To check or not to check ￼

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Outside of an academic setting, should spelling & grammar be corrected?

Really? You can ask an English teacher this question?

It’s kind of an odd coincidence that this prompt came up. A couple of days ago, I shared this photo on another social media platform…

This many corrections would give my students red pen anxiety

For the record, I think it’s kind of condescending to quit someone’s grammar and something other than an academic or professional setting. But let’s keep in mind that this letter in the photo above was written by Linda McMahon – Donald Trump‘s handpicked secretary of education.

For those of you unfamiliar with McMahon, she previously ran unsuccessfully for a Congress seat out of Connecticut. But McMahon is best known as the estranged wife of Vince McMahon, long time head-honcho of World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE. When the McMahon did previously hold a corporate title in WWE. In fact, she even appeared on TV as a character herself in WWE programming.

I don’t necessarily think that a secretary of education has to have a handful of college degrees. But at the same time, I think it would be nice if an education secretary has, at least, set foot in a public school sometime since they graduated from high school themselves.

Harvard meet their point. McMahon attempted to craft a professional litter to an institution of higher education. again, given McMahon‘s education, credentials, she basically brought a knife to a gun fight with Harvard.

In an academic setting, I think this is fine. In the professional world, I think somebody from whatever is left of the Department of education office should have proofread this letter before they sent it off to Harvard University. All the best candidates, indeed…

in the real world however, I think that these kind of reactions are condescending and cruel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on Facebook get grammar checked by other Facebook users. It’s one thing to make a legitimate correction, like if someone says one name, and they need the opposite name. But most of the time I see these from Facebook users, they’re completely avoiding the point of whatever the comment we were saying and only trying to make them look bad by grammar, checking them. That kind of stuff is just not necessary. We typically know what somebody means even when they do make a spelling grammar mistake.

But whenever I see a ride up with as many grammar mistakes, and it is Manon‘s letter scene above has, it tells me that the person writing it does not write enough nor do they read enough. There’s a school of thought in the grammar education that basically says we don’t need to teach grammar the way they were driven into the heads of my generation and previous generations before me. Some argue that grammar is best in context: seeing it in reading and in writing.

A lot of times, students know that something is grammatically, incorrect, even if they don’t know exactly what the correction necessary is.

As a teacher myself, I would try not to put this money, red pen strokes on a student’s page. In fact, I would probably find just one error that they make repeatedly and focus on that. For instance, let’s say that a student makes numerous capitalization errors – be it at the beginning of a sentence or in proper now. I would decide to focus on that and allow the student to make the necessary corrections. From there, I might find another area to focus on, like subject/ verb agreement.

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One response to “To check or not to check ”

patc44

May 9, 2025

I read something yesterday that asked how important it was for people to be able to read above a certain school level, and I felt it was very important. For this very reason.
When you read – anything- books, on line, magazines, posters, contracts, bill boards – it help with articulation and day to day work. Making cakes from recipes to writing business plans. It gives a greater understanding of what people are saying.

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