I am one these days, and it is so ironic. Until well into my school career I couldn't have given a whoop about spelling, punctuation, having a thesis, and all those other Strunk & White-isms. My complete refusal to take anything seriously in English class other than just reading books even led to me being kicked out of Honors after my sophomore year in high school. I was sort of shocked at the time, but it turned out that the Junior year Regulars teacher was better than the Honors one anyway, so it was all for the best in the end. And I got back into the AP class my senior year. I know: nerd!

The teacher who kicked me out was the closest thing I had to a nemesis in high school. She was such a grammar-obsessed freak that she counted off each instance of an error, rather than counting off for each type of error. Dude, if you don't know how to place a comma when you begin to write an in-class essay, it's not as if all of a sudden in the middle of writing the grammar fairy is going to come knock you over the head so that you see the light and mend your ways for the last few pages. As a result, people were consistently receiving negative scores.

Plus she was a master at writing random negative comments in the margins, like "I disagree. -3" or "NO! -10." One time we had to write an essay describing a room in school, and I compared the dark polished brick floor of our student lounge to the hue and texture of blue corn chips. She wrote "my favorite!" in the margin, and for two seconds I thought, "Hey! She's taking my writing seriously and appreciating my imagery." Then I realized she just really liked corn chips.

When we were studying Le Morte D'Arthur, she decided to be 'with it' and bring up a bunch of fantasy novels that deal with the same material (by Mary Stewart, Marion Zimmer Bradley, etc.). Only she kept mixing them up and getting things wrong about them. I was such an angry little snot by this point that I started keeping a list of errors of fact that she made. It was one ray of comfort amidst the angst of the rest of the class.

Meanwhile, the girls whose work she worshipped were writing essays about what a hero is with titles like "A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich." Because that's original.

One time my friend's mother, who taught college English, wrote one of my friend's essays for her. They received a 43%. So I was not the only one kicked out of Honors at the end of the year. There were six of us, and we were damn proud.

Another time I showed my mom one of my (severely marked-up) papers, and she started pointing out all these other errors that Evil Teacher had overlooked. I was like, "Mom, not helping."

Ok, Evil Teacher was a total troll, but somewhere between then and now (probably those four years I was tutoring students and running my grad school's Writing Center) I honed my mad writing skillz to a keen edge. Now typos and misusage and misspellings irk me to no end. Which is good, because a large portion of my job is fixing those sorts of things. At the same time, however, my computer's crackerjack spellcheck/grammarcheck is turning me into a very lazy typist. I get sloppy knowing that my buddy MacWord will correct things for me, and I end up writing unpoliced emails that read like "the cleent wast notpl esased atall." And I'm sure I make mistakes here too, but you know. This is just for fun and crumpets. I AM NOT JUDGING ANY OF YOU, EITHER.

All that aside, mistakes in professional things, like the Chicago Tribune, do really irritate me. And give me jolts of schadenfreudey glee, of course.

The best, however, was today at our big company meeting, my company being one that specializes in erradicating errors. The powerpoint presentation had several weird capitalizations and wrong dates and so on in it. It was, I think, one of the few situations where judicious pointing with a laser pen from the audience would be justified.