Ever wonder where your city stacks up grammatically vs. other sports cities around the nation? If you have, I’m sorry–I can all but guarantee your city sucks at sports and you are searching for a W anywhere you can get it. Hey, respect. A W’s a W.
Grammarly, the world’s best grammar checker, recently released the results of it’s Pro Sports 2015 Grammar Power Rankings–collecting data from fans in each pro sports city by how well they used grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
The methodology used to determine the statistics is as follows:
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.
Some interesting takeaways: fans in Tennessee managed to come in first place (Memphis) and last place (Nashville), NBA fans made the fewest mistakes overall, whereas NFL fans made the most, and Philadelphia dropped from 5th to 25th place because Phillies fans are mouth breathers.
Where does your city stack up? I’m from Boston (36th), so that’s my excuse if this post is peppered with grammatical errors.
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Quick snapshot of fans in Nashville right now:
[h/t Grammarly]