Posted on 03/05/2013 1:49:51 PM PST by nickcarraway
In a perfect world, students might be judged by their ideas alone -- not by whether they write "you're" or "your." But that isn't the world we live in.
It happens every time. As I hand the test out to my middle school students, one of them will invariably look up, pencil at the ready, and ask, "Does spelling count?"
Let's ignore the fact that my students should know better than to even ask this question in the first place. I've answered it more times than I care to remember, usually in the fall of the new school year, and it goes something like this:
Yes. Spelling counts. I have lots of witty quips loaded up in my quiver about why it counts, but my new favorite comes from homeschooling mom of four Jodi Jackson Stewart who tweeted me with her answer to this question: "Spelling counts here because spelling counts out there."
Let's imagine you work in human resources department in a company like Google, or in the admissions department of a popular university. You are responsible for reading thousands of applications and whittling those thousands down to a handful of promising candidates by next Tuesday, when you will meet with your boss. The application files are thick, and at the height of admissions or hiring season you have learned to carry a couple of extra grocery bags around in your car for toting these files back and forth between work and home. You have four meetings and a dentist appointment tomorrow, and you simply can't imagine how you will get through these application files.
Now, imagine that it's late on Monday night. Your kids have been put to bed, but your spouse is insisting on some alone time, and you've already spent nine hours today reading through these applications.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Spelling is a major discriminator for me. Any misspelling on a resume, and the candidate is trashed. It tells so much about the person.
I can use that in a sentence, “Dis Lexus is for sale, with low mileage and low interest. How ‘bout it?”
And if the examples were hand-written you would be able to separate the ancients from the young by the latter's inability to do cursive writing; moreover, many of them can't even print without mixing caps and lowercase letters within words.
Spelling is necessary.
The correct use of possessive pronouns has gone the wayside with the boon of electronic messaging “shorthand”.
The earlier inclusion of barbaric “ebonics” into the English language, was a mistake heralded by the Politically Correct and Revisionist crowd.
I worked for a time at the local state employment division, as a part-time mentor, for those ignorant of computer usage and the English language. This included high school graduates, and a few college graduates, as well as middle-aged men who have worked with their hands all their life, leaving their wives to do anything involving a pencil to paper.
The computer usage ignorance I was prepared for, but NOT the lack of ability to create a simple resume, i.e., “What was your job, and what did you do?”
I kept thinking, “in the future, THESE humans will be those that will be deciding about MY financial future????”
Ummm...do you mean like more than 50% of those posting on FR, with their Kennedy’s and Cuban’s and possibility’s and it’s who then call me a Nazi (another word they don’t know how to pluralize) when I point it out to them?
While I have no problem with "their" and "they're", I find myself constantly misusing "their" for "their". :=)
Perhaps we don't agree on certain matters (I have specific reference to our disagreement on college financing), cripplecreek, but I have always been impressed by the language in your posts. You obviously have spent a lot of time polishing your language.
And I’m a high school dropout.
Fo’Shizzle. LOL
Yes, I know, and that’s why your English is so impressive.
LOL!
“you’re” or “your.” , is not a matter of spelling. It’s knowing which to use.
Well, THERE you have it!
What annoys me is when college grads do not know the difference between the plural and the possessive.
Collage grad's are fool's.
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