Recently I was reading research about grammar police, the people who notice every misspelling and usage error in your writing and assume that you are ignorant based on these errors. Evidently they are disagreeable – certifiably disagreeable.

One of the factors in the Five Factor Personality Analysis (often called the Big Five) is Agreeableness. Research has shown that subjects reading e-mails both with and without spelling and grammar errors downgraded their estimation of the person the most if they also show a low score on Agreeableness. No big deal, you probably expected that to be true.

One of the other factors of the Big Five is Extraversion. Introverts who indicated that good grammar was important to them, were more sensitive to these errors and downgraded the likability of the author of the e-mail much more severely than did introverts who didn’t care about grammar. Overall introverts where not as generous…