ACCORDING to Stanley Johnson, most Britons lack the literacy to spell ‘Pinocchio’. Do you mangle the English language and earn the prime minister’s dad’s contempt?
You have a guess at words
Despite having access to a spellcheck and the whole internet you just have a vague stab at spelling words, resulting in painful attempts like ‘inditchiness population’, and then add ‘(?)’ to further insult the reader.
Your spelling undermines every point you make
When you’re going off on a political rant in the MailOnline comments, nobody will bother to follow your conspiracy theory about both parties’ leaders being Russian puppets when you spell them ‘Borris Jonston’ and ‘Jeromy Corbin’. Shame, you were really onto something.
You get familiar figures of speech wrong
Are your emails littered with malapropisms like ‘fly in the oinkment’ and ‘let’s talk pacfics’? There is a reason for this – you only read rubbish online, not proper books where people use the phrases correctly. Even a Jack Reacher novel would help.
The old ‘their, they’re and there’ trichotomy
Look, it takes about 15 minutes on the aforementioned internet to clear up this baffling homophonic puzzle. ‘There going to Chester Zoo on Saturday if they’re car is fixed’ is, frankly, just agonising.
You still communicate in txt-spk
If you are applying for a job with sentences like ‘OMG wud luv 2 work here!!!’ in your covering letter you may not get the job, although your future boss may also be an illiterate twat and will reply: ‘Gr8 2 hav u on bord.’
