As we all know, the official Trump twitter account has been riddled with grammatical errors—whether they’re kept on the president’s feed or promptly deleted after being sent off haphazardly into the social media sphere. These include, but are not limited to, “honered,” “tapp,” “Alex Baldwin” and “rediculous.” Don’t forget “covfefe.” (Even Trump has played into the whole “covfefe” slipup.) And now, a retired English teacher has spotted a slew of mistakes in a Trump letter she received in the mail.
Yvonne Mason, who formerly taught at Mauldin High School in South Carolina, sent a letter to the White House after the Parkland shooting on February 14, asking Trump to meet with victims’ family members.
The message she received back from the White House—signed by Trump—discussed the listening sessions he hosted and school safety in general. Mason graded it for spelling and grammar, like she would any English assignment, and marked it up with purple corrections (her version of the dreaded red ink).
“When you get letters from the highest level of government, you expect them to be at least mechanically correct,” Mason told Greenville News. “I have never, ever, received a letter with this many silly mistakes.”
Mason posted the Trump letter, which has gone viral, to Facebook (then reportedly sent it back to the White House):
Mistakes in the Trump letter
Mason counted 11 times the Trump letter capitalized words she said shouldn’t have been capitalized such as “Nation,” “Federal,” “President” and “State.” However, as The New York Times noted, the capitalization of these words follows the government’s style manual.
“‘Federal’ is capitalized only when used as part of a proper noun, e.g. the name of an agency,” Mason wrote. She also pointed to the overuse of the word “I” and dangling modifiers. Like the Trump twitter account, this letter lacked perfect grammar, according to Mason.
“If it had been written in middle school, I’d give it a C or C-plus,” she said. “If it had been written in high school, I’d give it a D.”
