It’s pathetic, really. There/Their/They’re, Your/You’re, and To/Two/Too don’t even get emphasised even though most people seem to struggle with them. Actually, I remember my misuse of “to”, instead of “too”, didn’t even get corrected. Ever.

To this day I have not figured out any worthy point to knowing what a noun is, what an adjective, or what an adverb is. Or for that matter, prepositional phrases, past participles, and all that other stuff. I read avidly. My writing was amazing. I read college level material at age 10 and received ridiculously high scores on all my papers, tested or otherwise (AP, SAT, regular papers, you get it). You don’t need to know any of that noun stuff in order to read and write exceptionally well. So if you could explain why anyone would “need” to know that stuff, please tell me.

Frankly, the only reason I ever bothered to figure out the difference between an adjective and an adverb was so I could play madlibs. Otherwise, the knowledge is useless. It won’t magically make anyone better at writing or reading unless all the other methods of education have failed on them. Hell, the only reason I didn’t get perfect on vocab tests was because there were always 4 questions asking me to mark which syllable has the stress. I mean, what the hell? Who cares? We know how to talk, no normally developed person actively thinks “well, ‘individual’ has the stress on THIS syllable so I say it like SO”….really makes no sense. So I’d just randomly pick a syllable for the stress and every so often I guessed right 4 times…and if I made 4 wrong answers I still got an A anyway since they were so few. Plenty of what’s taught in english classes does not make the language any easier to use.

And yes! As a nonparent, I support parents’ raiding of their kids’ halloween candy and bringing it to work. Also, Easter candy.