Your knicked

My sister is a senior nurse. As such, she’s often asked for her professional opinion when friends and family have a boo-boo. Does it need stitches? Which compress should I use – frozen peas or hot water bottle? Can you still use a tube of liniment that expired in 1978? Will taking paracetamol and ibuprofen at the same time make you froth at the mouth and overdose?

When you need expert advice, you ask an expert. Right? Wrong. Or at least not always. The last time I pummelled my sister for medical information, I felt the need to apologise. She gets this all the time, so she must be sick of it. Her response surprised me. She said, ‘But, as a writer, you must get people asking you for writing advice all the time.’

Once I’d stopped laughing, I wiped the tea I’d just spat out off my chin, picked myself up off the floor, looked her straight in the eye and replied, ‘Er… no.’ Because no one has ever asked me for my writing or editing advice, despite the fact that I’ve been doing both professionally for more than 20 years. Never. Nada. Zilch. Nope.

But why? Surely people need to write things all the time. How come they aren’t banging on my door 24/7 to make sure they’re doing it right? No one comes running to me with the literary version of a grazed knee, desperately inquiring as to which would soothe it more quickly, a semi-colon or an em-dash. Wondering if they should stick some adjectives on it or just slather it in quotation marks.

The answer is simple. Where writing’s concerned, and the grammar, punctuation and spelling that entails, everyone thinks they’re an expert. Everyone went to school. Everyone learnt their alphabet. Several decades ago they all picked up a fat Crayola in their pudgy little hands and learned how to write their name. Which now makes them editorial experts. Although, I can’t help pointing out that, as a child, I also learnt how to tie my shoelaces, but I wouldn’t call myself a cobbler.

Bizarrely, the Government, in their wisdom, or lack thereof, have muddied the waters somewhat. I recently filled out their handy online survey that tells you which new occupation is best suited to you, much like the careers advice questionnaire I filled out at school, where it was suggested that, due to my teenage interest in both stage make up and human biology, I’d make a more than competent embalmer. As tempting as it was to spend a career smelling of formaldehyde and having one-way conversations with a less-than-responsive, yet delightfully captive, audience, I resisted the urge to go down the cadaver route and instead became a journalist. So what did the finely tuned algorithms of the hallowed halls of Westminster suggest I should retrain as? Unsurprisingly, a journalist. £1.7m of taxpayers’ money well spent.

The odd thing is though, that nearly all my friends, from chefs to accountants, from Zumba teachers to actors, with skill sets as far removed from mine as it’s possible to imagine, were also told that they’d be perfectly suited to a career as a journalist, writer or editor. As if, on a whim, one can miraculously don those highly skilled, extensively trained-for sobriquets in the same way that one might effortlessly pull on a pair of old socks. Is it me?

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that, at these unprecedented times, my social media newsfeeds are also inundated with intrusive ads claiming that any old Tom, Dick or Sally can simply put down their monkey wrench, unplug their dentist’s drill and become an overnight successful writer, editor or proofreader. These ads boil my wee. To the point where you can actually see the 1930s cartoon train whistle on the top of my head shooting out steam. The perpetrators of these insidious ads promise the unsuspecting reader infinite pots of gold and as much foie gras as they can eat, as long as they’re prepared to sell their spleen for the cost of an online tutorial, wherein they’ll learn how to ditch their current line of work and make a more than comfortable living using words. Well here’s two for you – utter and shite.

If the amusing comments in response to these ads are anything to go by, not only must the uptake be pretty huge, but those taking up that offer are evidently mostly clueless. Many’s the comment I’ve seen saying, ‘I is reelly good at spotting misteaks.. Could I be proofreeder?’.  The answer to that is, of course, a resounding no. But money will still change hands and people will still assume that they can do a job it’s taken many a trained professional decades to hone to perfection.

But the most annoying people? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the self-appointed online Grammar Police. The hairdressers, pianists, bank clerks and clinicians of this world who love to correct the punctuation and grammar of everyone else on social media. Every now and then, I like to take a break from my professional, trained-at-journalism-college, 20-years-plus-in-the-business editorial work, grab a cup of Lapsang Souchong and a caramel wafer, and sit back and watch other people trying to do my job. It sustains my bloodlust to see people who are actually trained in eyebrow-plucking and animal husbandry try to correct the spelling and grammar in other people’s comments while peppering their own with countless mistakes. Mistakes they don’t even realise are mistakes, because they’re trained in hedge-cutting and flagpole painting as opposed to wordsmithery.

This morning, among endless rants about the ineptitude of Boris Johnson, the contentious posts about the benefits of the vaccine and the usual smattering of (rather enjoyable) cat videos, my social media feed also threw up a post from a local Facebook group, wherein the postee in question lets forth a tirade on the misuse of the English language, ‘could of’ and ‘should of’ specifically. Naturally, and with an irony lost on its outraged composer, the post was written in appalling English. Of the 204 responses, all of which were vehemently ‘correcting’ everyone else’s English, and all of which I diligently read while becoming increasingly more incensed, there were only two that were actually correctly written. Two. Out of 204.

Misspelled words, a terrifying lack of grammar and an utter desert of punctuation, all encompassed in the unfathomable misplaced confidence that the idiot correcting the other idiot’s sentence was indeed correct. From my lofty, NUJ-accredited ivory tower, I watched from above like Zeus sitting on a fluffy cloud of thesaurus pages, consumed with rage, but knowing that, for the sake of my blood pressure, I should just let it go.

After a few minutes, I saw a response in which a man called Shane (obvs) decided to pick apart every element of the original post and point out its editorial wrongdoings. In doing so, he spectacularly made several of his own, yet his erroneous response was garnering huge admiration from others. He already had 20 likes. The likers were believing his ungrammatical bollocks and were oblivious to the mistakes he was actually making. They thought Shane was the Lord of the Grammar. Nope. That would be me. So I waded in.

I spent the next ten minutes composing a response, painstakingly pointing out Shane’s errors, using two separate laptops for research and typing purposes, and referring to my trusty online dictionary to avoid making any schoolboy errors that could come back to bite me on the arse, in order to knock him from his self-imposed pedestal of literary expertise. I finished it, read it, reread it and, heart racing in anticipation of the shitstorm it would cause amongst the hard of thinking, pressed send. But it didn’t send. While I’d been composing my magnum opus, some well-meaning member of the group had brought the subject of learning difficulties into the fray and admin had duly turned off commenting to avoid potential offence to the dyslexic. Fair enough.

The moment was gone. Shane would never know what a jumped-up, self-entitled, arrogant, ignorant buffoon he was or that I was indeed the grammatical expert he so wanted to be. Neither would his 20 adoring followers. Shane’s now strutting round the backroom of Aldi, thinking he’s cock of the walk, because 20 stupid people thought another stupid person, who claimed to be an expert on something he wasn’t an expert in, was cleverer than the original stupid person, who claimed to be an expert in something they were also not an expert in. I walked away and made a cup of tea.

Of course, I should point out I am aware that not everyone other than me is a literary vacuum. I know some people who are perfectly able to craft a very well-constructed sentence. No one writes a ‘Disgusted of Clapham’ letter of complaint as well as my own father. So I don’t say any of this from any sense of superiority, but just from a sense of professional knowledge and experience. I’m the first to admit that in many instances in life, I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m grateful to the highly skilled people who do the things that I can’t - the men and women who fix my car or sort my plumbing or carry out my surgery. They’re experts in their field. But that’s their field and this is mine. Unless you’re meant to be in my field, get out of my field. Don’t make me set the scarecrow on you.

So let’s agree to admire and respect everyone else’s skill, training and area of expertise, without trying to claim a bit of it as our own. I know how to put on a plaster, but I wouldn’t claim to be a brain surgeon. I wouldn’t dream of assuming I could upholster a sofa or drive a train just because I’ve sat on both of them in the past. Perhaps the tree surgeons, dentists and accountants of this world who choose to be the self-appointed Grammar Police could just stop it. I don’t claim to know how to lop an ailing privet, extract an impacted molar or work out your tax return for the last financial quarter, so how about you don’t claim to be an editorial expert when you’re not? If you’re one of the people who does this, just stop. Don’t be a Shane.

So go ahead, pick the bones out of this. Trawl it for missing commas. Go through it with a fine-tooth comb looking for errant apostrophes and glaring typos. And then tell me, in faultless English, where I went wrong. I’ll just be here, silently correcting your grammar.