A message to Grammar Zealots: I understand your pain, since I hear the Grammar Zealot’s siren call from time to time.

You may be a Grammar Zealot if:

• Your own grammatical mistakes embarrass you or you are horrified when your children use poor grammar in front of somewhat pompous Ivy League-like friends. (If you don’t have any pompous Ivy League-like friends, good for you!)
• Spelling errors made by others annoy you, and/or
• You are overly proud of your own handwriting, which looks like wedding invitation-style calligraphy and/or feel slightly superior because your spouse’s handwriting looks like hen scratching.

Here’s the deal:

1. Good grammar matters – a lot.  If you use poor grammar in written or oral communication, many people will dismiss you.
2. However – and this is important – we have found learning proper grammar is relatively easy for young people IF THEY CARE ABOUT WRITING AND SPEAKING.
3. But most young people learn to loathe writing and speaking if a parent constantly nags or corrects them about grammatical mistakes.

So our goal is to encourage powerful communication, delivered with proper grammar through the following:

1. Provide your Eagle with exciting writing and speaking challenges that include a public performance;
2. Offer a few world class examples; a recipe or algorithm for creating the final product and gamification to make it fun.
3. Make multiple drafts, critique and revision a part of the process and arm your child with forced rank critiquing templates – or far better, ask Eagles to create their own criteria and rubrics.
4. Add a final green-lighting step where submissions with poor grammar are rejected, and the penalties for re-submitting work to classmates grow exponentially more expensive for each re-approval.

If you are patient, and reward your child with Growth Mindset praise, his or her fellow travelers will provide the community,  incentives and coaching that leads to a desire  to write and speak well, and individual critique and gamified programs will deliver the tools to reduce grammatical mistakes.

So fellow Grammar Zealots – if you have my left brained, engineer like longing for perfection — stand down.  Find something else to obsess about.