I don't get it, I just don't understand. I know that no one is perfect, including myself. While undoubtedly categorizing myself as a bad speller, I grasp for a stronger word than “bad.” However, I am not bad at grammar. I am actually quite good at grammar. I was taught at a young age that a person is to be judged based on their use of the English language. In my mind, it is simply that a smart person speaks eloquently while a stupid person speaks poorly. No, I don’t expect everyone to sound like President Obama with his team of speechwriters, but would it kill some people to stop saying things like “I feel real bad?”

When a person is using poor grammar while addressing me, my mind seems to wander. I stop thinking about what it is that they are trying to tell me, and focus only on their mistakes. This tendency to nitpick on grammar is especially distracting while taking tests. When a teacher confuses a period and a question mark, I am really bothered by it. How did you become a teacher if you don’t even know the difference between a statement and a question? I realize that most of these mistakes were made late in the previous night when the test was being created, but I cannot let go of them.

My generation is becoming increasingly dependent on technology. This offers pros as well as cons. Sending text and instant messages like “wat r u up 2?” are convenient in their brevity, yet lack personality. It seems as though we have started to speak similar to the way that we type. Don’t get me wrong, I love texting. I send thousands of texts every month, just like multitudes of other teenagers. But I use good grammar and I rarely abbreviate words and sayings. My “text voice” is nearly identical to my real voice. As for others, their text voice was created, and now they don’t know how or when to stop using it.

It seems as though some teenagers are incapable of not saying “like.” I kept a tab in my English class one day, during a discussion amongst 20 some students. It reached almost 100. I find that adults quickly lose interest and respect for a teen that uses the word “like” repetitively.

I am not asking that everyone speak like Shakespeare (although, that would be pretty cool.) And I am sure that during this writing that I have made a few grammatical errors. All that I want is for people, especially teenagers, to think about what they say before they let it spew from their brains’ with no filter. And for heaven’s sake, STOP SAYING LIKE.