Policing grammar — why do some autistics do it?

I can’t speak for anyone else, only for my individual autistic self/selves, so please keep that in mind while reading this.

If you knew me 20 years ago, when I was a kid in general high school (what do you call grades 5–8 in English? I never know), you wouldn’t like me.

Not because I wasn’t pretty (nobody is at that age and that’s superficial) or likeable (again, kids are annoying), but because I would go out of my way to fix things that maybe didn’t need fixing and I’d step on a lot of toes (figuratively speaking).

I learned from a very young age a whole lot of rules, especially of grammar. Rules are easy to remember and easy to implement. They are a natural part of my existence and many of them can be explained logically (the ones that can’t I generally ignore, such as not sitting on the pavement, or random social rules that make no sense, like drinking or eating because everyone else is doing it, or not telling the teacher where your fellow students are when they decided to skip classes and you stayed behind because you like to respect rules…).

Some of the most logical are grammar rules, which do have exceptions that prove that language isn’t as regular as we’d like to think, but hey, kids don’t need to learn that (or do they?).

Grammar rules were taught and enforced upon me an my peers from a young age, both in my native language (Romanian), and English, which I started learning in third grade, with an emphasis on grammar. I also started learning French in fifth grade and I learned all the rules because that’s all that we were presented with and had to learn, or else.

Everyone hated grammar, especially since that’s what we were made to learn, but I was the one that excelled at remembering all of the random rules that you don’t need to have a conversation with another human being. I like rules, remember?

I’d never outright brag about my knowledge of grammar, but I would interrupt you in the middle of a conversation and explain why what you said was wrong and provide a “correct” alternative, so that next time you’d know better (at least that was my thinking at the time, “people need to know when they make mistakes, so they don’t make the same mistake twice, as that’s how I work and everyone is the same, right?”).

I didn’t know that was rude or unnecessary or that it was one of the reasons why most other kids despised me. Nobody stopped me to tell me that there are other rules that I was unaware of and that I was not respecting.

I would have appreciated that, but apparently it’s not cool to tell people when they are wrong, even if they would benefit from it, if only they can see beyond their hurt ego and accept that all humans make mistakes and we can only get better by receiving and accepting feedback.

Nobody corrected me, nor explained what I did wrong, because regular social communication, interaction between neurotypicals, doesn’t have real, clear rules. It’s a mumbo-jumbo that you need to decode in real time and react to while the other person is communicating.

As someone who over-analyses every input (visual — color, motion, texture, 3D and 2D perception; auditory, olfactory, tactile) and passes it through a complex filter of logic and memory, I tended to ignore ambiguous social cues because I had no idea what they were supposed to mean (people lie a lot, so I was also confused a lot).

Many times people have used this vulnerability of mine to make fun of me, to put me in unsafe situations where I was unaware that I was unsafe, to ridicule me (despite me not being aware I was the butt of the joke).

So for them it was a nuisance that I tried to correct them, but they never did try to correct me because to them I was a source of amusement that never failed to provide.

As we grew older and I learned to keep my mouth shut around people (ye’ good ‘ol masking), I also turned more towards writing. I can be as critical as I want with my own writing. I can tweak and fix it as much as I want. Which is awesome!

But, at the same time, the internet started becoming a *thing*, so I’d have access to chats with random strangers on the internet (yay!).

There were many people that I never chatted with simply because it bothered me too much that they couldn’t be bothered to write correctly. Now I don’t mean using correct punctuation or diacritics (my language has a lot of those and it still irks me when I read articles online without diacritics, no, I hate it, I really really hate it, if you’re going to pretend like you are a writer or a journalist, just make a little effort and write correctly), I mean not butchering the language as if it were an early 2000’s haircut.

As social media websites became more and more popular and my generation started putting more and more of their lives on these platforms, I also noticed that many people continued to make the same mistakes while commenting on photos that they did while talking.

They also sent public cheesy and grammatically incorrect (sometimes on purpose) messages to each other, something that I would never be able to do under any circumstance (I don’t think I ever commented on a selfie, I’m not someone who hands out unsolicited compliments).

I wasn’t big on forums, their prime was while I was an adolescent more interested in blogs than forums (although I did visit some of those forums and some of them were festivals of cringe), but I matured while the popularity of Facebook groups increased.

I’m pretty sure there were quite a few people commenting on the form, not content, of some forum posts, but I’m not sure how prevalent it was.

Posts and comments on Facebook seem to me much more volatile than forum posts simply due to the sheer number of people who can participate in any given conversation.

It’s easier to comment on a Facebook post, where nobody has the patience to read more than 10 words at a time, than write a lengthy reply to a forum post, where you know people enjoy reading your “literary” discussion on the given topic.

On social media it’s so much easier to derail a conversation (especially on a political topic) by attracting attention to the grammar of one commenter or another, instead of discussing the actual content of what they said.

It’s also easy to pile hate on someone who couldn’t help themselves and *just had* to correct someone on a thread (most of the time making mistakes themselves, which just shows poor judgement).

It’s a distraction tactic that is widely used nowadays. I see and acknowledge it and never contribute in it. I learned my lesson as a kid. But some people never had to learn this lesson.

Some are autistic and never had to learn the hard way that correcting people is bad for you in general. Some are not autistic and use this as a distraction tactic. You can’t know.

So the best way that I’ve found to deal with this is ignoring this behavior. Do not engage with it. If you want to, you can engage the person and ask them their opinion on the topic, but do not engage the correction.

If it’s an autistic person trying to show the (generally accepted) correct way to say something, they already did, so there’s no need for further discussion.

If it’s a neurotypical person trying to create a stink that distracts from the actual problem being discussed, being ignored will not further their agenda.

If it’s an autistic person trying to create a stink that distracts from the actual problem being discussed, all of the above.

Either way, please do not engage.

What I also learned is that many times it’s more important what people are trying to say beyond their words. Sometimes they don’t know which words to use, sometimes they use their words wrongly intentionally (to hide something), but they always have a reason for speaking or speaking up.

I always try to reach that part of them, the origin, the truth that hurts them*. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but concentrating on whether they followed all grammar rules doesn’t generally help with this process.

*Because I always try to fix things, and getting to the root of a problem is the first step in solving it, despite the fact that most people only need me to listen, not to fix their problems, but I can’t help it. I’m still working on this.