For ABC’s Richard Castle, using the proper language to make a point is of the utmost importance, especially if that point is worth killing over. Upon stumbling across a murder victim, sporting graffiti on her face (presumably left by her killer), Castle jumps at the opportunity to correct the criminal’s poor grammar. “Your should be you-apostrophe-r-e as in you are. That’s not even a tough one, not like when to use who or whom. I’m just saying, whoever killed her also murdered the English language.”

We all make mistakes. I’ll be the first to admit that I make them all the time myself. I know the differences between their, they’re, and there, but even I mix them up every now and then when I’m typing quickly. The trick is to always proofread the work. If I can’t take the time to read it myself, how can I expect someone else to take the time to read it? I read and re-read what I’ve written at least five or six times before letting anyone else see it. I’ve done enough peer-editing in my time at Uconn to know that most people just do not take the time to proofread their own work. They assume the spell-check option on Word is enough to overcome the really bad errors, and any other mistakes are so ambiguous that no one will notice.

The consequence of this is that the author is undercutting his or her professionalism with every grammatical or spelling error. Poorly proofread work is like taking a megaphone and shouting: “I don’t care about what I have to say, and you shouldn’t either.” The real message gets overlooked. One slip-up is bad enough, but most works these days are riddled with mistakes. In a single five-page essay that I read by a fellow student last semester, I found no less than sixty mistakes that a spell-checker wouldn’t notice, but a cursory glance at the work would. These days, the biggest blunders people make include misuse of commas, fragmented sentences, and too many mix-ups of the words it’s/its, breath/breathe, who/whom, and who’s/whose. I won’t even go into the misuse of the word literally. There’s not enough time in the world to cover that rant.

Obviously the issue is that students are not being taught the basics of the English language at an early enough age. Kids are taught how to read, sure, but they are not taught how to write well. With vocabulary lessons, kids learn how to spell obscure and often obsolete words, but they’re never taught how to properly use and spell some of the most basic words. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people spell the words “tomorrow” and “definitely” with the letter A. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I saw either of those words spelled correctly. Trying to teach students grammar rules and spelling in high school is just not going to work. It’s far too late.

I work in the Roper Center on campus where I view hundreds of surveys a day, processing the data and cataloguing it all. In the span of a single minute, I found three very obvious typos in three different surveys. Two were from Zogby International. One release claimed the survey was conducted December 28-20 of last year. The other release claimed December 28-30, 2010 as its field date. The third I found in a Word Public Opinion survey, which encouraged readers to visit their website at WorldPublicIoinion.org. Obviously the person typing just missed the O and P keys and hit the I and O keys instead, but if anyone had proofread this at all, they could have caught this and fixed it before releasing the study to the public.

The most humiliating moment came this week when I was reading Tuesday’s Daily Campus. Right on the Sports page, the big headline read: “PLAYING THE VILLIAN.” I read the article to make sure it wasn’t a play-on-words; maybe someone’s last name was Villian? It wasn’t. It was about some terrible loss to Cincinnati with a throw-away mention of Villanova. The article discussed how “embarrassing” Uconn’s losing streak is. I couldn’t help but laugh. If you ask me, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a huge newspaper headline with a screaming typo. What’s even worse is that the article said: “He call it ‘embarrassing.’” Even if you don’t know how to spell villain, surely you can recognize that “he call it” is not proper English.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but I feel like, these days, the most common mistakes are not difficult to remedy. I don’t think it’s asking too much that people learn how to use simple three- and four-letter words like its or your. I mean, people clearly do not know how to use commas. I’ve become pretty understanding with comma misuse in the last few years because the rules are too complicated for people to bother learning. The problem I have is with the more basic mistakes. If you’re not saying “it is,” you’d better not be using an apostrophe. You’d also better not be saying “your stupid” unless you can explain “my stupid what?” Murder is a crime, people. Please stop murdering the English language.