Grammar: Most of us were forced to learn it, some of us weren't paying attention.
In the grand scheme of things, grammar isn't all that important, but if you're going to communicate your thoughts and feelings on a daily basis, it's worthwhile to learn how to do it correctly.
It drives me nuts when people send me entire paragraphs through text without a single vowel.
I don't understand what you're saying.
I'm not talking about grammar in a professional sense, like people whose job it is to spell things correctly. I'm talking everyday, easy communication.
Human error is inevitable — everyone makes mistakes. If it's not a life or death situation, why does it really matter if someone used the wrong you're? You know what they were trying to say.
Julia Boland from the University of Michigan published the paper in the journal PLOS ONE as a culmination of her research on how one's personality can determine how they communicate online.
They were given an ad for a roommate with edited and controlled grammatical mistakes added beforehand.
The participants were asked to judge how good of a roommate they thought the writer would be, and if any of the grammatical mistakes bothered them.
The Big Five Personality Assessment uses multiple choice questions to sort people into different personality types. The test is often used by employers and company executives.
Extroverts let the spelling mistakes slide, but introverts were more likely to use the mistakes as judgment against the writer.
In addition, those with less agreeable or open-minded personality types found it more difficult to deal with the typos than those whose personality types were more empathy-based.
Firstly, a sample size of only 84 people makes it likely that they were from similar demographics or age groups.
Secondly, though personality tests are useful tools for recognizing people's strengths and weaknesses, they aren't a foolproof scientific method.
Judging someone's intelligence based on whether or not they made a spelling mistake is pretty rude and close-minded. You don't have JERK written in your DNA or anything, but you should probably lighten up a little.
