Now, to be fair, I had a head start. When I was around 2 or 3 years of age, my parents started teaching me the alphabet, counting to 100, basic addition and subtraction, and spelling of basic words. By the time I was old enough to enter the state-sponsored programming institution (school, for most of you), I was already at a level a grade ahead of my classmates. I could count to 100, add and subtract single digits, recite the alphabet, spell basic words and read most one and two syllable words. As my grade school career progressed, I became known as a perfect speller, almost never seeing less than 100% on a spelling test.
When I got to high school and began taking English and creative writing courses, spelling was no issue for me, and other students often turned to me for help with that. I was also quite good at spelling words that I was unfamiliar with, by sounding them out in my head, with the rules of the English language in mind, and rarely was I wrong. Grammar was second nature, especially with an English teacher who actually knew the subject well.
Now, all of this is not to toot my own horn, as the saying goes. Rather it is written here to illustrate the schooling I received, and perhaps to investigate the differences between then and now. As I read various blogs and watch vlogs, spelling and grammar issues often jump out at me, quite glaringly. With the current state of writing technology, there should be no errors. MS Office has had spell check and grammatick since before it was even packaged as Office. Mac OS and now OSX have all had equivalents for many years as well. Heck, even iOS has it on iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Spell check, at least, and yet, I see so many spelling errors in works that were made on computers. I used to work with a guy whose spelling was atrocious, and he would ignore or deactivate the spell checker and grammatick in his copy of MS Office, even knowing full well that his spelling sucked.
Few things in the business world look less professional than incorrectly spelled signs and memos, especially with commas and apostrophes in places that don't require them.
So why is it that so many people these days can't spell? Is it a schooling difference between then and now? Is it mass apathy? Mass dyslexia? Aspartame? (Yeah, I went there.) In this wonderful universe that we call the Internet, many people will often say things like "who cares about my spelling? It's the Internet, it doesn't matter". But here's something to think about: a) the Internet is simply the modern equivalent of newspapers and magazines (at least in regards to news and blogs), so if it mattered in those media, why wouldn't it matter now? And b) if so many people are slamming you for your spelling, clearly it does matter. Personally, when I encounter spelling errors in blogs, vlogs or news articles, it turns me off to the point that I may simply leave that page, and will certainly regard the author in a much less professional light. Not because the author may be dyslexic and I'm a bigot, but because even if you are dyslexic, or have other reading/writing disorders, that's no excuse, because the technology you're using has got your back, if you'll let it.
In closing, quick tips: use spell check; give grammatick a chance; research the differences between your and you're, there, their and they're, it's and its; and learn the rules for apostrophe usage. Trust me, it will make a difference in the level of professionalism your article, blog or book displays. Also, as an example of a grammatically incorrect sentence, take a look at this excerpt from a blog post I recently read: "As the quality of apps improved, as did the feature list of...". To be grammatically correct, that should read "As the quality of apps improved, so (or so too) did the feature list of...". I had another example in mind, but I've forgotten where it is now, so this will have to suffice for now.
~Mahalo~
No comments:
Post a Comment