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 ...
Speling allways cunts.
What annoys me is when college grads do not know the difference between the plural and the possessive.
When I was in college the standard acceptable limit before receiving an F was 3 grammar/spelling errors per 1,000 words.
Considering how much effort was put in standardizing spelling, it seems idiotic to abandon it because people are too lazy and/or stupid to try and spell correctly.
My spelling isn’t the greatest but I try because I recognize the importance of it.
Correct spelling and punctuation add no weight to an argument; but careless blunders cause many readers to ignore it altogether.
I don’t know when you were in college, but today’s students have access to grammar/spell checking assistance in the word processing programs. There should be no reason for very many errors.
Also, I don’t agree that improper usage (such as mixing up their, they’re, their) constitutes spelling errors; it seems to be more of an ignorance of the proper usage and/or laziness to figure out the correct usage.
In Hebrew, Greek and Roman numerals, yes, very much so...
I loathe texting. But when I inevitably receive a text from my kids or my wife that contains lazy ‘text speak’ I have a generic response::
That does not make sense and it does not look like anything in the English language that I have seen. Reply to me with what you need in normal written words or call me like an adult.
"What difference does it make?!!!"
If you can’t spell...
...people can’t find what you publish on the ‘net.
...nobody will care about what you write, because it hasn’t been thought through well enough to even get obvious spelling right.
...people will laugh at what you wrote, because autocorrect will do some amazing things with misspellings. See damnyouautocorrect.com and imagine being a feature there.
I had a boss at a law firm who was a stickler for “the right word” (not just grammar, tense, or punctuation) in email communications who’d go into full on textspeech mode when she was sending IM messages (ur for YOUR). Looked lowest grade dumbass to me.
I read a number of resumes. With the technology that’s available today, anyone putting out a resume with spelling errors is just flat lazy. My opinion is, if you don’t take yourself seriously enough to run a spellcheck on a document that is your attempt to impress me with your abilities and experience, then why should I take you seriously?
In most cases, I can accurately predict the age of any poster on the internet by evaluating their spelling and grammar alone. Well constructed sentences, good spelling and grammar are almost the exclusive domain of the ancients among us.
If news articles are any indication, the auto-correct functions aren’t helping them that much.
I’m guilty now and then of typos and even bone headed misuse here on FR, but not on finished professional product. I consider lightening fast posts like this to be judged a bit differently than academic and professional work.
Agreed! (note: that was not a full sentence!!)
CARRY ON & have a good evening.
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