A Petty Annoyance, I know

I was just reading a fan-fic series over at the Scrubs Hub, which is a website dedicated to General Hospital’s Robin and Patrick. I admit that I can hardly stand GH anymore, although I have been watching since the fall of 1995–back when the show was still good. Anyway, I really enjoyed the story. It was a series of letters written for Robin and Patrick’s baby, Emma, and it was absolutely amazing. My one problem was that the author(s) kept making the same stupid grammar mistake. It is the same mistake that my mom makes all the time when she speaks, and it is constantly getting on my nerves. For a long time, I thought that I was going to be an English teacher, so I always try to be grammatical. My biggest pet peeve is when someone says/writes “I” instead of “me”. For instance, “They gave the pen to Jimmy and I”, which should read: “They gave the pen to Jimmy and me.” Even reading this back, my brain fixes the mistake in the first sentence, not even attempting to process it the way that I wrote it. In my mind the only excuse for this is that people simply don’t think when they write/speak. If they would only consider their words before they come out, things would be more grammatical. When I learned this rule (the indirect object rule), Mrs. B– told us to ask ourselves if we would say “me” or “I” if the sentence read: “They gave the pen to __”. Anyone who knows grammar, knows that “I” just doesn’t fit there. “They gave the pen to I?” It is more comfortable to say me than to say I there. That said, grammar isn’t always about comfort. One of the most annoying rules is the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition. Do you know how many papers I have strugged with because every other sentence ended with “to”, “on”, “in”, or “for”? Even Winston Churchill hated that rule! Another annoying rule is the one about not writing in a passive voice. I’m sorry, but I just don’t like writing in the active voice. I never have. I got a C on an assignment in High School because Ms. Z– thought that I used the passive voice too much. I never understood how she could fail someone for not using active voice. It wasn’t even part of the assignment. Then again she never really liked me. Could she have given me a C because she didn’t like the way I write? It is possible. I remember a conversation I had with one of my friends about Ms. Z–. Apparently, she flunked her brother because A–, my friend, helped him write the paper. She supposedly came out and told her that the reason he got an F was because he used A–’s writing style, a style that she hated.

Anyway, I’m going to end this post now before it gets further off the beaten track.