Why your fifth grade teacher was right
[In writing this post, I'm taking a risk in being viewed as arrogant or elitist or something (I promise I'm not). I'm willing to take this risk because I believe strongly about the subject.]
When you were in grade school, I bet you didn’t enjoy spelling or grammar lessons very much. I know I didn’t. (In fact, I regularly failed my spelling quizzes during 5th grade.) Then came high school, when you started writing papers and essays and (hopefully) learned about thesis statements and topic sentences and how to transition between paragraphs. You probably didn’t enjoy that too much either. Then in college you had to put all this together and produce strong, compelling essays and research papers. Then you graduated from college and said “boy, am I glad I won’t have to use those skills anymore!”
Only one problem: you do need to use those skills!
I’ve been working in corporate America for about six months now and I’m shocked by many people are sloppy with their communications. Just because email is (more or less) instant doesn’t mean you can leave the rules of good writing at the door. I can understand the occasional typo or misspelling of a tricky word (I do it myself with some regularity). It’s the habitual spelling errors, violations of basic grammar, and lack of a coherent, logical structure that get me down.
Things like your vs. you’re; their, there, and they’re; the over-use of apostrophes (plural nouns do not need to demonstrate ownership!); absent or inappropriate punctuation (one ! will suffice, thank you); CAPITALIZING FOR NO REASON (how I wish the caps lock key would disappear). The list goes on, but I think you get the idea.
The whole purpose of written language is to clearly convey an idea. In the corporate world, just as in school, this is a critical skill. Yet for some reason it doesn’t seem to be a very popular skill to enhance or improve. We all love taking classes on time management, leadership, coaching, etc. yet we leave writing skills by the wayside. Obviously the assumption is that once you’ve graduated from college your writing skills are sufficient. From what I’ve seen (both in college and at work) many graduates could benefit from a refresher course.
Maybe it’s all a matter of time and priorities–no one wants to proof read their emails before sending. Or they rely too heavily on spell checkers and sacrifice contextual accuracy for the sake of spelling correctness. I may be old fashioned, but I believe that good writing skills are important and it’s worth the extra time to write well.
Filed under education, work : Comments (5) : Mar 1st, 2007 by tadfad
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:33 am
tAd! LiKe, OMG, i ToTaLlY aGrRe Wit U. It is TOOTALLY redikulus that peeps cant spell and write imformally n stuff like dat. u are so rihgt, I kant even beleeve it. lol. ttyl
well, g2g.
love,
dumpo.
March 4th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
but seriously - I agree.
March 5th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
A few hours after reading this post, I received an e-mail (from a 4th year med student) with the following subject line: “Do you no a smoker who has quit?” But it’s OK because the spell checker told him he had zero misspelled words.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Have to agree with you. Despite me spending most of my childhood on-line on one of the many messenger programs or in chat rooms(so outdated now…), I obsessively read my IMs, e-mails and blog/forum posts for any sort of grammatical errors. I also have a bad habit of correcting errors in sentence structures on tests and homework assignments, and I love nothing more than proofreading…
But on the other hand I often wonder about how elitist grammar got its value (the educated–or those who could afford to be), who decides what the rules are (old angry men?), and if maybe I’m too traditionalist–can we still communicate effectively with the current language evolution? I rarely have problems understanding someone who “misues” the language…but I don’t always think very highly of them.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Kayla, great points. Is straight-laced proper English just another tool to separate the rich from the poor; the over-educated from the under-? While this may be true to some extent, I still believe that laziness is the biggest culprit to blame–especially laziness by the over-educated. (See Eric’s post above for evidence!)