Good Grammar Makes You Credible
As a reader, there’s little that will annoy me more than poor grammar.
Using correct grammar, including spelling and punctuation, gives you a bit of credibility. It makes you seem much more professional than if you’re mistaking “you’re” with “your” and a colon with a semicolon. If you use correct grammar you make your writing appealing to the reader, which should be your goal. It also makes the reader think you know what you’re talking about, or at least more than if your writing is littered with errors.
You should never use poor grammar. Typically, making grammatical errors shows one of two things: ignorance or laziness. Neither should be an excuse. If you consider yourself a writer, it’s your duty to know if a usage is correct or not; if you are unsure, it’s still your duty. Moreover, it’s your job to proofread your own work. Likewise, laziness can’t be an excuse; if anything, it’s worse than not knowing how to use a grammatical situation correctly. It shows that you don’t care. If you don’t care, i don’t care; if I don’t care, I’m not going to read your writing.
To summarize, grammar lets the reader know how serious you are about writing. It tests your perseverance and demonstrates your willingness to work and learn. The more grammatically sound your writing is, the more professional it will be.
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: what the hell is an interrogbang?! Well, if you think with punctuation, you’ve justed used one. The punctuation at an end of a sentence that includes both a question mark and an exclamation point is a modified version of the interrogbang. The name interrogbang comes from the question mark (interrogative point) and from the exclamation mark (the bang). The technical symbol for the interrogbang is the two marks overlayed as follows: ‽.