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ROTFL. A recent discussion of common grammatical errors on one of the JAG fic boards produced this link:


http://www.tomatonation.com/sincerely.shtml

Laura

LOL! Thanks for posting that link, Laura. I'm not sure how I missed that, but I'm glad you pointed it out. I'm a huge fan of Sarah's and her web site. (The site she references in the essay, Mighty Big TV, is now www.televisionwithoutpity.com and it's famous for its satirical recaps of popular television shows.) One of the recappers, Pamela Ribon (known as Pamie on TWP and on her own website www.pamie.com), wrote the very popular book Why Girls Are Weird, which I highly recommend.

On a side note, I loved this essay not only because she effectively explains so many common grammar mistakes, but because of her indignation. When I was editor of my university's newspaper, I would routinely receive applications riddled with typos, misspellings and grammar errors. Why in the world would I hire someone to be a writer - or god forbid an editor - if they can't be bothered to run spellcheck? Grammar, spelling and proofreading matter. I've said it once, I'll say it a hundred times. I cannot take someone seriously when they don't bother to take the time to think about what they are writing. Yes, everyone makes mistakes. And no, I don't expect formal writing in casual, personal emails. But if you want to be taken seriously - whether you are applying for a job, requesting a raise from your boss, soliciting donations for a charity, etc. - you MUST know how to write properly.

Stepping down off my soap box now, but it felt good to get that off my chest. <G>

Annie

Great article, thanks for sharing it, Laura. She pointed out several of my major grammar mistakes, that I am sure I knew the correct answer to in high school, but in my 5 years since taking an English class have somehow gone to the deep, dark recesses of my mind. I bookmarked the site for when I have those questions again!

I agree with Annie's opinion of the author's attitude! And with this . . .

Yes! I agree 100%.

To add to Annie's statement, students, never email your professor/teacher/teaching assistant, the person responsible for your grade, in this fashion:

(real email recieved 2 am, night before final exam)

Yo Laura

i dont no ne thing about ch 2, 6, 23, 25, 26, and 30. Mort's stuff. will they be on the final? plz no.

i need to grub 4 pts w/u on ex. 1, 2, 3. when can i c u?

tnx
(student's name removed)

Needless to say, when we had to determine this student's grade, and he happened to be on the borderline between C and B, he did not get bumped up because of this negative impression he left on me! I was his teaching assistant, not his buddy! There is a clear distinction. And, most importantly, I should not have to translate an email at 2 am!

To me it looked like:

Spanish word for I Laura (oh cool is that like I Claudius?)

Letters and numbers. Hard to read.

Jibberish.

letters.

student's name. Remember it because he fails. Too much work for me.

- Laura

ROTL! This thread was very fun to read! Thanks for the link, Laura. That was very funny! I used to be news editor for my high school paper and I couldn't believe some of the stuff my reporters would hand in to me. *grr*

Annie, I can sympathize a bit after my high school experience.

Laura, LOL! Your translation of that e-mail had me

This is a great thread. I enjoyed it!

Jana (who is LOLing after having to go back and edit this post to chance sypathize to sympathize.)

I'm glad grammar is important at least to some people. grammatical errors (which I encounter often, unfortunately) is pain to my eyes (and ears).

I use better grammar than so many people I know. My best friend used to write wonderful stories, and she used to brag about her perfect mark in English. She hasn't show me any of her works lately, and her grammar was FAR from being perfect even then, but at least she corrected her mistakes when I pointed them out then. Now she tells me that in emails and rushed notes it "okay" to have a minor mistake. And tells me to get a life. Ah, well, we'll see who gets published first. She still tells me she's a writer (and when I point out the fact that I'm one too, she says I'm not a real writer because I write fanfic and not original fiction- you have my permission to raid her house), but I would think a writer would watch their grammar whenever.

Thanks for the link, I really enjoyed reading this.

LOL, Laura, and Annie, I understand you both. I had to create a news broadcast script for English class with a group of other people, and each of us was going to write one or two stories for it. I volunteered to collect them and put them together. Half of them were full of incorrect grammar and the other half, I couldn't tell because it was all chatspeak. *sigh* and we're in grade 10.

Julie

LOL, Laura.

I did have two points I disagreed with, however. First, the author states that free of charge is incorrect. My dictionary agrees that free means "Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal". However, a second definition of free is "Not subject to a given condition; exempt: income that is free of all taxes." Applying this definition to the word "free", I would think that free of charge is not, technically, incorrect. [Note: would the author tell me that nothing can be "technically incorrect"? I suppose something is either incorrect or it is not.]

Secondly, no matter what anyone says, I will continue to write Lois'

- Vicki

Ah, Vicki, but Lois' is incorrect!


Wendy

PS: now, 'judgement/judgment' is where I would disagree with the author of this piece. In UK English, the normal spelling is 'judgement', but 'judgment' is used for legal purposes - ie the judgment in the case of Lane v Kent. I believe in the US the spelling 'judgement' exists in the legal context in the same way, but would need to be corrected by a lawyer... ML??

And then there's the other definition of "free" which is when something is unattached/not associated. If you can be "free of disease" (at least I think you can ) then something can be "free of charge."

My dictionary has a chunk of meanings for "free" but I guess my main point is, it doesn't have to have connotations of money. It can, in fact, be money-free!

I agree about the importance of proper grammar, or at least proper spelling, though... how does anyone expect to be taken seriously? That's one of the things I adore about this fandom, actually -- the GE's at the archive keep all our fanfic very clean, grammar-wise. As opposed to some of the horrors I've read over at fanfiction.net. <shudder> But even there, you have to have the story in halfway decent shape before you send it in.

PJ

Oh, I loved it! So indignant and so true. Anyone who sends me a job application that's not grammatically correct or contains spelling mistakes automatically gets sent to the end of the queue. Okay, so I'm in IT, which is a techy subject and not a literary subject, but a good IT worker is a good communicator, IMO. If you can't write decent English, you can't communicate effectively.

Yvonne

And, further on the subject of bad grammar, there is this article . Annie, you'll be particularly interested! Be aware, though, that the writer is an English journalist and broadcaster, so he's referring to UK English.


Wendy (who has a copy of the book referred to at the end of the article )

Great article, Laura. I so much agree with everything the author has said. I used to frequent televisionwithoutpity often and always enjoyed Deborah's recaps. And I have read in many, many places that discuss good writing techniques that it is OK to break the rules (some of them, anyway) for style or impact, but before you can break them, you must know them completely.

Wendy - that article much reminds me of a book I have - Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O'conner. Very interesting read, and at the end, she discusses some formerly proper ways of writing/speaking that have actually become obsolete.

My father gets the credit for drilling proper English grammar into my head. My particular favorite was whenever I would ask the question, "Where's it at?" or "Where's she at?" he would tell me "Before the 'at'". That one always stuck with me <g>.

I think that both writing and speaking English properly is even more of a requirement here in America, where we are not generally required by our public school system to learn second and/or third languages. It seems that a vast majority of other highly educated countries do require students to become proficient in a language other than their native tongue (often, ironically, learning English), yet here we maintain the arrogant attitude that our own language is enough.

If we are going to stand behind that vanity, we at least owe it to ourselves and to everyone else to learn and use English well. Nothing grates on my nerves more than to hear people who should know better butcher the English tongue. And while I'm a little bit more forgiving with errors in writing (only a little, mind you), it amazes me how people actually graduate from high school or even college but can't manage to form a coherent sentence.

/me steps off her high horse because she is guilty of making many mistakes in her writing, the whole proper tense situation of "lie" and "lay" being her Achilles heel. But she asks for forgiveness because at least she is trying to learn from her errors <g>.

Lynn

I've enjoyed this thread very much.

Oh, wow, Laura! I've never seen anything like it. Maybe my students aren't quite as bad as I thought. However, I thought I would share the following anecdotes with you.

I object to badly written student submissions not just because they look bad but also because it takes me two or three times longer to wade through a poorly written piece of work than it does a good one. The material might be there, but its value gets obscured by the grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes.

When I was a teaching assistant in Toronto, I was specifically told by one of the professors that I could not take marks off for poor use of language. Why not? Because I was teaching geography and not English. That didn't, however, stop me pointing mistakes out.

One day, I gave a student a poor mark. She came back to me and complained. "You can't give me a low grade," she said. "You're not allowed to penalise me for bad writing." (Actually, I doubt she used the word 'penalise'; it's got three syllables, after all.)

"No," I said. "I'm not. But I can take marks off if I don't understand what you are saying at all!"

In other words, only when her mistakes had descended into gibberish was I allowed to do anything constructive about it!

More recently...

I still point out mistakes to students. Mostly these are limited to comments like: "Learn to use apostrophes!" or "Use the spell checker!" on their feedback sheets. (We don't return the original scripts.)

One day, I was standing next to the departmental photocopier, and I got into a conversation with one of my more senior colleagues. I vented about the standard of English amongst the students, saying that I couldn't see how they possibly expected to cope in the workforce once they had graduated.

His response? He told me that I shouldn't be worrying about it. His argument was that the people who would be reading their poorly written output would not be able to recognise the mistakes contained within because they would only be capable of producing equally poorly written output of their own!

In other words, quality doesn't matter, so long as the message being conveyed is comprehensible.

But what will happen when, as in the case of my Canadian student above, poor writing becomes a string of meaningless letters, neither spelled or punctuated properly.

Now, I know that my English isn't perfect. I do make mistakes, although I do my best to learn from them and not to repeat them. There are folcs around here who are better versed in the mechanics of the English language than I.

And yet... I also know that there are plenty of people in the big Out There whose writing is worse than mine.

I just wish I could work out whether I should be proud or appalled to know that.

Chris

As a beta reader who was fired for pointing out errors (oh yes, it's true ) I got a good laugh from that site. Apostrophes -- will someone please take back the bushel baskets of those things that were mistakenly given to some folks? They sprinkle them throughout their writing whenever there's an "s" on the end of a word and they're not quite sure whether or not to use one. I'm going to send this link to my review staff as a quick, easy guide to grammar.

This happened to my younger sister in her college english class! They were doing some sort of newspaper project, and since she had been sick the day the assignment was given, she had gotten stuck with a group of students she didn't even know, and they all decided that she would be the one in charge of putting everything together. She had the same result as you. Her stories were relatively decent (with a little help from me), but all three other group members gave her unreadable stories. The grammar was horrible. One submitted all of her stories in chatspeak. None of them cited references, and one even gave her a plagerized web site -- word for word off the website he had cited. Even with my dad's and my help, my sister couldn't get the newspaper ready in time, and the professor had no sympathy for her . Evidently, it was my sister's fault for being sick the day the assignment was given. I could understand if she had skipped class, but she even had cleared it with the Dean. So, Julie, this even happens in college. And my sister goes to a relatively well respected liberal arts/teaching college. Does that scare others as much as it scares me?

Mine, too. I can still hear his voice telling my sister: "Laura and???" "No, Jenny, it's not Laura and me, it's Laura and I!" Oh wait, that's because he's on the phone with her now. He wouldn't (still won't) answer any questions direceted at him unless we used correct grammar. Such are the perils of having a father who has a degree in english, yet taught high school physics for 30 years ! He needs to take his grammar agressions out somewhere . I know my dad's grammar drilling has paid off -- I now find myself cringing whenever my roommate refuses to use the pronoun "me"! Rachel: He gave this thing to Ashu and I. Me: ASHU AND ME!! HE GAVE IT TO ME, NOT I!

Yes! I agree completely. If English is the only language we know, why not know it correctly? Also, I learned that knowning English grammar really helps with learning other languages. I did better than anyone else in my high school Spanish class (which was an elective) because I knew the english grammar behind many things -- like when to use which form of the verb, etc. That's saying nothing, though, because I won the Spanish Award in high school, and could not even write a sentance in Spanish now . It probably says something about how bad the other students were.

I've been a teaching assistant for two semesters, and that was by far the worst incidence I'd ever seen. Most students do not have perfect grammar (especially because we have a very large number of international students), but this student was the worst. Plus, he was an American, not an international student. I would have forgiven an international student. Last year I taught seniors who were about to graduate, and their grammar, on the whole, is much better than the grammar of the second years I had last semester. I am wondering if it is an age/maturity thing. The seniors are about to go off into the world jobs/graduate school/professional school and have to present themselves to the world. The sophmores are still basically kids and have two more years to mature.

The only writing my students ever give my are emails. This really does a lot to form my impression about students because with a class of 128, it is almost impossible to get to know all of the students personally. There really aren't any essays written in my department, so emails are my only experience with their writing. However, many, many students think of email as an informal conversation rather than a conversation with an authorty figure. I emailed that student I quoted before the next day and saw that he had CC'd the professor on that email message, and I told him that if I were him, I would send the professor an apologetic email for making him read an email like that. In our department, there are absolutely no essays, but there is the occasional formal lab report, but, luckily, I have never been required to grade them. I've had to grade quizzes, exams, and informal lab reports. Thank goodness. I would hate to see what some of these students would come up with.

Exactly. I am in the same situation -- I don't have the best grammar in the world, and I do make some stupid mistakes, but I know that I am not even close to being the worst, and of my immediate RL friends, I am probably the most dilligent about my grammar. This frigtens me.

- Laura

In my experience, exam scripts are even worse than essays in terms of spelling, grammar, poor presentation and - because it's the only time we actually get to see it - truly appalling handwriting. Shudder!!

Oh, not all students are bad, and some have quite good grounds for being poor at spelling and grammar (for example, a mature student - 40+ - in my department who was brought up in care and barely had any formal schooling before he was pretty much thrown into the army at 16, and never got any formal education beyond training courses after that. His writing skills were fairly poor, but he worked at it and now he knows most of the rules and his vocabulary is at times better than mine). But it's the really bad ones, especially the ones who have been told over and over that the possessive its has no apostrophe and that 'as well' is two words, and who cannot even transcribe accurately, who drive me insane year after year.


Wendy

Most of ya'll know that I'm a creative writing major. I've got to tell you; the first writing class I took gave me a great appreciation of proper grammar. Every day we were required to have two stories from different students read and critiqued. I spent more time correcting their grammar than actually reading what passed for stories.

The grammar was cringe-worthy; if there *could* be a mistake, there was. Needless to say, many students weren't happy with me. They didn't appreciate getting back stories that had been red-marked with grammatical corrections. Well, my professor *did* say to correct the stories!

My grammar isn't perfect, but I was raised speaking English properly, and foreign language training helped me understand grammar better.

Laura

I thought I'd share the sort of problem I encounter at work, which is that people *think* they can write acceptable English, but clearly cannot. Here's an email sent by my work-experience student on the department's behalf to the entire college (without my consent as manager, I might add!):

Hello,

Fed up of slow starting PCs, then a solution has been brought, since the network is mainly using the Windows 2000 operating system, it does not provide a utility called msconfig, which Windows 98 and XP provides, this utility enables you to configure the startup process of windows, by configuring applications you want to turn on or off in the startup process.

REMEMBER! this utility only benefits the log in process of your computer, not when switching on your machine.

If you have this kind of problem, please email me.

Regards,

I cringed when I saw that pop into my mailbox. The student got told (very nicely, of course) that notices must be passed to me for review before they go out. It reflects so badly on the department - and I hate the idea that it could reinforce people's prejudices that IT people are anoraks who can only communicate with computers <g>.

Yvonne

I would have said something, too, Yvonne, but I'm not sure how "nicely" my feelings would have been conveyed. Well, that's not totally true ... I wouldn't have yelled. But I would have made it very clear exactly what I was upset about!

But then again, I once returned a document back to one of my employees (a recent top-tier university graduate) with the information that, "My time is more valuable than this. There is absolutely no reason for me to look at *anything* you have produced until you have gone over several times yourself and have had it spell-checked. When there are spelling mistakes in a document that I have already pointed out to you in a previous draft, you are simply wasting my time and I don't appreciate it."

Poor guy looked like a cowed puppy dog <g> but he fell over himself apologizing (it turned out that he had somehow hit "add" instead of "correct" in his spellchecker and all the previously noted misspellings were now being recorded as correct ) and he never did it again. (And yes, I made sure to compliment him as he began paying careful attention to his writing skills; being a manager is a lot like being a parent. <g>)

Kathy

Very fun, Laura!

Thanks for sharing!

Missy

I am a talk-correctly freak. In English, I do my best (and I believe that my English is fairly good by now).

In Greek... OOOH! As you probably know, it's a very difficult language. Just imagine there are 5 different ways to spell the sound of 'e'!! I've had a good laughing time reading some tests my dad has been correcting... written by kids 12-18 years old! Geez!

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

P.S.: I think I'm a bit off topic... Anyway.