The joy of "cheapest bid" construction, and a rant about writing.
They've just shut down every bathroom in my building -- 16 floors, lots of classrooms and labs along with the offices -- due to a problem with the water system.
Just what I needed today.
Why can't people spell? Why do grammar and punctuation mean so little to most people? I don't mean in personal letters, or notes, or journal entries or what have you -- I mean important documents, newspapers, and formal email to other people in the department.
The Daily Collegian, the UMass Amherst daily paper, has never been a towering example of great literature. But... out of 4 issues I've read this semester, I've yet to find one without major spelling, grammatical, AND punctuation errors on the front page. One particularly fine sample managed, in one paragraph, to combine poor spelling, a failure to understand how to use capital letters and commas, and a total failure of understanding of tense. They used past, future, and present to refer to something that happened a few weeks ago, all in the same sentence. These people are JOURNALISM majors! They're supposed to know how to write! And the editors are supposed to know how to edit! Honestly, someone who relied purely on MS Word for their editing would have done better.
And I just got a new trouble ticket from our former department head. It starts out "I just inherited two computers (their hand me downs as they upgrade)." The question of there/they're/their is not a complicated one. One would expect someone with a PhD in Chemistry and numerous publications to know the difference.
This sort of thing drives me absolutely nuts. I see people in my classes who can't figure out whether to use "it's" or "its," who don't know when a comma is appropriate, who don't know when capitalizing a word is appropriate. These are 18, 19, and 20 year-olds, and they are completely unable to either read or write a coherent sentence. If you've made it through high school without learning to write, what the hell are you doing in college? Again, I don't mean in-class essays. Some people are simply bad at spelling, and will never get much better. That's not their fault. But EVERYONE should be able to figure out how to spell things when they have two weeks to write a paper. I used to have to go over my papers with a dictionary in order for it to be readable, and my in-class essays were practically unreadable. Lots of practice and a good editor, and I learned to do better.
This is one of my ineradicable prejudices: if you cannot write clearly, and you aren't willing to either find someone to edit for you or look things up, and if you can't be bothered to learn to write well, then you shouldn't be writing anything. Don't write for the newspaper, don't send email to anyone, and don't get yourself into management. When I see something official which is written so poorly that I'm not sure what it means, I assume the person who wrote it is either illiterate or stupid. And I usually lean towards stupid, since anyone who came through the American school system SHOULD have learned enough of the basics to find out the rest. Granted, our school system is far from the best, but it's not THAT bad most places.
And I grant you, this rant isn't perfectly written, but at least it's better than some of the shit I see in the newspapers and in classes.
Just what I needed today.
Why can't people spell? Why do grammar and punctuation mean so little to most people? I don't mean in personal letters, or notes, or journal entries or what have you -- I mean important documents, newspapers, and formal email to other people in the department.
The Daily Collegian, the UMass Amherst daily paper, has never been a towering example of great literature. But... out of 4 issues I've read this semester, I've yet to find one without major spelling, grammatical, AND punctuation errors on the front page. One particularly fine sample managed, in one paragraph, to combine poor spelling, a failure to understand how to use capital letters and commas, and a total failure of understanding of tense. They used past, future, and present to refer to something that happened a few weeks ago, all in the same sentence. These people are JOURNALISM majors! They're supposed to know how to write! And the editors are supposed to know how to edit! Honestly, someone who relied purely on MS Word for their editing would have done better.
And I just got a new trouble ticket from our former department head. It starts out "I just inherited two computers (their hand me downs as they upgrade)." The question of there/they're/their is not a complicated one. One would expect someone with a PhD in Chemistry and numerous publications to know the difference.
This sort of thing drives me absolutely nuts. I see people in my classes who can't figure out whether to use "it's" or "its," who don't know when a comma is appropriate, who don't know when capitalizing a word is appropriate. These are 18, 19, and 20 year-olds, and they are completely unable to either read or write a coherent sentence. If you've made it through high school without learning to write, what the hell are you doing in college? Again, I don't mean in-class essays. Some people are simply bad at spelling, and will never get much better. That's not their fault. But EVERYONE should be able to figure out how to spell things when they have two weeks to write a paper. I used to have to go over my papers with a dictionary in order for it to be readable, and my in-class essays were practically unreadable. Lots of practice and a good editor, and I learned to do better.
This is one of my ineradicable prejudices: if you cannot write clearly, and you aren't willing to either find someone to edit for you or look things up, and if you can't be bothered to learn to write well, then you shouldn't be writing anything. Don't write for the newspaper, don't send email to anyone, and don't get yourself into management. When I see something official which is written so poorly that I'm not sure what it means, I assume the person who wrote it is either illiterate or stupid. And I usually lean towards stupid, since anyone who came through the American school system SHOULD have learned enough of the basics to find out the rest. Granted, our school system is far from the best, but it's not THAT bad most places.
And I grant you, this rant isn't perfectly written, but at least it's better than some of the shit I see in the newspapers and in classes.