The Weltchek Weekly

The stakes just got higher.

On the heels of last week’s post about the missing comma that cost a dairy company $5 million in back pay comes more vindication for grammar geeks. Slate, in an article about the indictments against 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election, suggests we should have known that the supposed grassroots activists weren’t the Americans they claimed to be. Why? Because of the bad writing in their social media posts.

Yes, writing on social media tends to be sloppy, the piece acknowledges, but the erroneous capitalizations, stiff sentences, and missing articles like the and a—a trait of the Russian language—should have been a tip-off.

It’s never uncool to fixate on bad grammar and awkward sentence structure. If we had, we might have caught these crooks earlier.