Good grammar and spelling skills make your life better.
From Education Week, a teacher's blog post about an employer who screens job candidates to weed out those with poor English grammar skills:
In a fiery post for the Harvard Business Review, Wiens says he flat out won't hire people who are careless with grammar. And to ensure that no offenders slip through, both of his companies—Wiens is also the founder of the documentation-software maker Dozuki—have instituted mandatory grammar tests as part of the hiring process.
Before I read the source post by Kyle Wiens for Harvard Business Review, I had mixed feelings. Is this really necessary for candidates who aren't writers? I know so many smart, capable people who use--oh, let's call it "nonstandard grammar." They're not writers, and so I switch off the inner critic before I read their email messages.
But Wiens makes a compelling argument:
Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.
In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are "essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms." The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.
And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.
He's right that details matter.
You can even put a price on details. According to a 2004 article in The New York Times, one spelling mistake can cost as much as $198:
Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200.
An article published by BBC News in 2011 calculates the cumulative costs:
An online entrepreneur says that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for Internet businesses.
Wayne State University assistant professor Fred Vultee, who conducted a study sponsored by the American Copy Editors' Society, found that not only can readers distinguish edited from unedited text, but they notice and are troubled by errors (more here). Said Vultee, "Editing makes a difference. It's across the board, it's not imaginary, and it's reasonably big."
And if that weren't enough, errors in spelling and grammar can also inhibit romance: "In a survey of more than 5,000 Match.com members asking about the most common profile mistakes, 51% complained about profiles with poor spelling or grammar...."
Over the last almost twenty years, I've worked with writers whose English language skills range from impeccable to not. When I say "not," I don't mean to pick on anyone who makes an occasional typo or some other minor mistake. It's very difficult to proof one's own work; the brain insists on making the text appear as you know it should appear. I use "not" for those whose work displays not just a repeated pattern of error, but sometimes repeated patterns of different types of errors, even after those same types of errors have been pointed out to the writer previously.
Is it prejudice to expect that people whose trade is writing should have strong language skills? Maybe. For me, it's work avoidance; writers who make lots of mistakes cause me lots of extra work. Which means I can verify that mistakes have a cost, because if I need writers, my first calls are to the ones whose writing causes me the least work in terms of content and style.
I don't fault anyone for not knowing something; we all of us stumble on our ignorance sometimes. And yet, it works against us to cling to that ignorance once we become aware of it.
Toward the goal of jobs, money, and love for all, I offer the following resources:
Grammar & Style: Grammar Guides, Style Guides, APA, MLA--LibrarySpot.com
Grammar.net
HyperGrammar at the University of Ottawa
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Pam Nelson: Grammar Guide
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk, E.B. White, and Roger Angell
The Purdue Online Writing Lab
Top Ten Resources on Spelling and Word Study
The train is rolling into the station on our big passage writing project. As my co-conspirator partner-in-crime colleague cautions, it's too soon to uncork the champagne. There is still work to do, of course, in the immortal words of the Isley Brothers.
We have two other projects we're working on, too, so one train arrives for the disembarkation while another arrives and the passengers load up.
And yet, we foresee a time when we'll have completed what we're doing now. Then what? We're thinking. We're big on thinking. In order to think, I always need to go looking for raw material to chip and chop.
In that search, I found some items of interest:
SchoolTube: School videos. Who knew.
National Novel Writing Month: Coming up. Sharpen your pencils. And your wits.
First Book: Providing books to children in need.
National Writing Project: Writing prompts, resources, articles about writing and teaching writing.
Best Ever Teen Novels: Vote. Though how anyone could vote for anything else with To Kill a Mockingbird on the list is beyond me.
That's all I got. I'm going back in.
All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not. In the same manner, all power, of whatever sort, is of itself desirable. A man would not submit to learn to hem a ruffle, of his wife, or his wife's maid; but if a mere wish could attain it, he would rather wish to be able to hem a ruffle.
Thus spaketh Samuel Johnson, as quoted by James Boswell in Life of Johnson.
Ten years ago, I was late to the inline skating party, but once I was there, I threw myself into it. Once I had taught myself how to fall and how to stop, well, there was no stopping me. I trained for marathons, often skating 70 miles or more a week.
What I never did learn, though, was how to maintain my skates. Having grown up in the company of mechanical geniuses, I believed that the wielding of tools was far beyond my ken. Not to mention the learned helplessness that develops when one is in the habit of allowing others doing for one what one might be capable of doing for oneself if one only took the trouble.
Relying on the kindness of another eventually became an insurmountable obstacle. Doesn't that sound stupid? But I quit skating--something I loved--because of my combined ignorance and unwillingness to learn how to maintain the skates myself: if you don't clean the bearings and rotate the wheels, you slow down, which deceleration drastically decreases the fun and increases the risk (as counter-intuitive as it sounds, the slower you go, the less stable you are).
Last weekend, I persuaded someone to show me how to take the skates apart and clean them and put them back together. Then I did it. The process took hours and hours. I had grime under my fingernails (what was left of them) and a streak of black grease on my face and I was tired. But by the time I was done, I thoroughly knew how to do this thing. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.
So I learned how to do this task that did not come easily to me, one to which I used to have aversion, because I was highly motivated:
There are certain aspects of tasks that induce greater effort and persistence: a performer’s interest in the task and the level of difficulty of the task. These factors are relevant in creating an environment where an individual is likely to exert more effort and, in turn, become more industrious. Therefore, task interest and task difficulty may both act as moderators in the relationship between effort and industriousness.
Which effort was reinforced:
Learned industriousness theory asserts that reinforcing an individual for achieving a performance standard increases the likelihood of that individual performing those behaviors again. If the individual exerted high levels of effort during the completion of the task, the effort takes on its own reinforcing value. This is because the individual enjoys the sensation of working hard because it is associated with reinforcement. Therefore, this individual is more likely to generalize this high level of effort to other tasks because it is less aversive and is associated with positive results.
The joy is in the doing.
You understand that this is really about how we can figure out how to help kids access that joy of exerting oneself and developing competence and confidence--in whatever realm.
What is the lever that triggers the engagement?
Maybe this is evidence of brainwashing from my college years, but I hold fast to the belief that the road to happiness is to become really, really good at something. How pleasant if that thing is also something at which one can earn a living. Even if not--even if that thing is carving sculptures out of butter or that strange combination of art, vocation, and drudgery of being a parent or if it is a kind of play--training one's dog, growing orchids (not my area--I'm just now trying to resurrect several that I nearly murdered from neglect followed by equally damaging obsessive attention), or building sculptures out of buttons--it's still not only a worthwhile pursuit but the highway to heaven.
Why?
1. Fun--Fun is absorbing, leads to flow, there are brain wave changes, look it up.
2. Becoming a master of something changes you deeply. You develop the confidence of the expert, which has a salutary deflating effect on the ego, thereby creating room for curiosity. You can afford to admit ignorance and to consider that you have something to learn. When I was studying Iyengar yoga and was admitted to the invitation-only level IV-V class, any pride I might have had was extinguished by the obvious truth that I was the dunce of the class. This was incredibly liberating. I felt freed of any expectations I might have had, any desire to compete (oh, people say yoga isn't competitive--baloney! If humans do it in a group, someone is going to try to dominate or show off, probably many someones) simply because I lacked the ability and experience to be able to compete at that level. Some of the people in the class had themselves been teachers for many years, others had studied in India, some had had a yoga practice for decades.
3. The joy is in the doing--not in feeling special for the doing, not in the attention one might get for the doing, but in the doing itself.
But one only learns this joy if one finds something that one really really loves to do, and then works and works and works and works at it. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.
I think about kids at school. How do they get a chance to find what they love to do and are really really good at? Some maybe just stumble across it. One of the protegees (and I desperately hope she doesn't mind I'm talking about her here) is shockingly good at content development. She's a natural. She just has this way of thinking, this combination of acuity, precision, and creativity that makes her a knockout. With only a few months experience, she's creating work of the quality I'd expect from someone with years of experience. Did she choose a career in assessment content development? No. It was sort of happenstance facilitated by a recommendation of someone who is a friend of mine and was one of my protegee's teachers. Never underestimate the power of a teacher to guide, nudge, encourage.
Maybe sometimes kids are really good at things they don't necessarily love, and maybe sometimes they love things they're terrible at. Then what? We can't all be good at everything. We can't all be suited for everything.
When I was in the sixth grade, I'd been reading all the Black Stallion books for years, and more than anything I wanted to be a jockey. I was 5' 6" and weighed 120 pounds and someone hinted to me that jockeys tend to be built more delicately. I was crushed. (I got over it.)
Last night I was making a list of things I'm not just terrible at, but monumentally and breath-takingly terrible at.
I was the world's worst secretary. When I was 21, I burst into tears at a panel job interview when I learned there would be a timed typing test (what's funny is that I'm now quite speedy on the keyboard, writing having become my life's work). I like to cook but once in a while I stop paying attention and something catches fire (generally a sleeve, although I branch out occasionally and have set fire to two wooden cutting boards and a couple of oven mitts--and I'm not even listing all the times I left a kettle on the stove and then went my way). I like to knit but the highest knitting rank I will ever achieve is that of advanced beginner, as I get confused when I see numbers and letters in the same paragraph, and so find knitting patterns impossible to read and also? Directions are boring. I am bad at sitting through anything that bores me. In fact, I am really bad at sitting still. When I'm on the phone, I have to pace or sketch or file papers or make coffee or snip dead blossoms off the rosebush. Once I did sit still long enough knit a sweater. I read the directions and then congratulated myself on my creativity in not following them. We named the sweater Moby Dick. It was of the shape and dimension of a giant hobbit--or maybe an orangutang: too short in the torso, as wide as three rather hefty people, and with arms that reached nearly to my knees. It had a fetching hood of Medieval appearance. I had to wear the sweater, at least a couple of times, because it took probably 100 hours to knit, and when I did, I looked like a deranged monk. However, the sweater was banished to the Goodwill because it endangered my life when I forgot about the billowing sleeve while making coffee. Yes, it caught fire. TWICE. You couldn't tell after I brushed off the charred yarn. I knitted a skirt, too. The skirt never caught fire, but you'd think it would have spontaneously combusted from sheer hideousness. It looked like a homemade tent fashioned from olive, orange, and purple yarn barf. I just threw it away, although it might have been a serviceable sleeping bag if I'd just sewed the hem together. I GET LOST. Getting lost is so deeply embedded in my life that I have a formula for how much getting lost time to allow depending on the distance I'm traveling: For less than an hour's drive, I allow 30 extra minutes; for more than an hour, 60 minutes; for longer trips, it's another half day. I've gotten lost going to the airport, and to the cello teacher's--where we go once a week and have done for the last two years. I've been late for planes and for job interviews (before the formula). I'm always late to doctor appointments (I've gotten lost going there, too, even though it is 15 minutes away and I think I know where the office is, but my doctor kindly tells me she never minds because it gives her a chance to catch up on her file notes.
UPDATE: Fixed typo & formatting. Same as it ever was.
The Secret Service was formed not to protect the president, but to protect the economy. During and after the Civil War, the sun shone brightly on counterfeiters, and they made plenty of hay. The bills were so crude then and counterfeiting was easy to do and difficult to detect. The economy tottered.
Hence the Secret Service. (Maybe there should be a new branch to protect the economy from banks.)
How do I know? Reading.
A few days ago, I read one of the best and funniest short stories I've read in ages, "The Revolt of Mother," by a writer of whom I'd never heard: Mary Wilkins Freeman. (Yes, I am an ignoramus. Though I read a lot and have been so doing for many years, I never made much of a study of American literature. Except the exceptions: Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty. The modernists. Charles Bukowski and John Fante. Some others.)
Anyone who's ever been married for a long time will understand this:
“I wish you'd go into the house, mother, an' 'tend to your own affairs,” the old man said then. He ran his words together, and his speech was almost as inarticulate as a growl.
But the woman understood; it was her most native tongue. “I ain't goin' into the house till you tell me what them men are doin' over there in the field,” said she.
I won't tell you what happens.
It was in a volume of great American short stories, which volume included all the usual suspects: Hawthorne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, great storytellers all.
What else am I reading? Marianne Moore's Complete Poems and I'm rereading Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill.
What I really want to be reading, too, but I loaned it out or misplaced it: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. That book is just a lovely afternoon.
A few years ago, when I was about to move from one state to another, I was talking with a moving company sales representative whose job it was to estimate the cost of transporting my household. We got to talking, and I asked how he'd ended up in that line of work. In the course of telling that story, he told another, about his first job in sales. The owner of the business had directed him to go home, stand in front of a mirror, and say "No" a hundred different ways.
When I laughed, he gave a demonstration:
Heck, no!
Are you crazy?
No way!
That's insane.
No can do.
Nope.
Not on your life.
That's a negative.
That ain't happening.
He said it was the best career advice he'd ever gotten. How did it help him? He didn't say. I imagine it probably plucked some of the sting from the waspish word (in the immortal words of Henry Taylor). After all, a basic tenet of social psychology is that people tend to seek acceptance and avoid rejection. To be free of the need to avoid rejection means--to be free to take risks. And the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff. Courting "no" allows for unexpected yeses.
When first I started submitting stories and poems to literary journals, I was felled by rejection as is a redwood by a chainsaw. Then I read an article in some writer's magazine about the rule of 12. The writer tracked all his submissions, and found that every piece he wrote ended up getting accepted, on average, the twelfth time out. I started tracking my rejections and found that my average was four times out the gate. (Maybe I chose less demanding markets. Certainly the markets counted on those who wrote for love, as the payment was frequently just a nice note from the editor, along with two complimentary copies of the journal.) Rejection lost its sting in that context. (Most of it. I still remember that one letter, in which an editor schooled me about the construction of plot: "A story has a beginning (sets the background), a middle (something happens) and an ending (the problem is solved)." I sure didn't like reading that letter at the time, but I think it's funny now.)
A story of mine was rejected recently. I didn't write it intentionally to take risks, nor to get rejected -- but I did take risks in the writing. Did the rejection bother me? Not at all. I can use the story elsewhere. And even if I couldn't--it was fun to write.
Let's say that I aspire to this degree of equanimity in every circumstance.
We all use shorthand communication. As much as I like to talk, there are times when I don't want to explain every single little detail of every single little thought process (in the immortal words of Voltaire, the secret of being a bore is to tell everything), and instead rely on the person I'm talking with to envision the shape of the glacier that lies beneath the surface.
When I went to that workshop on writing picture books for children, a writer was musing about how to refine language for a lower grade level. She said she needed to "dumb it down."
In the project I'm working on now, several writers have used that phrase about revising a text to be suitable for a lower grade level. (Not at all to single out any one writer in particular; I've heard it so many times now from so many different writers that I couldn't even say which said it when.)
These writers are thoughtful people. They're probably using shorthand. They probably mean to say "revise the language and syntax so that it works for the grade level."
Still, I can't help but react to that phrase. Writers can't afford to think that way about our audience. Habits of thinking create habits of being. And then we are what we repeatedly do (in the immortal words of Aristotle). This is really part of a bigger belief. How we use language affects (and may reflect) how we think. Edward Sapir suggested that our very view of the world is shaped by our language.
It comes back to intention. When writing for art or self-expression, a writer has the freedom to demand whatever he or she likes from the reader, and then the reader has the freedom to participate or not. Writing as a job--according to given specifications--doesn't allow for that.
In our case, we've got a captive audience (as discussed previously). And in the work of writing stories, poems, articles, and other types of text for reading tests, we're writing for a specific purpose. Of primary importance is integrity to the purpose: In a paper for Apex Learning on interpreting Lexile readabilities, Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert said that "the goal of writing and publishing texts for schools is to provide the most comprehensible text possible." If the integrity of the text can't be maintained simultaneously, then a new text is required. Because the integrity of the text is essential. But we have to have both, and the former can never be sacrificed to the latter.
What is developmentally appropriate changes rapidly and drastically from a child's first turn of a page through the journey to adult reading: picture books, chapter books, novels, textbooks, classics, technical manuals, employee handbooks, fifty-page volumes of health insurance gibberish. We wouldn't ask a 3rd grader to lift a suitcase weighing 50 pounds, and we shouldn't present a 3rd grader (4th grader, 5th grader, 6th grader) with text that is far beyond his or her knowledge and abilities. It's a bad practice that sets kids up for failure, and one that ultimately defeats our purpose.
This is one of the reasons writers who write for children should spend time with children of the same age as their target audience. Children are a lot smarter than we often think they are. They just haven't been reading as long as we have, so they aren't able to do the heavy lifting we're capable of. It's not to say they won't be able to do it one day. Certainly they will. But in order to get there, they have to start where they are. It's our job to meet them there.
If we must use shorthand for how we do that, I think I'd prefer "simplify."
