"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Employers say the grammar skills of people they hire are getting worse, a recent survey shows. But language is evolving so fast that old rules of usage are eroding. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break. Illustration: John S. Dykes.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.
"Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help."
ReplyDeleteThis coming Wednesday will be my last day of working in the warehouse. I happened upon a copy of the Big Company Writing Style Guide, so while working I proceeded to go through the thing and edit it for grammar and spelling*.
Once done, I left a note on it telling them that they may wish to apply the corrections contained within this copy to the master file before their next printing. I left it in a highly visible part of the main office. It was gone within the hour.
This is a long way of saying that corporate-produced style guides are pretty much garbage.
*About 90% of what I marked were failures to comply with things the guide said to do, such as putting periods at the end of sentences or putting punctuation inside quotation marks. One of the others was to note that die is not the plural of dice, but the singular. Dice is plural.
We've talked here at CM about the proliferation of "myself" before, of course. Even my boss, a PhD in humanities (but not a very intellectual one, if I may say so), does this. "If you have a question about this project, just ask Dave or myself and we'll be glad to help you."
ReplyDeleteSeveral generations of slapping people for saying "you and me" have of course resulted in its complete avoidance, even when it is correct. So now we say, "Dave wants to see you and I in his office right away."
I taught a writing workshop for adults and got them to slap themselves on the forehead to illustrate the proper (reflexive) use of "myself." It seemed to do the trick.
DeleteThis is one of many problem's which has long been a loosing battle.
ReplyDelete(Those two gems make my teeth want to explode but I have seen them daily for years, in venues well beyond snowflake writing.)
And yet, when you call attention to such things you're labeled a Grammar Nazi, even if it's a spelling error.
DeleteOr you're told that "this isn't English class" -- as if grammar is all English proffies talk about and no other aspect of life requires clear and accurate communication.
DeleteHas anyone figured out a response to "I just don't get grammar"? I've tried pointing out that nobody naturally "gets" math, science, golf, cooking, or any other of the number of things that bring us rewards in our personal and professional lives. I show them the studies indicating that employers (the only people my students seem to care about) expect higher levels of communication skills than my students demonstrate. I've recommended -- even loaned out my own copies -- books that explain grammar in ways that are both entertaining and enlightening. Still, they say "I just don't get it." *sigh*
I just don't get "I just don't get grammar."
If a student doesn't "get" grammar then that student doesn't "get" an A on his lab report.
Delete"...Grammar Nazi..."
DeleteHyperbole has gotten completely out of hand, in this age of amplified everything. A real Grammar Nazi would slap you around the room, at the very least.
Amazing comment, Frod!
DeleteI sucked at the formal aspects of writing until I learned a foreign language. Then a whole bunch of lights went on. At least for my way of thinking, for the way my brain works, learning a foreign language was KEY to making a huge leap in my English. It massively increased my language awareness, clarified all those mysterious grammatical terms, and gave me a broader context for reading, writing and speaking.
ReplyDeleteAmericans typically get some exposure to a foreign language, but lack the opportunities or contexts to get very good at a language they did not learn as a child. I would encourage anyone who wants to "get it" in terms of grammar in their first language(s) to aim for some level of mastery in a language they did not grow up speaking, a language they have to consciously learn.
But . . . but . . . taking a language class might hurt their GPA!!!!
DeleteI'll second the Slave. There's no better way to learn the structure of your own language than to study another one.
DeleteAnd Your Grace, there are plenty of ways for them to hurt their GPA. Such as turning in written work that's full of grammatical foolishness.
Oh, introvert.prof, you forgot the undergraduate screed:
DeleteYOU CAN'T GRADE ME ON GRAMMAR! THIS ISN'T AN ENGLISH CLASS!
I've heard the same screed in English classes too. *sigh*
Ah, remember the old days when it didn't matter what the class was, you still got dinged for spelling and grammar errors? History, science, geography, math, the subject didn't matter. We were expected to spell, punctuate, etc. correctly. And that was elementary school.
DeleteAnd R and/or G, given the subject of the thread I feel justified in pointing out that the correct spelling is "sacrilegious."
A Business Prof at my school stops grading an assignment and gives an F as soon as she encounters the first grammatical error in a student's homework. I really like her.
DeleteI teach a capstone course in business that mostly entails paper writing. Students are warned in the syllabus: my policy is to deduct 5% per spelling/grammatical/usage error greater than three for the paper overall or two per page. I've given students negative scores for being particularly obtuse. Now, I give them one chance to re-write a paper so this isn't fatal but the outcomes usually improve pretty quickly.
DeleteYOU CAN'T GRADE ME ON GRAMMAR! THIS ISN'T AN ENGLISH CLASS!
DeleteWatch me.
I, too, like CC's colleague. I return lab reports as unacceptable, with a 10% rewrite penalty, but so far not for grammar. Grammar is worth 10% of the report grade.
I interviewed a week ago at a company in Large Urban Area for a position as an "inside sales coordinator, writing emphasis"--The job is to produce materials (everything from LOIs to full PowerPoint presentations) for the outside sales folks. They are interested in me precisely because I am an English proffie, and also because I have a (rather shallow, I'll admit) range of knowledge regarding nanotechnology, photovoltaics, and LEED-certified architecture. (The company is an architectural engineering firm based in Germany, and is a world-leader in clean-room building.)
ReplyDeleteIf I take the job, it will be because it pays better than trying to inculcate the rules to students who aren't interested in what I have to say about rules, because who uses them anyway?
Or maybe: "It was I, Yaro, with the farting!" (or was that sacreligious?)
ReplyDeleteSince "to be" is not transitive but a verb of identity, doesn't the predicate take the nominative case? "It was me" is not correct, AFAIK.
DeleteI used to give presentations about science to classes of elementary school children. We make slime or I perform some demos and then I answer questions about college. Sometimes they ask me about being a professor. I am honest and this is when they start not liking science.
ReplyDeleteIt takes nine more years of school after high school to get a PhD.
They need to know a lot of math in order to be a scientist.
I spend my day writing various reports. I do not spend any time in the lab.
Like I say, I used to talk with elementary school kids about science.
I sometimes present at Career Day. The kids stop listening when I tell them my salary.
DeleteWhen I tell kids about my job, they can't get enough. Of course I always tell them they can make more money for less effort than astronomy in just about any other job in the world, and they never listen.
DeleteA modern student has an attention span of a gnat, and that's if it'll stop texting. It therefore is essential to combat illiteracy with something short and snappy, and of course less than 140 characters long. A good one is:
ReplyDeleteA boss in the real world won't like it.
This can be amped up in tone, if you have tenure.
How about "This could get you fired"?
DeleteI use variations on "your diploma will get you the job, but you won't keep it unless you actually have the skills the diploma certifies" when talking about a variety of writing skills, starting with not plagiarizing. The students who get it are not, I fear, the ones who most need to get it. And I always end up making one or two over-conscientious students *more* nervous.
DeleteCassandra: This is too long for them. They will tune you out right around, "your diploma will get you the job, but you won't..."
Delete"And I always end up making one or two over-conscientious students *more* nervous."
Sometimes wonder if I shouldn't wear a lab apron, just in case one of those wets. With the way they keep acting more like increasingly younger children, it;s just a matter of time before this happens. The chance they will then say, "It was I" is approximately zero.
Does anyone distinguish between the necessity of differentiating between spoken grammar and written grammar? Surely, register should also be something we consider? I teach a class in Advanced English Syntax where I expect students to learn grammar, and would never write an incorrect sentence in a formal document, but I've said things like "There's lots of vegetables in the fridge we need to eat" without thinking twice about it or feeling uneducated.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, someone earlier brought up the idea that it seems to have fallen under the purview of English teachers to correct grammar (or writing). I think this is partly why students DON'T learn to write correctly: they think they should only do so for English classes (then again, that doesn't mean they DO try to write correctly in an English class).
I highly recommend diagramming sentences, which I was forced to do for my entire sixth-grade year. Learning transformational-generative grammar as a college freshman also helped.
ReplyDeleteApparently, these are not things people do anymore.
Yep. No less a writer than Winston Churchill recommended it, and I had it for two years in Junior High. The process drummed the structure of an English sentence into my subconscious.
DeleteWe used to have sentence-diagramming races on the board in 8th grade. I've never been much of a one for racing, or any other form of competition as a spur to doing something (too inner-focused), but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
DeleteI still diagram sentences occasionally in class, in order to illustrate a point, but only after saying "don't worry; I won't ask you to do this, but it makes my point easier to see." I don't know how well it works for those who've never seen a sentence diagrammed before, but some of them seem to get it.
Maybe we could bring diagramming back under the rubric of visual/spatial and/or kinesthetic learning (yes, I know learning styles are bunk, but it's going to take a long, long time for that idea to work its way through the educational-industrial complex. Far too many profitable curricula, training materials, etc., etc. have been founded on the idea).
People will learn what they are reinforced for learning, blaming technology for willful ignorance is just the current fad.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's a run-on sentence, for what it's worth.
DeleteComma splice, to be more specific.
DeleteI almost deleted that reply just to fix that comma splice but I didn't want to waste the space. Thanks for the giggle because of it!
DeleteOvreductd: just claim you're writing according to British rules. Joining sentences with commas is okay in the UK. Not that that kept me from cringing every time I saw one in our church bulletin (typed up for many years by a very literate UK-born secretary). I always point out the differences (punctuation goes outside quotation marks in the UK, too) to my Commonwealth-born students, and present it as a matter of "when in Rome," but most of them admit that they didn't actually know any rule.
DeleteI learn something from you nearly every time you write. Thanks!
Delete