Sincere thanks for our grammar guardians

I’m new at American Thinker, a “Deputy Editor.” They didn’t even give me a badge or a computer. When I was a police officer I got a badge and a gun, but they say the pen is mightier than the sword, so maybe it’s a wash. I’m a pinch-hitter, allowing over-worked colleagues like Andrea a well-deserved, occasional, day off. I also blog full-time at Stately McDaniel Manor. As those who have taken the time to read the compressed bios at the ends of my blog posts know, I’m—shudder–a retired high school and college English teacher. Grammar only upon request.

So what? So this: Wendy J. Wallace wrote this comment in response to Hopeful American musings for the new year:

For readers of American Thinker, it’s easy to develop a pessimistic outlook as we note the steady increase of typos, grammatical errors and poorly constructed essays. It seems much of the increase is due to the intentional glitches built into our present means of communication. It requires constant vigilance to correct this slew of unwanted commas, incorrect homophones and faulty word substitutions, such as “and” for “an,” or, in this case,” ‘then” for “than.” If we all proofread our submissions, and correct the errors, in 2024 we may find fewer of them than our fears might anticipate. But which will drive us mad more quickly; the continued exposure to garbled essays and comments, or the endless attempts to correct even such brief comments as this one?

Perhaps it’s already happened to me: are these observations and concerns mine alone?

Image: Socrates Teaching Perikles, Nicholas Gubal, wikimedia commons.org,

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 France

No, Wendy. We struggle with them every day. New to AT, I’ve been learning the quirks of its dated—by IT standards—software. What one types doesn’t always make it to the entry box, which doesn’t always make it to the website. Contributors submit articles on a variety of software, though we prefer Microsoft Word, Times New Roman 14. MSW has its own grammar and spell-checking quirks. Combined with the formatting issues inherent in combining platforms, your faithful editors spend a great deal of time just getting things to look right on the screen.

Then there’s editing and proofreading. Because we encourage thoughtful, conservative, articles from a wide variety of authors, we deal with all levels of writing ability, and do our best to help everyone improve. I won’t go into those matters, merely proofreading.  “Satch43,” commenting about All cultures are equally valuable: a deadly delusion, sets the stage:

d/S/C, Mike? Google it and see what you get. I tried and didn’t get anything that allowed me to understand just what cultural delusions you were referring to. I like the stuff you’ve been writing recently, and am especially glad that you are writing about topics that the mainstream media hates to mention, maybe out of fear of another _Charlie Hebdo _moment. Now those are words that you can search for learn something from.

You are good. But you can do better.

Well, at least I’ve risen to the “good” level. Satch43 is right, however. Acronyms not universally understood must first be spelled out. In the daily rush of deadline publishing, I overlooked my own teaching in that article. Satch43 couldn’t Google it because it’s my invention, and tragically, my linguistic creations are not yet on the tips of American’s tongues. Small “d” Democrat, because Socialists and Communists have all but devoured the party of Democrats who once put America first and supported the Constitution. I fixed it, but when last I looked at the article on the site, the fix hadn’t appeared. Sigh.

Among the other things I taught is one can’t proofread immediately upon finishing writing. The brain will see what one intended to write. Only by putting time between finishing a work and proofreading can one begin to see mistakes. One day while I handed back papers, a young man complained: “why did you put a red mark by my name?” I smiled and replied: “because you misspelled it.” “I did not misspell my own name!” he indignantly replied. “Look.” Sheepishly and quietly he mumbled: “I misspelled my own name.” Hilarity ensued.

We appreciate our grammar guardians who help make our own writing and the writing of our contributors as error-free and stylish as possible. We especially appreciate those who do not begin their missives with “how stupid are you?!” Please understand we relentlessly proofread everything we publish, but between human nature, deadlines, conflicting grammar/spell checkers, creaky and sometimes inconsistent software, and the sincere desire to encourage and publish as many of our contributors as possible, such things will inevitably happen. I think you’ll find we do better than many stops on the Internet express, but we’ll never stop trying for perfection. That’s kind of hard, though…

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and all-too-human high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.