This next story made me very happy, as grammar is certainly not my strong point. In my opinion getting the point of the message across, is far more important than worrying too much about the occasional missed comma.
And it seems that researchers have decided that those people who are obsessed with grammatical errors are not as nice as everyone else.
Julie Boland and Robin Queen, from the University of Michigan, asked people to rate the responses from 83 people to a job advert. They wanted to see how people would react to good and bad grammar, and if that would have any bearing on whether or not they would put the applicant forward for a job interview. There were three different types of emails, the perfectly written batch, the emails with grammatical errors, and those with spelling mistakes.
Once they had read the emails, they were then asked to fill out a personality assessment on their perceptions of each candidate. Bearing in mind that they had never met these people their entire viewpoint and decisions were based purely on the emails.
According to the research, the more positive and enthusiastic participants were less likely to be so harsh than the more pedantic participants who reacted very negatively to the grammar and typing errors.
It could be argued, reasonably, that less agreeable, pedantic people are less forgiving regarding errors or deviations from the norm. Also, the more extroverted people seem to be more understanding than those who are introverted. The study says “Less agreeable people were more sensitive to grammar errors while more conscientious and less open people were sensitive to typos.”
According to Gregory Guy New York University Professor, these findings are not necessarily that surprising.
“This ideology of standardness and correctness — seeing everything that is not standard as deviant — is constantly confronting [the] linguistic reality which is a lot of [language] diversity, so I would imagine that personality traits would correlate with language attitudes,” Guy told Mashable
So there you have it, people that obsess over grammar errors are more likely to be introverted and not such nice people. So please if I have made any errors please ignore them and prove yourself the nicer person. That’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.