I'm a journalist. Pretty darn good one, I think. So do some other
people; I just won 1st Place in a statewide competition for one of my
columns. Nope, ti wasn't about spelling.
I college, English 101, a classmate argued he wouldn't need to learn
spelling and punctuation because he intended to have a secretary handle
that for him. I argued he better hope he had a secretary that took more
care than he. I speed-read, and spelling and punctuation errors make me
stop to see what was wrong. He went on to become the governor's press
secretary.
The use of initials in text messaging and IM has a useful purpose --
or did, when text messaging was expensive and cutting down message
length was important. That doesn't seem to matter as much in these days
of $5 a month gets unlimited messaging, and anyway Mom and Dad are
paying the bill.
But communication is important. I don't know what a lot of those
initial-words mean, so I miss out on a lot of message content that uses
them.
Some things change with time. I think "I've been here over ten
years" should be "more than 10 years." I learned that the correct phrase
is "dollars a pound," not "dollars per pound." Some folks don't agree,
and in any case, communication does not really suffer.
But misuse of spelling and punctuation can change meanings, often
without the writer or reader being aware of the change; each has an
interpretation without benefit of knowing the other's is different.
I regularly re-write police reports. I agree completely with the
writer here who mentioned the apparent lack of professionalism exhibited
many of those reports. It's just plain sloppy, and makes me hope the
reporting officers take more care of the other tools of their trade.
My belief is people who do not take care to communicate accurately
also do not pay much attention to others who exhibit little or no
respect for communications. That, I submit, leads to general malaise
among the electorate, and lots of dead folks on battlefields they could
not have found on a globe with all but their field painted black.
YMMV.
Alli wrote:
> I teach high school. Spelling does count. Grammar does count. Of course,
> I teach French and writing, so my kids don't stand a chance. Then again,
> I live on IRC and refuse to chat with people who use aohell speak and
> don't have the intelligence to type out 3 or 4 letter words.
>
> Jerry Godsey wrote:
>
>> When I was teaching school the question I hated most was, "Mr. Godsey, does
>> spelling count on this?" My answer was always a smarmy, "Why, no, feel free
>> to misspell as many words as you possibly can." One of the parents of a
>> student was the editor of the local newspaper (the one who got my newspaper
>> column started) and she wrote an editorial once entitled, "Spelling Always
>> Counts!"
>> Some of the reports we get from our deputies are amazing. It is not always
>> misspelled words, spell check can catch those. It is words used incorrectly
>> that drive us buggy. I constantly preach to my staff that the reports need
>> to be as bulletproof as possible. Misspelled words make us look like
>> amateurs to the lawyers who are scrutinzing our reports and looking for ways
>> to discredit us on the witness stand. It's just like teaching school all
>> over again!
>> Blessings,
>> Jerry Godsey
>>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
--
/The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless -- to us -- if we
know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us
whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of
chow mein. We grieve only for what we know./
A Sand County Almanac, /Aldo Leopold, July 1949/
