When someone cannot argue a case, they resort to pedantry, it seems.
A retired secondary school English teacher has corrected a letter she received from US president Donald Trump and sent it back to the White House.
Yvonne Mason, who lives in Atlanta and was a teacher for 17 years, said the letter would have barely passed and corrected its numerous grammatical errors.
This included 11 examples of incorrect capitalisation of words such as “president” and “state”.
“If it had been written in middle school, I’d give it a C or C-plus. If it had been written in high school, I’d give it a D,” Ms Mason told South Carolina’s Greenville News.
In so doing, she says nothing about her target and everything about herself. Firstly, she should realise that style and grammar are two separate entities and a loose style is perfectly acceptable. What matters here is, did the writer convey his message accurately?
Okay, I can be a bit of a grammar pedant – but I keep it to myself. What I don’t do is correct it and send it back with my corrections scrawled all over it. This is because I am an adult.
Georgia ranks in the bottom 10 in the U.S. in terms of students lacking basic literacy skills
It may well have his signature but I would be surprised if the Donald had actually written it.
Well, quite. The article even acknowledges that point. All pretty pathetic.
The Language Log made a passing reference to Trump’s use of capitals. Unfortunately it was just to sneer at how common he is, or something, rather than to make the linguistically relevant point that in publicity material, which is, I imagine, what the letter was, capitlization draws attention to things that are important to the message, and so is used more than in other types of communication.
Actually, having seen the letter, it’s not so much that as a personal choice of style, and there is little wrong with any of the things she scrawls across in purple..
I’m not sure the teacher was trying to argue anything?
I think you will find that it’s the usual “Trump is bad M’Kay…”