Bad Grammar Disclaimer or Admission of Carelessness? (Or Run That Spelling and Grammar Check)

I have noticed a mildly disturbing trend by authors of listserv and discussion board posts and even bloggers to routinely add written disclaimers for their own grammatical errors, such as “I am not responsible for any grammatical errors due to my typing speed” or “Please disregard my typos due to the short amount of time I had to post my response.” (I am suspicious when someone tells the world that she keyboards like the wind if what her writing suggests is that she slept through most of her English classes in high school).

Disclaimers can be prudent, especially when lawyers are giving advice to non-clients whose cases they have not reviewed, or doctors are answering questions from patients they have not actually met. However, for legal professionals, failing to proofread our own writing is an admission of carelessness.

I know that sometimes people are trying to be funny when they add a disclaimer for potential written mistakes. Unfortunately, it is not funny at all when the writing disclaimed is actually full of errors. Our writing is one of our most important public professional personas, especially in the legal field. They might laugh, but in the end, our audience is still judging our competency and maybe even our level of education and academic success.

Plus, a disclaimer in lieu of simply running our word processor’s spelling and grammar check before we present our writing to others just seems lazy. When I was majoring in English in the early '80s, my typewriter did not check my spelling or my grammar, and my editing capabilities were limited to white-out, correction tape and cursing if I had to re-type an entire paper an hour before it was due. Today, we do not have any excuses for presenting basic written grammatical errors to potential employers, our supervising attorneys or our colleagues.

Disclaimer: I ran Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check on this blog entry. If it is not grammatically correct, it is my computer’s fault. The program does not recognize the word “bloggers” and recommends “bogglers” instead, which can be descriptive of people whose writing is mind-boggling.