Why Correcting My Grammar Is Counterrevolutionary

I also am quite biased against it, as someone with quite severe dyslexia and even more severe stubbornness, I simply refuse to spell correctly when it can be avoided. I write in textspeak, and I habitually violate grammar norms. I was raised by an English teacher and might have been an English teacher’s worst nightmare, as a devastatingly talkative kid that simply refused do a workbook.

That said it should be pretty clear why in my mind language and power are so intermingled. The ability for me to control how I express myself has been central to my life, and the expectations of how I write or speak or think have had real material form. So here I want to set out the positive argument for an almost childlike revolution against grammar and style norms, and a reclamation of what “serious writing” looks like. Or put simple: why correcting my grammar is counterrevolutionary.

Whats The Point of a Style Guide?

In my view a style guide should focus on one purpose, effective communication. If having a standard helps me communicate its needed, if it does not, it’s superfluous. For an example of the basic argument, in legal writing we always put case names (example v. example) in italics, this is to help them stick out among the prose and make reading it easier. This works in the legal writing community because we all agree on it. But if I am writing to a lay audience, it does not, and it possibly confuses or distracts. So if a lawyer gets annoyed at me not italicizing to a lay audience, they are missing the point.

Thats the most charitable reading of style guides, but thats not why I actually think they exist. Or at least not why anyone on the internet will make a fuss about them. I think, as all leftists annoyingly do, that it is about power and influence.

Language Standards and Power

I don’t give a fuck if one of my friends misspells something, and I have would not correct them. If someone I am arguing with in comments uses the wrong “Their”, oh baby it is fucking on.

Because its not about what is correct, it is about me showing I am smarter than them, it is me showing I am to be taken seriously. This does not have to be malicious, and in my experience it is often not. When I am writing a legal text, I know I will only be taken seriously using a certain language even if I know that that’s not the most effective way to communicate. I use my language to signal I know what I’m talking about, that I am part of the in-group.

In classic leftist fashion I must expand this systemically. If it is true I use language to denote my membership of an in-group, then surely language is generally used to denote social in-groups and out-groups, and my god this topic has been beaten to death in leftist circles because of course it is. Language developed in black and brown communities is seen as slang, if it’s from the South its lower class, and if its queer its often (stolen) slang as well. We demote and demean language outside of the group in power, and when we are told that language used is not “serious” we are maintaining that power structure.

Now I recognize this is not every correction. Sometimes (often) I misspell things and I rejoice in someone correcting it, and in fact if I misspell to the point of worsening comprehension, I beg y’all to tell me. But I do know the above phenomenon does occur when if pushed on why the standard helps communication the answer is that “that is how it is done”. This non sequitur hides a real reason, whether that is because I’ve accepted the standard uncritically, or society has deemed my mode of communication less valuable.

What is to be Done?

These ideas are not new and have been somewhat beaten to death in the leftist canon, the idea that language itself, and especially how we regulate language, is a reflection of and thus is a avenue to challenge power1. So I think any self respecting leftists can recognize that this is true. What baffles me is how many refused to accept the obvious solution: a radical rejection of received language standards.

If we accept that the standards we have received are seeping in classism, racism, and elitism, the first step is not to accept them but reform them. I thought we were fucking leftists, we are revolutionaries. We revolt. We always tell ourselves to “kill the cop within us”, and yet many of us have not killed the grammarian.

And if your knee-jerk reaction is to say I am being too serious about this, I want you to test yourself. Do you sound like the very conservative and right wingers that call us “too woke”? Are you saying this is not that deep? I think its uncomfortable to turn analysis in on oneself and consider the standards that have allowed them to engage with the world productively. For many learning to speak “properly” is both of an empowering and deeply constraining practice. 2

I have personally felt this, when I see people communicating in a informal way, it makes me squirm, but not because they’re doing anything wrong but because I feel the embarrassment that was pushed upon me for communicating the same way. At some point the cycle must end. At some point I have to give up the tool that lets me signal my status, and I would call on you to do the same.

As a final note before I turn to what this looks like in practice, I want to know that my goal is to communicate effectively. This critique doesn’t apply to things that genuinely help me communicate with different groups of people more effectively, and as a matter of fact rejection of the social norm that is ubiquitous and unwieldy allows a nuanced and contextually helpful method of communication. So I still recognize that sometimes my spellings are so bad no amount of leftism can justify them, thats not my point. My point is that the issue is not them being “unserious,” it is them being “unintelligible.”

So Allow Me to Deep it for a Second – What is to be Done?

Ok, if we take this seriously and want to live it, how do we do that? Do we start typing gibberish? Do we make a new language? Do we abolish the Oxford Comma? Maybe. But I can tell you what we don’t do: continue policing each other’s language as long as we understand each other.

We should be infinitely more interested in communicating effectively genuinely and productively between ourselves than we should in maintaining the appearance of seriousness. We should be more interested in exploring just how far we can push language, than we should in staying within the box that the very Society we are trying to reshape has set around our language. We should call out when people are using these language standards to assert power, and help develop language standards that are accessible and understandable to all, that are genuinely helpful in mutual understanding. And we should collectively unlearn the narratives that have demeaned and sidelined so many valid ways of expression.

Final Thoughts –

For me, that means I’m not going to worry about using the language I am comfortable with, from “y’all” to “u”, I’m going to put my internal thoughts in random parentheses, and I’m going to flop between my learned formal method of writing and my deeply casual method of speaking. I am going to write the same way I made videos, sometimes I have a shirt on and I am talking about silly topics and sometimes I wear my tank top and talk about the worst war crimes this world has seen. if this is not how you think writing should be done, thats ok. But I would ask you consider why.

In all cases I expect people to perceive me how I intend to be perceived, to engage with what I say and not only how they think I should say it. If I make a mistake, or there is a way I could help *you* understand me better please let me know, but if critique comes down to “it is inappropriate” or “unserious” I want you first to consider who has defined appropriate and who has defined serious.

As a conclusion, this could all be cope. It could be true that I’m simply a bad writer, or I am simply too lazy to proofread my work or spell out my words. This could be me projecting the insecurities I grew up with spending three years learning cursive that I still can’t do. The world may never know why I care about this, but I do hope the arguments I made stand: if language matters, use it consciously. If you are more comfortable and more effective writing how you speak; do that, bc ik sure as hell I will be. 3