and I continued to write the way that I always have-like I talk.

Years have gone by, it has been 5 since I was in a high school classroom, thank god, and I still suck at grammar. I am taking a University level course on the importance of grammar, in hopes that my professor actually teaches me something instead of yelling or flirting with students. I am working at trying to better my writing skills and my spoken grammar.

Now, the part you have all been waiting for, the reason why you suck. If you feel personally attacked, it is probably because you are. If you have corrected my grammar while I am talking to you about my feelings or thoughts, you suck. You took a moment that I was expressing myself and marred it with your own nit picky behavior so you could feel smart and I could feel dumb. “But Naomi, that was never my intention. I wanted you to know the correct way to say it”, no you wanted to feel like an alpha in a situation that didn’t revolve around you. You are the cause of why adults do not feel comfortable telling people anything. A majority of educational institutions have stopped teaching grammar all together, they have replaced it with vocabulary lessons and how to cram as much useless information into a paper as possible. The schools are failing us, so while I am happy that you were taught grammar techniques and rhetorical devices, know that it is your privilege. My generation and I were shafted by the public school system in terms of how to write and still function, so take your grammar nazi attitude and shove it.

When I started going to therapy, I would tell my therapist how I felt so stupid sitting in classes reading over my papers, unable to see why sentences were crossed through with a red pen. I would get anxiety attacks when we had papers due because my grammar is so bad that I didn’t want to be shamed in front of the class. My therapist pointed me to several options of how I could fix this, there are writing centers on campus, there are classes I can take, there are tutors I can hire. She consistently made me feel heard and understood, especially since she was from an older generation that was taught proper grammar. She and I would discuss all of the ways to fix the problem, but for the people that had comments that cut me to the core, I was at a loss. But I guess that these are the things I will tell my therapist.