English is my native language but I’ll be damned if I know the intricacies of writing it, let alone speaking it. I’ve learned a few things along the way but there is a part of me that avoids trying to learn the proper way of writing the English language. Knowing verbs, adjectives, possessive this and that. All the stuff I’ve forgotten from the days of school. I’ve relied on the spell checker in the browser and occasionally, I’ll Google the definition of a word before I use it.

In the past few years of publishing content, I’ve been able to avoid people intent on making sure every grammatical mistake on the web is fixed. Sure, I’ve had the comments where people suggest other words or corrected a typo or two and I’m thankful for those. The thing is, if you can understand the point I’m trying to get across, what’s with all this other crap surrounding the point.

In certain situations, I can see how punctuation, grammar, and the like are important for people to understand points I’m making. The ability to publish things I write the way I speak is fulfilling. But correcting this mistake, that mistake, and seemingly never being able to write something that doesn’t require at least one correction, sucks. Why do I have to subject myself to those rules? I’d like to tell the English language to kiss my ass and let me do things my way.

I guess I should just hunker down and read English for dummies and try to at least obtain some semblance of writing skills. After all, if I can stop making those writing mistakes, that’s less I have to bitch about! By the way, style guides are books used to put people to sleep.