a total tool

A lawyer friend of mine recently sent me this awesome Above The Law article: 20 Ways To Write Like a Tool.  And the tool in me just hesitated about whether or not the "to" in that title should have been capitalized.  The tool in me also cringed at starting a sentence with "and."  But I'm getting over it.  Ha!  Another sentence begun with a conjunction.  How do you like me now?!?  It turns out, I make fun this concept a lot... so why am I still such a grammar-nazi?

Sitting around the conference table at work today, one of my coworkers was reviewing an intern's work and noticed she had missed the accent mark over CaféWell.  My coworker, who (bless his heart) has endured almost three months of my anal retentive, hyper sensitivity to grammar, looked at me sideways and warned our intern, "Don't do that again or she'll put a shock collar around your neck and make you bark like a dog."  Awesome.  Not really.

Due to my time as a lawyer, I write like a tool.  While I'm happy to report that "to the extent" has, in fact, magically drifted out of my vocabulary, I have to admit that I'm guilty of many, if not all, twenty (20) of the atrocities listed in the ATL article.  So much so in fact, our intern is undoubtedly losing sleep.  Typos are everything in law.  And I lost a lot of sleep over typos and potential typos.  The last thing I want to do is inflict the same torture I endured on someone else.  Especially someone who has to "report" to me.  In an effort to not become one of "those" supervisors (or in other words, a "partner at a law firm"), I am going to seriously make an effort to tone down my melodramatic relationship with grammatical errors.  Are they ideal?  Nope.  But the golden rule applies here too... and despite the fact that I effectively had a grammar shock collar around my neck for the last few years, I wouldn't wish my learned neuroses on anyone.

Arf.