Nothing chaps the collective hiney of the Antisocial Network's staff grammar curmudgeons quite like the people who offer grammar advice chock full of grammatical mistakes, spelling the topic "grammer" and similar sins. Oh, sure, there are descriptivists and prescriptivists in the grammar game, but we're pretty certain both of them would head for the nearest vomitorium upon reading the sort of crap someone calling himself (herself) Nitin Gupta penned for HubPages.com under the title "Tips on How to use good punctuation and grammar in essay or letter Writing."¹ This may well be the worst grammar advice in the history of the internet - and that's saying a lot!
Take, for instance, Gupta's first paragraph:
¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was http://nitingupta.hubpages.com/hub/Why-worry-about-Essay-punctuation-and-grammar
DD - WRITING
Take, for instance, Gupta's first paragraph:
Apparently Nitin was unfamiliar with the concept of redundancy ("emerged out"), and didn't realize that active voice ("Essay can be written") is anathema to most who teach grammar and writing. So... In the second paragraph, Gupta finally got down to brass tacks while discussing punctuation:"In today’s world essay writing has emerged out as one of the best ways to express one’s thought on the topic of concern. It gives a great opportunity for you to make your knowledge on a given topic count. Essay writing is very common in schools where students are required to express their point of view by writing academic essays. Essay can be written on any topic ranging from current affairs to historical events, from scientific field to economic field and so on."
"But to correctly express one’s thought to others can only be done with following the grammar rules and make the write punctuation marks as and when required. You can write punctuation marks to make the reading frequent. Now how can you know whether you are writing correctly with the right punctuation marks and that too at the right place?"Oh, dear: so many grammatical screw-ups and so little time... Let's just say that Nitin needed to learn the difference between "right" and "write" and leave it at that. We'll be perfectly honest: reading any more of this rubbish made our collective head hurt. |
| It gets worse, though: Nitin wrote more articles for HubPages on perfecting the art of writing essays; likewise jammed with grammatical errors. For his arrogance – or perhaps his complete obliviousness – and the urge to pick up a few pennies, we hereby proclaim Nitin Gupta to be today's Dumbass of the Day. | 
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¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was http://nitingupta.hubpages.com/hub/Why-worry-about-Essay-punctuation-and-grammar
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DD - WRITING
Even if the write/right thing were correct, N. Gupta would fall short on prose making sense.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes - it's so bad I could have spent a week (or three) just critiquing the grammar in this one submission. So many mistakes, so little time...
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