A study conducted at the University of Michigan, United States, has found that people who are more demanding with spelling could turn out to be more hateful than others.
If you are one of those people who cannot stop correcting the spelling of anyone in your environment, or who cannot bear even a single grammatical error on television or in the newspaper, it seems very important to us to inform you that you have a slight obsession with good spelling.
This time science has proven that all those people who are very demanding, when it comes to good writing, could be much more hateful and unbearable. These researchers from the University of Michigan decided to test 83 people who participated voluntarily, and the results were surprising.
All the people who participated had to read the answers to the advertisements in the newspaper, which were looking for roommates and had to examine the personalities of the applicants. The emails that were received had replies with misspellings, in addition to typographical errors and many grammatical errors.
Those who participated in the study were evaluated by a psychological model of personality study and the most extroverted and cordial examined the answers in a more tolerant way than those who are obsessed with spelling, and these, turned out to be less “agreeable” and “extroverted”. ”.
In conclusion, the specialists demonstrated that:
“The less agreeable participants showed greater sensitivity to misspellings than the more agreeable participants, this could be because the less agreeable people are less tolerant than the previous group” Which leads us to a very interesting fact, the specialists pointed out that misspellings influence the decisions of people who are obsessed with “good writing” much more. The “spelling Nazis” or also called “gram Nazis” do not justify bad writers at all and decided to judge them by their errors in the grammatical environment. According to them, a bad spelling is already more than enough reason not to choose them as roommates. Maybe it’s (for them) a horrible idea to share a room with a person who doesn’t get along with grammar.
A very important piece of evidence from the experts is that “the production of language plays a very important role, one could even say vital, as far as personality traits are concerned.”
What does all this mean?
The study is just an isolated piece in the wide world of psychology. One can participate in the rigid ranks of the grammatical requirement, and at the same time be a very friendly person and open to new experiences, a very smiling person who loves the simple things in the world, including those who comment on these misspellings. In a simple way, it established clues: it is normal for people who are more introverted, and who have less ease of socializing and are more prone to conflict, to take a misspelling personally and in an exaggerated way.
Repress your impulses.
Now, we are sure that the following question arises: “Am I one of them?” Maybe yes, maybe not, maybe to a greater or lesser extent. One day, INC magazine, tried to solve what for people obsessed with spelling, represents a “problem”, with a handful of questions.
The first and most important is to consider the following when faced with a grammatical error:
Does it matter?: If the answer is NO, and in 95 percent of the cases it probably is, the best we can do is simple, just let it go. For example, if your cousin puts “ke” instead of putting “que” the world keeps turning, nobody dies, and everything is in its place. Among other important tips are the following: language evolves, and will continue to do so as time goes by, so we must accept (even if we don’t like it) that even the RAE is including spelling mistakes in the language dictionary hispanica (obviously this, according to the circular polemics, denotes a wide spectrum of “grammar Nazis” among us); and often,
In a few words, and to conclude, being very punctilious and demanding in the matter of grammar does not speak very well of your person, and we do not say it, as we already told you, this is proven by science.
And you… Do you know someone who is very obsessed with spelling? Or are you the “grammar Nazi” this time?
