Watch out for the grammar police, they’ll get you
In our fast-paced world, where time is money and social media is commonplace, it has become increasingly important to deliver content quickly and consistently. But what do you sacrifice when you push quantity over quality?
As Red Balloon examines the trend of celebrities tweeting abbreviated words, using poor spelling, and bad grammar, they find that younger fans, who look up to these celebrities, use their poorly edited tweets as a model for their own communications.
In some cases, they use the celebrities as a defense model: “if Lady Gaga writes like that, why can’t I?” In an effort to combat this theory, the cutest “Grammar Police” you have ever seen were created.
Red Balloon has launched a campaign, called “Celeb Grammar Cops,” to correct celebrities’ tweets. Red Balloon is an English grammar school in Brazil that challenged a group of eight to thirteen-year-olds to play “grammar police” and help their favorite celebrities on Twitter.
The results are quite entertaining and adorable, as the children typically post a picture to go along with their corrections. And with a never-ending supply of tweets to criticize, this is a great way for kids to practice their grammatical skills. And “school” in now in session for Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, John Cusack, Ashton Kutcher, Charlie Sheen, and many others.
Celebrities are not the only guilty parties
However, poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation are not limited to celebrities. There are numerous sites like the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation, dedicated to enlightening the world about the rules of “proper grammar;” including a look at superfluous quotation marks on signs and advertising.
Since the majority of us text in letters and numbers on a daily basis (“r u stopping by @ 7 or 8?”), it makes you wonder if the rules of grammar still apply. I would like to think they do because there is nothing more attractive than a properly punctuated sentence. So before you tweet, text, or Facebook, you might want to take another look at your post and see if it will pass a “Grammar Police” inspection.
If you are interested in following Red Balloon as they correct their favorite celebrity tweets, you can follow them @redballoonBR.