In 2015, Grammarly put pro sports fans to the test. We wanted to see who had the best writing chops when they were cheering on their favorite teams online. Our first study— ranking NFL fans by their spelling, grammar, and punctuation—proved so popular that we went on to rank MLB and NBA enthusiasts, as well.
To wrap up the year in sports (Grammarly style), we decided to see which pro sports cities had game. Sports lovers in the great state of Tennessee surprised us by coming in both first and last. Memphis ranked number 1, lead by grammatically adept Grizzlies (NBA) fans. Nashville lumbered in at the back of the pack, hindered by typo-prone Titans (NFL) fans. NBA fans made the fewest mistakes overall, and NFL fans the most.
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Methodology
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.
