And people think it is only I who makes English mistakes

It's 5 a.m., English assignment due in 7 hours and the spellchecker on my macbook is contradicting my instinct. Do I rely on my intelligence or obey my laptop? On one hand if I follow my nous and it fails me I could be the guy my tutor will eternally know as "that one who doesn't know the difference between s' and 's". However if I were to substitute my ineptness with the intel of a mac then I would probably have to put a reference at the end of the work out of guilt.

I'm certain most students have these situations similar to mine when it comes to late night work.
To me, as an English student, there is that added pressure of making work sound coherent, concise and most importantly correct. Ultimately if I makes a grammatical mistake or a speling error then all my "mates" are ready to let me know about it.

A clear example of this is incarnated in the critical reaction to my first blog. The "blogism of fire" started when a fellow linguist and "friend" commented on my facebook "can you please put an apostrophe in show's". Now if blogs had been around in the 18th century then Samuel Johnson, curator of the first dictionary, may have probably sent me a twittering message of disgust at the blunder. However I thought people were past that.

For today's modern reader finding spelling errors and telling someone about them functions to feed their ego. In their mind they are probably thinking "I am better than you because I know the difference between onto and on to". Nevertheless in my case there are always two excuses you can use in your defense. To my friends I say "who is the one who does English at university?" and to the ones who study English I just say "typo".

From timed essays in class to assignments at the death of night, the English language is a very delicate creature. However if someone finds that "jade" hasn't been capitalized in Heat magazine it's not going to kill it or, worse, stop the printing presses. So when it comes to my work please judge the beast by it's content rather than its skin.