My line of work, more or less, is writing, so multiple times I’ve dealt with finicky editors and picked up a few things. Unlike you, I also did reasonably well in English in high school and college, though my standards were lower than yours and I probably came out with a B in most courses. I also never took any advanced grammer. Everything I know I learned in the 9th grade from one of those old lady school teachers who was a tyrant on a mission. However, I took enough literature in college for my dad to say, “Don’t major in English too. You’re already majoring in useless subjects.” The truth is though that I never liked highbrow literature like James Joyce or even Faulkner at his peak. I confess an appreciation for William Blake, and had an old school English professor who dismissed the term paper I wrote on his simple stuff and ordered me to write one on “Heaven Hell,” which to this day I’m not sure I understand. (Nowadays a student could appeal a professor’s decision like this and insist upon a passing grade for having done the assignment, but in those days a professor could actually order a student to work up to his potential.)

Anyway, I personally wonder how much slack I should cut people who don’t have my background. I cut Latinos a lot of slack in text messages, when they write “ala” for “a la” and even “callo” for “cayo.” Oral communication is the gold standard, and there’s no reason why I should expect others to have the same chops that experience and education have provided to me. Yet, on the flip side, I do have to wonder how a grown up can have been successful in business or whatever and still write things like “wear where u, i want to the ofice.” You’d think there would be some general stock of cultural competence, at least among the successful, but noooo.

One thing I notice is capitalization. It seems like people want to capitalize words they believe are important, like government, even when they shouldn’t be. You capitalize high school. Oops, a mistake. A specific high school should be capitalized, since that would be a proper noun, but “high school” in general shouldn’t be.

It’s a more or less affair, I think, and none of us are error-free, but then again a little more than less would be nice.

Meanwhile, people make similar mistakes with arithmetic all the time, but that’s another subject . . .

BTW, you write well.

My car is not new, but a nice 4X4 diesel. The inspection runs a few minutes.