<p>Found this to be an interesting story in the WSJ. Have noticed for some time the number of grammatical and spelling errors in students who post on CC. Some can be attributed to hasty typing but some clearly indicate the writer does not know the difference. Can</a> Poor Spelling Derail a Career? - WSJ.com</p>
<p>Are more than spelling. For example, the author mentions the employee not knowing the difference between homonyms such as “there” and “their.”</p>
<p>I wish the public education system placed more emphasis on writing skills, from elementary school onward. There is a reason we grew up with the sing-song phrase, “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.” In my profession I ran into people from a wide range of educational backgrounds. However, one thing they all needed (and few possessed) was good writing skills.</p>
<p>I agree. The article says he’s been making the same mistakes for a year. </p>
<p>Not really.</p>
<p>He never <em>learned</em> the stuff in elementary school. Of course, the young person in question is an engineer. He is probably quite talented in math and quantitative work. Thirty years ago (well maybe fifty) he would have had a secretary to take care of all that stuff and nonsense. (My dad was an engineer, so is my husband. I worked for an engineering firm 25 years ago – when there was a ‘word processing pool’ that did all the heavy labor of typing reports that the engineers had written out by hand, complete with spelling and grammatical errors.)</p>
<p>Now, in the new millennium, everyone has a computer on their desk and is expected to type their own work. And those little errors stick out like a sore thumb. Especially to those of us whose talents lie on the verbal side of the SAT.</p>
<p>My wife gets irritated that I always correct our kids if they write “it’s” instead of “its” or say “I seen” instead of “I saw”. I tell her that regardless of how intelligent they really are, many people will view them as idiots if they have these bad habits. Now they correct my wife when she does these things. I makes me laugh inside and gives me the comfort of knowing that they will make a good first impression on people who notice such things.</p>
<p>Can there be a more frustrating job in the universe than that of a secretary being paid $12 per hour to correct the grammar and spelling mistakes of a $200,000-per-year executive?</p>
<p>Part of the problem is that our educational system fails to penalize for spelling errors.</p>
<p>From the SAT website:</p>
<p>Spelling errors do not affect a student’s score unless they are so pervasive that they get in the way of the reader understanding the essay. Even with some errors in punctuation and grammar, a student can get a top score on the essay. </p>
<p>And according to my son, he was told that on the AP English/Literature test, spelling was not important. I told him to ignore that advice and only use words that he knew how to spell.</p>
<p>We’ve lowered the bar in this area so much that even our better students are losing their spelling skills. Any time you eliminate a basic skill (spelling, changing a tire, parallel parking) as a sine qua non, you lose that basic skill in the majority of the population.</p>
<p>This, by the way, is no different from permitting the use of a calculator on standardized math tests. Maybe I’m in the minority here but if you can’t figure out what 43% of 96 is without resorting to the use of a calculator, your SAT score ought to reflect that shortcoming.</p>
<p>You can be sure that this affects people later in life, like the engineer in the WSJ article. When I get a communication rife with spelling errors and the like, it has a significant impact on the author’s ability to persuade me. I can’t imagine that I’m alone.</p>
<p>You are not alone!</p>
<p>Bad spellling iss why engineerrs invented spell chek (and why I wish it was on this compter.)</p>
<p>Firefox has spell-check built in. Microsoft Word has a built-in grammar checker which I would love to see in browsers.</p>
<p>On built-in spell checkers:</p>
<p>About 9 years ago, in elementary school at a parent teacher night a teacher mentioned the difficulty in teaching spelling because the computers corrected students’ mistakes. I raised my hand (after all, I was in school) and asked why they don’t just turn off the setting in Word. I was practically shouted down by parents who said that just wasn’t “realistic.”</p>
<p>We’re creating bad spellers at an early age and excusing bad spelling during all standardized testing. Is it any wonder that essays for top colleges contain spelling errors, that scholarship applications have spelling errors, or that professionals can’t write grammatically correct sentences and spell correctly?</p>
<p>This is education in America. If you paid attention, you aren’t surprised.</p>
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<p>In Firefox, the word is highlighted. You can right-click to bring up a list of words to replace it with or you are given additional options. You still have to choose an option. If this happens often enough, the writer should eventually internalize the correction.</p>
<p>I work with engineers from India and China and the problems are larger so I usually try to overlook spelling errors.</p>
<p>My former boss, who had an MA in Psychology, is a terrible speller, and is very ambitious. He would get ribbed about some of his mistakes and it made him much more careful. Of course, things would still slip through because he truly didn’t know the difference. (he was an indifferent student in elementary and high school, didn’t want to go to college but once in there started working when he got interested in psychology- but it was too late for simple elementary stuff he should have learned before then)</p>
<p>I’m so glad so many people can’t spell.</p>
<p>It’s part of why I have a job. </p>
<p>I’m an editor. </p>
<p>If you’ve ever left the L out of “public” or the last S out of “assess” in a business document, you know why people like me are needed. Spellcheckers won’t protect you from making a fool of yourself; I will.</p>
<p>Speaking of being saved from looking the fool: spell check did not keep my ex-company from titling a multi-hundred million dollar proposal to the federal government The Unclear Defense Initiative versus Nuclear.</p>
<p>OP - Know, eye due nut think sew. Jess bee clear in you’re righting.</p>
<p>(Yes, this passed spell check.)</p>
<p>S has this problem and it is attributed to a diagnosed learning disability. Marian and others are right, spell check will only take you so far and editors serve a valuable function! He can remember all the grammar rules, etc., but can’t remember the distinction between sense and cents, etc. I hope he has good administrative assistants as he enters his chosen profession.</p>
<p>Great prank: On a coworker’s computer, make an entry in Microsoft Word’s auto-correct list to change “[boss’s name]” to “that jerk [boss’s name]”.</p>
<p>This is probably only safe if you work in a department where documents are reviewed before being sent outside. I learned this trick in an analytical lab where the boss himself would review the reports before sending them out. Fortunately he had a good sense of humor.</p>
<p>I see glaring spelling/grammar mistakes in major novels and newpapers all the time. Where are those editors?</p>
<p>S2 and I toured a second-tier state university yesterday. The Admissions Office presenter opened with, “Am I speaking bad? I’ll talk loud so that everything goes good.” </p>
<p>S2 turned to me and whispered, “That’s already a “C” in Mr. *******'s English class”.</p>
<p>It went downhill from there.</p>
<p>Bad spelling would kill a law school app</p>
<p>It’s not just spelling, unfortunately. </p>
<p>Every element of writing has been toned down in the standard English class. </p>
<p>I know of people who can’t spell or pronounce incredibly common and useful words that they should have learned years ago. </p>
<p>I swear, the American public school systems are severely slacking in the writing department, and it’s really starting to irk me.</p>
<p>I don’t remember the last time I had an actual spelling and/or grammar lesson. The only time we covered grammar in my English class last year was right before our state standards, and we “reviewed”–get ready for this–basic punctuation (periods and commas) and capitalization. I think we may have had a short review on homonyms (and, of course, a lot of people had no idea what those were). </p>
<p>-sigh- The upcoming generation of adults is going to be pathetic is this keeps up.</p>