him.happyhippos

Oct 17, 2013 - 2 minute read - Blog

Grammar wars

I was forced to take a mandatory course yesterday as part of my employment duties. I got about halfway through the course before I nearly broke down in frustration at the lack of basic grammar and editing in the questions and content. I was chatting with a co-worker while I was doing the course, and expressed my anger to her. She told me to “turn your internal grammar/spelling/logic sensor off”. Since there was no off switch for my sensor, I resorted to documenting the atrocities against the English language that I was witnessing as a way of dealing with the fact that I had to read these unedited words. Here are some examples of what I found, along with my notes:

“Head’s Up!” - apostrophe not used correctly - statement isn’t possessive. Also, this should be a more descriptive title like “There are prerequisites to this section of content”.

Question 7 - “If the PRB is not worth pursuing do to End of Life” should be “due to”

Meaning, the PRB was not born from an Incident - sentence fragment. Attach this fragment to the previous sentence.

According to my co-worker, it’s standard practice here at my company to gloss over grammar and spelling errors with the reasoning that “It’s internal, it doesn’t matter”. This attitude drives me crazy! Are you saying that your employees don’t care about seeing professional documentation when it deals with their very employment? Why bother writing job offers or hiring contracts that make sense? They’ll only be seen by internal employees! To me, these kinds of things are what differentiates a growing company from a grown-up company.

Blegh.