Striving for perfection
A feat that I concede
May lead to an imperfection
Of my personality

Critiquing all the writing
Ensuring it is free
From grammatical delusion
No need for subtlety

Proposition and a verb
The subject here is me
These rules are non-negotiable
Who has deceiv’d thee?

And please call me a pedant
A badge I wear with glee
There’s no shades to this grey
I’m apathetic to your grief

So smugly I deliver
My damned philosophy
I give to you my ‘feedback’
Update it by decree

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Discussion

After feeling frustrated at how anal I find myself being over how the blog posts read, I wrote Perfection. It is supposed to be a humorous interpretation of an individual prescriptively reviewing a piece of emotional work, such as my blog posts about cancer. They are examining it with the same ethos as to how they would score an essay, ignoring what the words are saying and focusing on the inaccuracies of the grammar.

I studied for an English Language degree as an undergraduate. Some people who know this will occasionally use it as a quip when I incorrectly spell something, as if I spent 3 years reading the dictionary and studying the oxford comma. I have seldom admitted that we did have grammar modules, though, so it’s not totally unreasonable to expect better from me where you find such errors.

Due to the nature of the blog posts and how quickly I tend to write, read, re-read and post them, I find myself cringing at things I’ve written. It usually happens the next day when I decide to re-read the final version that I uploaded and start wondering how on earth I allowed such drivel to be made public to the world. In reality, I know that I am being a pedant and that the central point usually speaks for itself in the posts. If you notice something grammatically wrong, though, please let me know as soon as possible. I can then correct it before any more judgmental readers wonder how I got a first in my English Language degree because I did that, by the way.