When I was teaching middle and high school English, one of the many things I worked hard at was trying to get students to pay attention to the concept of “correctness” in their writing. Old school English teachers would refer to this as grammar, but that went out of fashion quite a while ago. Call it the dumbification of education or whatever, but “correctness” was easier for everyone to understand conceptually, and so there we were.

“Correctness” involves all kinds of things: punctuation, capitalization, spelling, sentence variety, tone, and — yes — even grammar (but we try to be sneaky about it). As a teacher, it doesn’t take long to notice your students’ challenges and weaknesses. For me, it was easier than most teachers because I was the English teacher in our school and I had most of my students for many years (some students endured me for six years).

One of the broadest areas of “correctness” that seemed to have its own life in most students’ writing was punctuation. So I had little lessons and quizzes to try to develop the skill of self-editing among students. The first lesson in punctuation usually involved writing a sentence on the board:

“Let’s eat, Grandma!”

I’d ask students to read the sentence to themselves, and then would ask one student to read it out loud. I’d then ask that student what the sentence meant, what it was doing. Easy.

Then I’d erase the comma and ask them if the meaning changed. Most students either just shouted out the answer, laughed, or (if they were one of the polite ones) raised their hands.

To cap the lesson, I’d say something like, “See, punctuation can save lives.” Or, “Forgetting a tiny little comma can turn an otherwise polite young person into a raging cannibal!” Before too long, most students stopped making punctuation boners.

There are lots of other things, obviously, about writing that require a sensitivity to correctness, and they get subtler as one gets better at it. Writing, and verbal communication in general, is very unnatural and fraught with traps and pitfalls and contradictions. But that’s why we have editors and proofreaders, and why we’ve learned to expect if not the reality of those types of people and their influence on the written word but at least the impact of their work, especially as the consumer works his or her way up the communication food chain. Newspapers, major corporations, and other important entities (including government agencies) employ such professionals to protect the excellence and authority of their written message. A fairly high value for “correctness” — regardless of what the message might be — is widely assumed. One, or at least nerds like me, notices with glee (or something) when the New York Times, for example, publishes a rare subject-verb agreement error.

Enter The White House e-newsletter of the current administration, which I somehow subscribed to (although I don’t remember doing so). I’ve seen probably half a dozen of these so far, and each has — at a quick glance — had several pretty glaring “correctness” errors. I don’t know about you, but I expected better from the highest office of the greatest country on earth.