r/GrammarPolice

That is all

I was listening to a true crime podcast and noticed that so many of the cops they interviewed were using the simple past after an auxiliary instead of using the past participle:

• He had saw
• She had went
• He had drove by there
• May have came upon it
• Could have went out
• Had came home
• He had ran off
• Had went off the road
• Had went off the edge
• Instead of being took to the station
• If someone had came to the door

FWIW, none of them otherwise sounded remotely like AAVE speakers (I'm Black with a speech-language pathology degree, and can tell you this construction is considered normal in some varieties of AAVE). Just sounded like white dudes who think you slap "had" before all of your past-tense verbs.

I feel like I've seen a post about this before, but I'm going to post about it anyway.

People replacing em dashes with hyphens isn't the worst part. The worst part is then they don't put a space before it, but do after it. For example:

"That's not his ball- it's her ball".

It should be an em dash. In British English, there should be spaces on both sides. In American English, there should be no spaces.

It drives me insane.

Edit: Reading back on my example, a semicolon would be better, but you get the point.

Example: “Is there an event going on or something because it’s so frustrating as I can’t seem to find any affordable hotels that aren’t booked up.

Why do statements like this, that contain the word “as” and then an explanation, bother me so much? I see it all the time when people are trying to an explain a situation. It seems unnecessary, but I couldn’t begin to explain why and provide an alternative.

Lately I’ve noticed something odd with my writing habits.

The more academic papers, polished blog posts, and professional articles I read, the harder it becomes to tell whether my own writing still sounds natural. I’ll reread a paragraph five times and keep changing tiny things that probably didn’t even need fixing in the first place.

What makes it frustrating is that the grammar itself is usually fine. The issue is more that certain sentences start feeling “off” even when they technically work. Sometimes the wording feels too stiff, other times too repetitive, and after a while I can’t even tell if I’m improving the draft or just making it worse.

Recently I started experimenting with a more structured editing process instead of endlessly rereading everything manually. One thing that surprisingly helped was seeing how writing patterns show up during analysis rather than only checking for grammar mistakes. It made repeated sentence structures and awkward phrasing much easier to notice.

Still trying to figure out where the balance is between clean writing and overediting though.

Curious if anyone else here has gone through this phase where you become overly aware of every sentence you write.

What has happened to giving? You give a gift. Why has “give/have given/ will be giving” etc been replaced by “gift/have gifted/will be gifting”. My stomach turns every time that I see this “verbification” of what used to be a perfectly respectable noun.

“The air current was strong enough to impede his movement, if only slightly- as if warning not to go on.” 

I apologize if this isn’t the place for this kind of thing🙏

For example, you're supposed to write like the following:

The sign read, "NO PARKING."

I think that's ridiculous. It ought to be thus:

The sign read, "NO PARKING".

"We're [today's date]"

My friend Peter grew up in the South of France, and then went to high school in New Jersey. He's the only person I've ever heard say the current date this way:

"We're the 16th."

When I hear it, my mind just goes, "No, we're two dudes on our way to work. _Today_ is the 16th."

Is this construction a European thing?

I see myriad exemplars of bad grammar in this subreddit. I just wanted to say that. It's fine. It's reddit. I hope this post isn't too meta. I'm laughing out loud right now.