If a person reads much of what I write, it shouldn’t take long for them to figure out that I’m not very well educated. I graduated the 12th. How that happened, I’m not sure. I spent most of my approximately 2160 days of formal education observing what was going on out the window or getting into mischief of some kind or the other.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not proud that I didn’t graduate at the top of the class. Most things that where common sense, I did alright in. Math was something I could reason out. History and Geography were things that interested me, so I’d perk and listen most of the time. Science was a little baffling. I didn’t mind experimenting around with stuff, but memorizing the periodical tables and such didn’t set well with me.

But now let’s talk about English. There was nothing common sensical about sentence structure and diagraming a sentence. Reading meant little to me. I was easily distracted and living in my early world there were few quite places where I could sit and read. Even though I always lived in the country, I had noises playing in my head. I think they called it having an active mind.

As I got grown and out into the business world, I wanted to project myself as someone learned, so I listened to how most smart people talked and tried to talk like them. I didn’t worry about diagraming the sentence they spoke, I just knew to not fumble around with my words. It helped that my wife would subtlety correct me when I misspoke, which I really appreciated. She didn’t harp on me too much, but just enough to be helpful. She was a great English student.

Somewhere along the way I decided to start writing stories about growing up and the people I’ve meet in my journeys. But I choose to write more like me and a bunch of my friends (yes, I know that should say “a bunch of my friends and me”) just sitting around talking. Like telling stories to each other. Let me stop for a minute and asked you a question. Have you ever been told a story, a really good story, where the storyteller was real proper with his words? Most likely if you have, it wasn’t a real good ol’ down home county boy story.

So here is what I did. I decided to write just like I talk. If I’m going along talking and I feel like a nice pregnant pause would make the story more interesting, I’ll just drop in a comma. I’m not sure it’s always proper to do so, but I just do it. I even occasionally start a sentence with an And, knowing that’s not how you write. But that is how I talk.

Today I submitted a story to a group that I have seldom been on and a nice fellow commented that I had used 60’s, meaning it was at a time in 1960s when I was a kid growing up. He explained that 60s is the proper way to write that. I wasn’t offended by being corrected. In fact, I was thankful that he explained that writing rule. In a way it was kind of like my wife subtly correcting me.

Luckily I can do a Facebook search using my name and 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, etc and it will bring up every time I’ve used it that why. I probably corrected a few dozen places where I have used the ‘s. And I know I’ll be able to entertain myself for countless hours, correcting the other 900 to 1000 stories I’ve written and submitted on various FB Groups.

But with all that being said, don’t very many of you decide to be the grammar police on me, because I probably won’t feel like editing that many more stories.

But I do have a suggestion for y’all. Go on Amazon and buy a copy of my book, The Angora Chronicles, read it and look for typo’s and grammatical errors and send me a list of them. It’s not likely I’ll change anything, but it would be a way for me to sell books.