You Need To Go To School To Learn Grammar

As an online article author, and now an author of e-books, completely self-taught, I’ve been accused in my day of poor grammar at times. Unfortunately for me, the criticism is justified, and I don’t claim to be a writer, or having got top-notch grades for composition while in high school or college. Indeed I did well enough to survive, but that’s really not saying very much, and my work shows the reality. Okay so let’s talk about this for second shall we?
The other day, I was reading a paper on artificial intelligence by a quite famous computer scientist Peter Norvig and he noted that there are something like 1700 pages worth of grammar rules in a basic informal English grammar text book. He mentioned this fact so that programmers could realize how difficult it was to get artificial intelligence to understand a story, analyze it, and cite its main points. Of course, as a writer myself I just laughed because think how hard it is to write the story in the first place, now the AI machine will read it instead of a human to tell them what it was about, consider that if you will.
If you want to be a great writer, without grammatical errors you would have to be well-versed in those 1700 pages at minimum to do it correctly. And I might add; by the time you master that, you’ll have wasted (spent – not to offend any English teachers) a year or two of your life writing and re-writing while learning those rules, and in the information age, especially in online writing you’d probably be the last person using those rules anyway – so anyone reading what you wrote would think you were looped – go figure.
And why do I say that? Because if you look at some of the grammar mistakes online, and if you realize the number of people who are writing on the Internet using English as a second language, it becomes quite obvious that what you read on blogs, and a good bit of the content out there isn’t much better than the nonsensical tweets that teenagers do or the text messages they often post to their Facebook page.
It’s not that I think that anyone should dismiss the grammar rules in the English language, it’s obvious that much of the writing these days online is simply atrocious and overall could use an upgrade back to those rules, however it’s getting to the point where no one except for an English teacher will know the difference if you make a few mistakes here and there isn’t going to be easy, not for a human writer or an AI programmer. And I guarantee you there are at least 10 grammatical mistakes in this article that I have purposely put forth for you. Can you find them, I doubt it. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.