Earlier this year I posted an entry about the relative intelligence of baseball fans when it comes to proper use of grammar, based on a report by Grammarly.com. According to the piece, Mets fans were the worst, with an average of 13.9 mistakes per 100 words; those who called the Cleveland Indians their own were lowest on the list with just 3.9.
Of course, I’d like to think that New York fans are just impatient, rather than dumb and/or lazy. They have better things to do (“New York minute.” am I right?) and you get their meaning.
Now there’s a new study comparing fans across pro baseball, basketball, and football along the same lines. (No hockey, eh? Too many “foreigners?” Fans have too much trouble typing the players’ names in their texts or on Twitter?) NBA fans made the fewest mistakes overall, NFL fans the most.
According to Grammarly
We began by collecting the first five comments posted under articles on each official MLB, NBA, and NFL team blog from official sports team and sports fan websites, like NFL.com and SB Nation, until we had gathered a total of 100 comments for each team. Each comment contained at least 50 words and was posted within an average timespan of two months ending October 20, 2015.
Using Grammarly, we identified the errors in the comments, which were then verified and tallied by a team of live proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, team and player nicknames, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.
Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each team.
Make of it what you will. There’s a famous scene in the premiere episode of HBO’s The Newsroom in which news anchor extraordinaire Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) points out that the U.S. is not the greatest country in the world, and points out where we stand in various educational disciplines.
As someone who works with words all day, I’m frequently amazed how poorly people express themselves on the page and often refer to the scene included in the link at the beginning of this piece as a commentary on the state of literacy now, not at some distant point in the future.
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