Celebrity Grammar-What Our Stars Are Messing Up In Twitter

Ah, celebrities. They’re there to entertain us whether that’s their intention or not. Sure, many celebrities get their notoriety from making a great movie, song or other creative performance, and then there are those who make a splash due to their poor grammar and spelling on social networks.

Most of today’s celebrities can be found communicating with their fans through social platforms such as Twitter. And yes, Twitter does limit your characters to 140, so some creativity is needed in order to get your point across, but that doesn’t excuse poor grammar and spelling. The following are just some examples of what today’s stars are messing up on Twitter.

Alicia Keys

Due to the 140-character limit, many Twitter users remove letters from words in order to make it fit, and while it’s one way to get your point across, it’s another way to irritate people who prefer correct grammar. It’s unclear whether or not Ms. Alicia Keys removed the “e” from “be” to save character space, but she then added an “s” to the word “help”, which didn’t make grammatical sense.

Wayne Rooney

Spelling and grammar is one thing, but context is another. Wayne Rooney has a tendency to talk about random topics in one tweet, and they’re all separated by periods, which makes the tweet sound chunky. In the following tweet, Rooney lets us know that he:

1. Had a great day today (although he misspelled day)

2. Is back home chilling out

3. Has a funny son

4. Is going to bed.

Thanks for breaking all that down for us in 140 characters or less, Mr. Rooney.

Master P

Master P is an example of Alicia Keys and Wayne Rooney combined. In his tweets, Master P has a tendency to misspell words, and he is also known to discuss a variety of topics in one tweet. Unlike Rooney, though, Master P doesn’t separate his thoughts with periods, but with commas. And in order to save space, he doesn’t add a space after the comma, so his entire tweet runs together. Adding his own errors, he is also notorious for writing his tweets in all capital letters (which is the Internet equivalent to yelling). At least that keeps him from forgetting to capitalize the beginning of a new sentence.

While all three of these celebrities are different, they’re all notorious for making grammatical and spelling mistakes in their tweets. Some people don’t believe that using proper grammar, spelling and punctuation is important on Twitter, but it is. When your tweets are grammatically correct, it not only allows others to understand you completely and accurately, but it also doesn’t make you look like a fool.

Poor writing is not a matter of personal style and fame does not give individuals a special license to degrade language. Many will tell you that as long as one is understood it is all well but we know that standards in language specifically grammatical rules exist for a reason and serve to deliver clarity in content.

Recently Grammarly.com conducted research to determine the grammatical competence of celebrities. To our surprise celebrities of hispanic background scored quite high delivering a good number of grammatically correct tweets. You can see a really fun grammar infographic here.

Some people simply don’t have a thorough grasp on proper grammar and spelling, and that’s okay. There are plenty of tools available to help check your spelling and grammar. Should we use a grammar checker for small pieces of text? Absolutely.